Twilight Princess Eyes Breakdown

[JoshTriplett]

http://www.benjones.us/twilight-princess-eyes-breakdown/

[webwielder]

I find it kind of magical that 3D models can be ripped out of game ROMs and then manipulated like they were any old document.

[nlawalker → webwielder]

Me too. Can someone give a quick explanation of how that works? Is the data format for these models just somewhat universal?

[Wilya → nlawalker]

The article mentions using 3D Ripper DX [0].

What I would guess from the homepage is that it hooks itself somewhere in the DirectX stack, and is able to extract the model from there. It probably monitors DirectX calls and pulls the data about the geometry, textures, etc from there. If it does that, it avoids the data format issue since it only has to understand the native DirectX API calls and memory structures.

[0] http://www.deep-shadows.com/hax/3DRipperDX.htm

[JoshTriplett]

Thanks to magoghm for posting this in the discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7895301 .

[aw3c2]

Lots of similar examinations at http://simonschreibt.de/