big red dragon

i stumbled upon the filters on google meet and at the very bottom there's a selection of cute animals that you can Become (well, at least for the duration of an online meeting)

i especially liked the cat and the dinosaur, and was curious if there was some way to grab the models to play with. The answer is Yes 🐱✅

if you monitor the web requests made when picking the fuzzy cat filter, you'll see one that fetches a file named fuzzy_cat_embed_eqjsb_0dc1024e61aaa09cd7e71d8da56acb49.wasm.data
this file is a blob of some kind, but there's a Few Interesting plaintext strings in there like cat_lighting.glb and cat_v13a_opt.glb

.glb is one of the file extensions for the glTF format - "the JPEG of 3D models", so this is a Great Sign. There's clearly some glb files in the blob, the difficult part is just to get them out of there. A .glb file always begins with the ascii characters "glTF" but there were no occurrences of this string in the blob, indicating that the .glb is probably compressed within the blob.

I then started looking at the script that fetches the blob, and noticed it had a link to a fuzzy_cat_6e4908bf37f2d597b25c08ff6c70430a.zip. Zip files are a lot friendlier than blobs, and this one contained a js_assets_bundle.xajs. I had never heard of .xajs before but any file extension with an x in it is usually a type of compressed archive (pptx, docx, xlsx, etc.) so I attempted opening it in 7zip and
oh so the files are just there okay that was Easy

sure enough these are glb files you can just Put Them in Blender it Just Works
you get all the bones, shape keys and even the lighting setup (although the light strengths need to be adjusted a bit)

well, you get everything except the paws

i did the same with the dinosaur and bnuy and made a few pics for fun

anyway Moral of the Story is that glTF is nice