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Occasionally I see people talking about "ripping game models" to print for props, so I thought I'd toss up an example of why you generally cannot do that. The low-detail sword is the game rip, the detailed one is mine from scratch.
This sword belongs to Thancred from FFXIV. Some games will have more high-poly models than this, but most of them rely on textures and various image files to make them look... well, not like that.
Sometimes games also have multiple versions of each prop; the ones that appear in pre-rendered cutscenes are, naturally, a lot more high-poly to begin with.... but they generally aren't available to the public the way a model ripped from the general gameplay is.
Resurfacing models for printing IS doable, but there are many reasons you probably don't want to, including bulk. Thancred's sword here is super chunky and scaled up to human sizes, it looks about as thick as his bicep. Would you really want a blade as thick as your bicep?
Another reason is that you're going to spend an astronomical amount of time fixing up a model that low-poly to be even remotely usable in real life. You might as well do it from scratch, especially because you can do internal support, details, etc for real-life use.
It's also just not meant for real-life. Sometimes anime proportion weapons just don't work next to people, sometimes design elements are thick enough to support themselves.
I prefer not to use game models much when modeling. Usually if I'm tight on reference and can't get good enough shots of it and *have* to resort to looking at the 3D model, I actually just look at the texture files to see the details and then wing the actual form.
And truthfully, people care less about 100% accuracy and more about what looks good. Deliberate design choices will trump a resurfaced chunk of polygons any day.
