Can I Sell A 3d Model From A Game?

hello everyone, i just wanted to ask if it's ok , if i 3d model a character from a mobile game then sell it for 3d printing?

Yes you can - but then the copyright holder can request that the model be taken down, and can also sue you in court for using their intellectual property without permission. There was a miniseries on intellectual property law on the shapeways blog (or magazine as they now call it) about a year ago that explains the rules of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (or why some models with obviously copyrighted content
may stay in the shop section for years) and related topics.

@mkroeker oh i see maybe i should model my own character then, to prevent troubles. thank you very much.

Beyond the legal issues, 3D models from games sometimes don't translate well to 3D printing. Sometimes the game model isn't a proper manifold, needed for printing. Often the model which looks good with texture on a video display will look terrible without the texture. The reverse can also happen, the high polygon count needed for many models to render well for 3D printing swamps the capacity for rendering to a video display.

1. consider copyright issue;
2. the model from games may be not ok to print,maybe they cannot meet 3d printing requirement

Disclaimer: While I do work at Shapeways, I don't work in the areas of the company which deal directly with this sort of thing. This is all my own personal advice as an independent artist familiar with the issues involved in reusing the work of others, not actual legal advice or a statement of official company policy.

Every game's models are owned by their game's publishers/creators/artists/etc. There are certain factors which dictate whether you can sell a model from a game.

For games by Valve Software, there's good news: they have agreed to let Shapeways' users sell models based on their work. You can check out the thread in this forum about the Valve partnership here, and there are a couple of good blog posts in Shapeways Magazine about it here and here. Part of this agreement is that Valve gets a percentage of earnings form your sales based on their work, which is really the main issue in such things; Valve of course is entitled to some of the profits when others are selling things which reuse their property and work, and the Valve + Shapeways partnership allows an easy way for everyone to manage all that business.

There are also certain games published under free licenses (open source, GNU, Creative Commons, etc.) that are open to reuse of their work; if you want to print and sell something from those games, you may be automatically allowed to do so in line with those free licenses. Check into those games' individual projects for more info on what licenses they are applying to their artwork, and how it applies to resale.

For other publishers, you will want to get that information from them directly. If you're interested in selling 3D prints from a game, your next step is to contact the company who makes it to find out what they'd think of you selling their work. Maybe post to their own user forums, or contact them directly through their own sites. Maybe they'll grant you permission, maybe they'll have some sort of intellectual-property licensing system that you can apply to be part of, maybe they will just say no, but either way they are the only ones who can tell you what you are allowed to do with the artwork they own. You might even like to send them a link to Shapeways' Valve posts as an example; maybe they would be interested in working out a Shapeways partnership like that which would allow folks to easily reuse their games' work in their own creations here.

Best of luck!