Player Features and Ideas Discussion

TL;DR:
I hereby request a toggle that enables depth-buffer output only. There are people who would like to recreate their characters for out-of-game use, like Niden did with her famous images, but there is no efficient way to do so. Learning to use DAZ3D or makehuman takes a considerable amount of time and recreating characters even more so.

Explanation:

As character meshes are created at runtime and can not be exported, I request a toggle for depth-buffer output only. With this, screenshots can be made and pixel coordinates can be extracted from these screenshots (from several angles of course) which would allow the creation of a pixel accurate point-cloud and triangle mesh.

As far as I know all this would need for the developers to do is a simple switch that outputs the depth of a pixel as it's color.

I guess the most reasonable way would be a button that creates two screenshots at once. One for normal colour output and one for depth values only.

Please make it so. Thank you.

The full 360 turn around let's you, with a bit of patience, create your own view planes.
Front and profile is all you need to make a half decent model, the waiting is just to get the right posture as the idle animations cycle.

I'm a bit rusty on my character creation from start to finish, but it would likely take me about 2hrs to set up vplanes and do the face, about 3 to get a very rough wireframe body set up with proper anatomy and rig, 2hrs tops for the UV unwrap and bone weighting. Texturing properly, well, that could take from hours to days, depending on polygon budget, and texture res. I do use Maya, so it probably is a bit easier for me, esp considering I've made myself a lot of tool scripts.

+1 from me though because it might be a first step in fan created game items.

Okay correct me if I'm wrong here... but let me get this straight:

You're asking CCP to code a way for you to export your 3D character model out of the game, to do... what?

So you can make fun little movies like Clear Skies?

"CCP I want to make 3D animations using my EVE avatar, but I don't want to learn how to 3D model, so please use your time and money to help me. No this has nothing to do with the game, I just want pretty little videos using my EVE character."

Is this right?

Are you kidding me?

Umm, duuude.... did you not get the point of my post??

It doesn't matter how difficult it is to export your EVE character, or learn 3D modeling...

The point is that it's not CCPs job to facilitate your out-of-game hobby of using your EVE character for movies and artwork.

Seriously... unbelievable... the entitlement is burning my brain.

Is my above summary of your thoughts correct? "CCP please waste your time and money to give me a feature that 0.001% of the playerbase would use, so I can make art out of game?"

-1 not supported, in case you didn't get that already.

Tools for THE GAME are one thing.

Tools for an EXTREMELY NICHE target like this... using your EVE character in OUT OF GAME art... is ridiculous to expect. I realize the OP didn't say he expects it, but to even ask for it is not much better.

I can't believe anyone thinks they should waste their time on this.

Supported, +1.

Edit: to clarify, i would use this feature if implamented

Why not rip it out of the real depth buffer? (ask a dev beforehand)

While I don't do enough modeling to get this, I think more tools for video makers and similar are good, but not a priority. A hearty +1 for putting it on the "when we have a dev who can do this idle" list or whatever the equivalent time filling projects list is called.

This is one way to say you don't model. And for what it's worth CCP has this tool internally already.

Well now I ask you as well for a hint towards it, which does not end in DLL Injection and breaking the EULA. Ms. Terror above sadly was nothing more but trolling.