The last couple of weeks, I have talked about how I got started in 3D printing, including setting up my software toolchain, and selecting the 3D printer I wanted to get. This week, I wanted to talk about a project I’ve been poking at for a couple of weeks, and have finally gotten to the point where I have produced some positive results.
You see, I like spaceships. And games that feature spaceships. While the first game that probably comes to mind is EVE Online, the project I started with is actually for Sins of a Solar Empire. In particular, Sins of a Solar Empire has a very active modding community, and Ironclad has provided the community with a great tool chain for doing just about anything to the game – including messing with the models. So, with very little effort, a little bit of perl (and, actually, without having to download anything), I was able to extract the meshes for the capital ships and export them to .stl files. If you remember from my first post, getting an STL file is the first step toward getting something to print on a 3D printer.