Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Export created characters to printable 3D models

Hello everyone! Let me start by thanking Larian's folks for their astonishing work on BG3. This really has the potential to be one of the greatest RPGs ever released.

I hereby wanted to share an idea with you: wouldn't it be nice to have the option to export created characters into printable 3D models?
BG3 seems to have an amazingly rich and customizable character creator and it would be wonderful to be able to use it to create minis for IRL tabletop rpg.
I don't know how technically feasible a tool of this sort is, so any feedback on the matter (both from devs and users) will be greatly appreciated.

The tech used to create detail models is very different from what you see (and thus is available) in the game.

Basically the process for game models is (very simplified) following:
-you do a highly detailed model sculpt (if you look for zbrush sculpts for video games on artstation.com you will see those)
-then you make a extremely simplified 3d model where the information from the detail sculpt is 'baked' into 2d images that fakes the detail level by 'painting' it on the simple geometry of the game model.
-that thing then gets a skeleton that can be animated and moved within the game, but otherwise would be standing in a T- or A-pose and look boring.

So the model in the game doesn't have a lot of details (you can actually see it on heroforge.com when a model gets loaded sometimes the textures with the details don't get loaded as quickly as you see a much simpler geometry that lacks detail).


This means you could only get a very simple model out of the game not being very close to what you see there. Heroforge shows a pretty good example of how far you can go with something compared to game files.. Also game models are not build for the technical necessities of printing, which means there would be a need for some automated adjustments (hair for example is not printable at all the way its done for games). For something with the quality of for example Warhammer miniatures, you would actually need access to something much closer to the quality of the digital sculpts used to create video game models than what is available in the game (those 'source files though are huge though - talking about several gb per character - and thus not included in the game files).

I think its far more work for the dev team to implement than it would be worth when you look at the results you could get out of it and how many would be using it. Probably you could actually just see if a modder could export you a posed version of the character you want and then find a freelancer who could modify the 3d file to match printing needs... or you just go for something similar with heroforge - because you won't get much more detail out of it than what you see there in their printed examples.