Is there a way to grab your character's 3D Model/Image File?

[Hanamaru]

Hello everyone,

Not sure if this is the correct sub board, but I'm looking to get some information on how to pull your characters 3D file. When you log in and select your character and load into the game, the 3D model of your custom made character must be stored somewhere... do they get saved locally or server side? If locally, does anyone know where within the game files you could find that?

 

[Hanamaru]

From what I'm seeing, it appears that they are saved server side. Is there any particular way I could have a character model retrieved from the server? I'm not even sure who'd I'd go about asking for that from.

 

[MagicLuthee]

Hello, models come from the game's data files.
From my limited knowledge in terms of game design/programming, and broadly speaking, I'd say that in the server-side save-data the server stores id's of your head/body/skin color... etc and when displaying your character the client talks with the server to know what specific model parts / textures to load from local data and display on your screen.

One way to save/capture your character's model would require you to extract from game data each model part and texture your character uses then load them in a 3D modeling software, apply textures to your character's model... etc. You'd end up with a file that contains your character's "3D appearance" but the process is probably extremely time consuming.

Another way would be to capture your character's "full" model as the game sees it by ripping it from the game right as it's about to be displayed (which means in the exact pose it has when pushing the button).

For that you could try using 3D Ripper DX (Though not sure it would work because Ephinea now supports more recent graphic APIs). It supposedly is one of the only ways to capture models of DirectX 7 - 9 games.

There's software for capturing DX 9 - 11 models too : NinjaRipper

In the end you'll still probably need to convert/import model data from one of the rippers to a 3D modeling software, then to separate your character from the rest of the 3D scene you snapshotted and then to save your character model to a file.

I've never really used 3D Ripper DX, nor NinjaRipper though, you'll probably need to do some reading on how to use them.

 

[DRM.EXE]

I don't know how to make edits and then modding those in the game, but I've used NinjaRipper to extract models from the game, here's a tutorial for this specifically using NinjaRipper: