3D print 0.AD units

[dmzerocold]

Hello All, anyone here tried to print 0.AD units ?

i bought a very small 3d printer and i want to try some of units and see how it goes.

Would you please remind me where can i find 3d model files  ? which folder is stored them ?

[nifa]

You can find the meshes here: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/src/branch/main/binaries/data/mods/public/art/meshes

I don't think the units are suitable for 3D printing though, you might try to print one of the statues instead.

[Perzival12]

9 hours ago, dmzerocold said:

Hello All, anyone here tried to print 0.AD units ?

I would recommend scaling them up, at least a little bigger.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

On 28/12/2025 at 8:19 AM, dmzerocold said:

Hello All, anyone here tried to print 0.AD units ?

i bought a very small 3d printer and i want to try some of units and see how it goes.

Would you please remind me where can i find 3d model files  ? which folder is stored them ?

I imagine you will need to pose the body mesh the way you want to with the armature and then import the props and combine them with the body mesh to make one mesh to print it. But, mind you, I'm no 3D printing expert.

[dmzerocold]

1 hour ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I imagine you will need to pose the body mesh the way you want to with the armature and then import the props and combine them with the body mesh to make one mesh to print it. But, mind you, I'm no 3D printing expert.

By any chance do you have a STL file of units ? so you can share with me ? 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

15 hours ago, dmzerocold said:

By any chance do you have a STL file of units ? so you can share with me ? 

@Stan`

[ffm2]

I looked a bit in to it. The files are stored as .dae files. You should learn how to convert them to .stl so you can do it yourself and chose which model you like. Blender can export to stl and here is the wiki for blender.

However I couldn't import it easy in blender since import .dae wasn't listed (arch linux) and I couldn't solve it in a reasonable time (tried searching addons inside blender, packages in the arch repo and chatGPT).

I found this:

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/4.5/files/import_export/collada.html

But it was a bit tl;dr at one time.

I could load the models in FreeCAD which can also convert it to stl.

Your slicer then should be able to scale the unit up or down.

Tbh. there might be nicer models to print on thingyverse or so which take in to account that arms/arrows aren't so thin so they don't break. But converting the 0ad models shouldn't be too hard and also feasable.

Other question that comes up: What's 0ad's plan if .dae support ends?

Edited 5 hours ago by ffm2

[nifa]

You could use this for import:

I think you might have to modify the meshes though, because the game meshes are often just "flat planes" and they need some thickness for printing. Also keep in mind that a lot of the details is stored in a normal map. I think there is a way to turn the normal map into geometry via nodes editor. 

[Stan`]

@ffm2 I assume Arch has the latest Blender which deprecated (removed?) the DAE import and export because they no longer wanna support this. This means 0 A.D. is probably the last big open source project to use the Collada format. I haven't checked if the settings allows you to restore it;

Doing a bit of 3D printing myself, NIFA is right, unless you get a way to get the normal map details from the textures, your models will look very bland, and they clearly are not meant for printing, because of their non manifold nature.