Having succeeded in my attempts to capture data from Doom3 (see comments in earlier post – Link), I decided to start playing with the captured .obj file… mostly to see how easy (or hard) it would be to get the geometry to go “solid” in CAD. For me the most intriguing object in the entire game was the little critter above, a Sentry Bot, so I decided to pluck one out for some experimentation.

Below are some screens to show what the mess looked like after importing the file into Maya.

The wide angle view of everything captured is shown in the view above. The model’s spherical rotation handles make a nice locator here.

Zooming in on the model you can start to see the walls of the room in which the character is positioned.

Within some odd “blur-triangles” that permeate the mesh I found the Sentry Bot.

And here’s the little guy extracted and scaled (each grid is a square foot). Click on the above layout to see a larger view.

After I got that far I started playing with converting the mesh, but I’ve not been happy with the results so far (and it takes over an hour for a Sub-D to NURBs conversion). I have something I want to try, so I’ll be getting back to this soon. Also note that while I could have gotten a geometry screengrab when the model was in a symmetrical pose, I thought something dynamic would be more interesting. We’ll see how that turns out (it’ll most likely make the CAD conversion more difficult if what I’m planning to try next doesn’t pan out).

{Image source: Doom3 © id software}