OGLE: OpenGLExtractor by Eyebeam R&D blogs

WOW Modelviewer Tutorial

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 20:34:37 -0500

Awesome Sourceforge and OGLE user rameir has done some great work recently with OGLE and the World of Warcraft Modelviewer. This is one of those applications that does work with OGLE, but takes a bit of tweaking to get there. rameir has been kind enough to write a tutorial, which I publish on this site: http://ogle.eyebeamresearch.org/tutorial/wow_modelviewer

some of his work includes:

great work Wyatt/rameir, thanks!

Some Press, Finally

Mon, 09 Oct 2006 23:10:15 -0400

OGLE got a press mention. I guess it wasn't worthy until someone tried to start a business with it:

Wired News: Second Life Figures Get a Life

Others 3D Printing from OGLE

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 19:47:30 -0400

Other people are doing 3D prints from OGLE'd data. Finally!

First is Michael Buckbee at Fabjectory who has actually set up a for-fee service that will do the OGLE'ing, data cleaning, and 3D printing for you (calling all SecondLife freaks -- only $75!!!):

Next is SourceForge OGLE user askaniblue, who writes:

On the upside, the UI program for OGLE does a beautiful job at pulling things from Model Viewer and actually I like the precision of Model Viewer better than straight out of the game (I can select the exact pose and point in the pose animation that I want much easier). [img 1, img 2]

OGLE Pro?

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 14:50:23 -0400

It appears that 3DS, the company that makes Solidworks, has released what seems to be a system-level version of OGLE.

gltony writes:

This week I found a very similar tool to OGLE.
3D PrintScreen is free software that allows the capture of OpenGL data (geometry, normal, lines, colours and Textures!!). I have tested it, and the result is very interesting.

This tool is really easy to use:
- installation
- launch it
- launch an OpenGL software (no special setting needed, no dll to copy)
- press F10 and it’s done

This soft generate 3D XML files (some kind of new XML format like colada
I guess). Those files can be opened by a free viewer called 3D XML player.

I’ve tested it on games. The results with Quake 3 and wolfenstein are really good; we can see the mesh with textures, the billboards with alpha channel…. impressive. However the results on google earth are really bad :o( The captures of second life doesn’t works with textures but the result is nice without (there is a setting to disable the capture of textures).
No test on WoW for the moment (I’m a guild wars player ;-)

I heard that 3D PrintScreen works also really well with CAD softwares.
I think I will use OGLE or 3D print screen to be sure to get a good result cause for me they look complementary.

If anyone wants to test it, here is the download link:

http://www.3ds.com/products-solutions/3d-for-all/3d-xml/3d-printscreen/

He also said that the software appears to be posted on September 13, 2006, so maybe they took a cue from our project. I am glad that the idea is taking off, but right off the bat I realized that it probably won't work very well for SL or WoW because it probably doesn't have the OpenGL Vertex Program-disabling features of GLIntercept, for which OGLE is a plugin.

Flurd is Crazy!!

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 14:54:43 -0400

Flurd (who is the man!!!!) writes:

I created a WoW movie promoting my guild, which combines rendered models (extracted with OGLE) and in-game footage. There are 10 models in all scattered throughout the video. The model geometry and textures were taken, and then using Blender's 'Soft Body' cloth simulation, the dangling clothing and hair was given movement. Also added in the appropriate spell effects, reflective and otherwise enhanced materials, and included a post-production glow. After being thrown together with background video captured from WoW, it created a pretty awesome effect.

You can view or download the video at http://www.lunaticrage.com/wow/doa/

Here's a sample:

I also put together a version of the video with only the OGLE'd characters (but no music), watch it here.

Color 3D Prints

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 12:36:04 -0400

With the help of some friends at CADD Edge we were able to get a color 3D print of our favorite World of Warcraft gnome. All we had to do was export our cleaned up and textured models as VRML files, which they fed right into their ZCorp printer.

If you are interested in doing the same with your video game avatars, I suggest contacting Anvil Prototypes. They are interested in helping people who want to pay to have their characters printed (see their sweet flyer), and took this funny photo of a color-printed gnome in the woods:

(is it just me, or are the monochrome prints from Eyebeam's Dimension so much less fulfilling now?)

OGLE At SIGGRAPH 2006

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 19:25:37 -0400

SIGGRAPH Guerilla Studio

We're going to SIGGRAPH. We'll be at the Guerilla Studio helping people extract geometries and clean them up for 3D printing. What's extra cool is that SIGGRAPH will actually have some on- and off-site 3D printing resources that we can use for free!

You can expect to find some or all of the following folks there:

- Rob O'Neill -- ex-Eyebeamer, Pratt Digital Arts Lab
- Paris Mavroidis -- Rob's grad student
- Evan Harper -- Studio Senior Fellow, Eyebeam
- Arthur Young-Spivey -- CADDEdge, local ZCorp reseller, and digital design/manufacture at teacher at Parsons
- Michael Frumin-- R&D Tech Director, Eyebeam (and author of OGLE)

CounterStrike

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 12:45:09 -0400

Diego Roa, an apparently retired CounterStriker fiend has done some gorgeous work with his CS team:

Would love to see someone do the same with a model that they had re-assigned textures to, using OGLE's texture coordinate (UV) capture and the texture maps that GLIntercept's writtes to disk.

More WoW Sweetness

Sun, 21 May 2006 11:51:14 -0400

Frédéric Calendini has used the World of Warcraft Modelviewer to position his avatar and then OGLE'd the scene to re-texture and re-render in ZBrush. The results are gorgeous:

OGLE-esque tool for Direct 3D

Mon, 15 May 2006 11:09:18 -0400

Damian Trebilco, the awesome author of GLIntercept (system for which OGLE is a plugin), has alerted me to the presence of tool that is very similar to OGLE but for Direct3D -- 3DRipperDX. If you like OGLE but have a Direct3D game (or OGLE doesn't work on a game that supports both!!) try it out.

NYC 3D Prints, Finally

Thu, 11 May 2006 17:35:30 -0400

The 3D buildings OGLE'd from Google Earth are not ready to be 3D printed off the bat. Each building is a composition of multiple vertical volumes that have walls and a ceiling but no floor. By computationally (i.e. hacked up OBJ-file-processing perl script!) copying all of the roof polygons to floor polygons, we got the job done:

Ground Zero (in Google Earth):

Columbus Circle (in Google Earth):

At 'sunset' (two prints not on same scale):

City of Heroes

Mon, 08 May 2006 10:25:59 -0400

SourceForge user 'thesarge00' recently posted some interesting work using OGLE with City Of Heroes. Below is a screen cap he sent along, and he also points out the interesting possibility of using the 'demorecord' functionality to compose things in the game before OGLE'ing them:

Both games have a command called /demorecord. What this will do while in game is you will type in the command /demorecord , hit enter, and it will quietly, in the background, be "recording" all that is going on in game until you type /demostop (or zone) - not as a graphics file, but essentially as a script, that can, by use of a demo-launcher, be used to launch an instance of the game, and "replay" everything done and said in game (sans interface). There are a number of fan written editors, though you can do it easily enough with notepad, since the demorecord file consists of essentially loader lines (sets the time of day, the map you're on, the camera's starting position, and loads all npcs and players who fall within a certain range of the player themselves), then subsequent timestamped commands - at time w, have character X perform Y animation at location Z. The handy thing is, with a lot of cut and paste, or using an editor, you can remove or substitute ANY asset you have the name for (and there are sites out there that have lists for them).
...
So, you could do a quick little demorecord of a nonhostile standing somewhere, step out, edit it, and swap the civillian for Lord Recluse, Statesman, Nemesis, the Kraken, the Ghostship, (I've even swapped the Hamidon in for Ms Liberty in the middle of Atlas Park). The point is, via demo editing, you can pick just the assets you want to sample from the game, delete all the superfluous pedestrians, cars, doors, mailboxes, etc, and be able to just have the items you want - much less strain on the ogle capture process, and makes finding your object easier.

OGLE GUI

Mon, 24 Apr 2006 16:12:47 -0400

So, some Austrian guy Alex has implemented an OGLE GUI application that supposedly makes it much easier to configure and use OGLE. He has posted the executable, and some of his OGLE results, at http://members.chello.at/alexan/.

Use it, test it, and give him feedback on the SourceForge forum.

WoW Comedy, with Textures

Mon, 24 Apr 2006 10:51:21 -0400

Another great OGLE use-case, posted anonymously on the SoureForge forums. The OGLE user captured her avatar and steed from World of Warcraft, and reassigned the texture maps with OGLE's new automatic Texture Coordinate (UV) capture. Then they used Blender and The Gimp (both open source apps) to render and composite this image:

Great work!!

OGLE Captures Texture Coords

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 15:28:50 -0500

As of OGLE 0.3b, it is possible to capture texture coordinates (UV) for vertices that have them. This is enabled by the CaptureTextureCoords flag. Coupled with the fact that GLIntercept writes out to disk images for all the texture maps, this allows you to re-texture your capture in Maya with a little menial labor, eg:

This has tested to work accurately on some applications (World Of Warcraft) but on others it seems to misbehave, so it is disabled by default. I am working with Damian Trebilco, author of GLIntercept, to give OGLE the power to do this image-texture-assigning work automatically. Give it time...