I have these assets from a videogame and I want to 3D print them. I am familiar with the general steps (turning the surfaces into a solid volume, slicing etc).
The problem is, videogame models have less resolution/polygons/whatever and they have a texture (image) applied to them to look like they have higher detail.
My question is, is there a way to transform the mesh of these assets by using those textures as some sort of "height map"?
My thought was to subdivide the model to introduce more resolution, and then apply some sort of radial extrusion with the texture file as input, if that makes any sense. Imagine a smooth sphere where I extrude every vertix from the sphere center according to a world map (edited into a grey scale that represents altitude).
However, I am not happy with the results and I am unsure if this would even work, I am missing some crucial previous step, or somebody has a different idea to approach this issue.
I am using blender, but advice from any software is welcome!