ShipWright

(The?) ShipWright
Release date:
Made by:	Dolf Veenvliet
Runs on:	Browser
Imports:	Text
Exports:	.WRL

ShipWright is a browser-based tool for generating 3-D models of space ships from text strings. They look really nice and Japanese-shooter-y

Models can be downloaded as .WRL files, which will generally need to be converted to another format to use in 3-D game builders. (On my computer at least) models cannot be downloaded in Firefox (does weird permission stuff [Windows 7]) nor Opera (no download button); only Chrome.

Software that can load .WRL files can be a bit hard to find, but meshconv is a little command-line tool you can use across Windows, Linux, and Mac operating systems. For example the line meshconv -c obj -tri modelname.wrl will spit you out a triangulated model in .OBJ format. If your file name includes spaces just wrap it in inverted commas. There seems to be at least one Blender plugin that may help too.

I have noticed that the models I've brought into Unity with this method are aligned awkwardly though. Like their facing is 55° off where it should be (at a guess). Not sure if that's due to ShipWright or meshconv. Also you have to (re-?)do the UVs because you can't get anything but a solid colour on them)

Examples

Click an image to see the full-size version. Click the link below an image to see the model in ShipWright.

• 

  'Hello World'

• 

  'Game Making Tools Wiki'

• 

  'Here I try entering lots of words to see how complex it gets. Testing my theory that it adds one part per word' (It doesn't)

See Also

• ship.shapewright.com
• Create a random 3D spaceship with shapeWright - Some nice looking examples on Exonauts.
• Spaceship Generator - Blender script which generates spaceships from text strings.