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What would Suramar City look like in real life or in different style? Reddit user Lornek (Lorne Kwechansky) presented a version of Suramar City using WoW assets with a different, more realistic, rendering and visual approach.
Courtesy of Lornek (Lorne Kwechansky)
“Not sure why but I just spent like 3 days coding a conversion tool to export WoW into my VFX software package. Still miles to go…but here’s Suramar City,” said the artist. You have to admit that’s just mind-blowing!
The whole thing is based on an app by Marlamin that allows to load your WoW install files and extract models, textures, and placement data from the game.
“You get a huge folder dump of .obj (models) .png (textures) and .csv (spreadsheets). The .csv files are just huge spreadsheets where column 0 tells you the name of the object, column 1-3 tell you its XYZ position in the world, column 4-7 tell you its XYZW orientation, column 8 tells you its scale, and then a couple more columns with info like what set it belongs to, whether it’s a wmo (buildings and major landscape features) or a m2 (props, trees, banners, decorations, etc),” said the artist.
The artist used Houdini here because of its powerful programming integration and Python. For rendering he used RedShift as it’s an extremely fast and robust GPU renderer.
Then he used Marlamin’s app to get a huge folder full of every single model, texture, and placement info to bbuild the Court of Stars dungeon in this case.
You can find more details here.