Shinbe Corner’s

World of Warcraft has an amazingly rich collection of models including weapons, creatures, trees, plants, houses and pretty much everything that is needed a complete game.

First off I want to address the legal/copyright issues.

Educational Use of Production Materials

Blizzard Entertainment supports the use of its game assets for educational purposes, and you are welcome and encouraged to create a Production for a school project, master’s thesis, etc. All limitations above still apply to Productions created for educational purposes.

Taken from http://www.wow-europe.com/en/community/machinima/letter.html

Tools needed:

MyWarcraftStudio http://www.wowmodelviewer.org/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=35&func=fileinfo&id=12

WoW Model Viewer http://www.wowmodelviewer.org/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=35&func=fileinfo&id=28

Milkshape 3D http://chumbalum.swissquake.ch/ms3d/download.html

Word of Warcraft

How To:

WoW stores models as .M2 files, which is a WoW proprietary file format. It contains a lot of data such as bones, vertices, textures used, animations and more. These .M2 files are stored in compressed .MPQ files. The .MPQ files of interest are common.mpq, expansion.mpq and patch-x.mpq in the WoW\data directory.

1. Open up WoW Model Viewer and point it towards your WoW .mpq files. Most of the interesting decals are placed in the World subdirectory. Pick a model of your liking and go to File->export model and save it somewhere.
2. The model will be saved in a Milkshape 3D format. Open the exported model in Milkshape 3D and go to File->Export->Ogre3D Engine file. Give an appropriate path and click OK. If you want to see all supported file formats go to http://chumbalum.swissquake.ch/ms3d/index.html
3. View the exported model in Ogre Mesh Viewer program or you can use your own program. If you are lucky, everything looks fine. However, more often than not, something isn’t quite right.
4. If the exported model’s textures have alpha channels, for example if it is an bush or a tree, you need to manually extract the texture using MyWarCraftStudio because WoW Model Viewer currently (version 0.5.09c) does not export the alpha channel correctly. Open the log.txt file stored in the same folder as WoW Model Viewer and scroll to the bottom. It will have a few lines like this that correspond to the model you just exported:

Loading model: World\Azeroth\burningsteppes\passivedoodads\rocks burningsteppesboulders04.m2
Loading texture: WORLD\AZEROTH\BURNINGSTEPPES\PASSIVEDOODADS\ROCKS\ASHROCK04.BLP
Info: Exporting model to X:\Stone1.ms3d..

The .blp files are the textures, so browse to that path using MyWarcraftStudio and extract the texture. It will now have the correct alpha channel.

That’s it.