EVE Ship Models

Probably the most useful thing here is how I get and render the EVE models.

The models themselves come the files shipped with EVE. I use a number of tools to extract the models and textures from the EVE files, and some other s/w to render and process the images. In this FAQ / Guide, I'll show how I extract a model and get it in a form I can render with. I'll also include some other tips I've picked up.

This guide assumes that you all ready have downloaded and unpacked / installed the various tools needed to extract and convert the models.

TriExporter

Start TriExporter. If you have not run TriExporter before you will need to point it at the EVE client folder so that it can pick up the models. Do this by clicking File -> Set Folder and just click on the client folder.

TriExporter should look like this (click on the image to open a larger version in a new window):

Open the 'res' tree and navigate down to the 'model' section so it looks like the following:

All the in game models are included under this part of the tree structure and are suffixed with a .tri extension.

For the rest of this brief tutorial, we are going to work on a quick render of a Thorax Gallente cruiser. OK, so now TriExporter is running, open up the 'ships' section, then navigate to 'gallente'. Under this tree structure are lots of sub directories with names such as gf3, gi1, gc2, etc. In this naming convention, the 'g' stands for Gallente, the 'f', 'i', 'c', etc. stands for the ship class (such as frigate, industrial, cruiser) and the number is the different ship type within the class. The naming convention is pretty standard, but by no means absolute. You may need to dig around a lot to get the ship models you are after, but I'll give some hints on how that can be done later.

OK, so the Thorax will be one of the 'gc*' models. At this point it is just trial and error to get the right model. Open each of the 'gc' folders and double-click the .tri file found there. The model will be rendered in the main TriExporter screen so you can see what you have selected. Eventually you will find the right model in 'gc4', as can be seen in the following image:

The next thing is to select the right textures for the model. The image files for the ship 'skin' are located in the 'res->texture' folder. Open the texture folder and navigate to the 'gallente' directory. In this directory you will see lots of '.dds' files. These files contain the image maps for the ships. Locate the file 'gc4.dds' file and double-click on it. You will see that only some of the ship is textured:

Keep double-clicking the .dds file until you get the following error pop-up:

At this point you have filled the necessary textures. You can see the actual texture list at the bottom left of TriExporter, highlighted in the following image:

OK, so now we have the ship and it's textures. The next step is to export the model and the image maps so we can use them in an other program. Select File->Export Model, chose a directory and filename for export, and remember to select to export in a .obj format. Click OK. This only exports the actual mesh model, so the next step is to extract the textures. The first step of getting to the image maps is to unstuff the texture file. To so this, select the appropriate .dds file in the folder view ('gc4.dds' in our example) then select File->Unstuff and chose an output directory, preferably the same one as to where you saved the model mesh.

In you working directory, you should now have 3 files, a .dds file which contains the image maps, a .obj file with the ship model and a .mtl file which references the .dds files. If these 3 files are present, then we have finished with TriExporter and can move on to the next step, extracting and manipulating the image maps.

DDS Tools

The NVidia DDS tools allow us to extract the actual image map files from the .dds file. The .dds file format is a common file type used to store image maps for games.

For this example I will use the command line tool 'readdxt.exe'. Run the extract tool in the directory with the .dds file using the following command:

readdxt.exe gc4.dds

This will uncompress the .dds file and create a number of .tga files in the same directory, each with different file sizes. Each of these contains the image map for the model, but in different levels of details. We only need to work with the largest file. For the Thorax model, this will be 'gc400.tga'. You can open this up in any image browser to have a look at the image map.

The next thing we need to do is update the .mtl file to reference the .tga file rather that the .dds file. You can use any text editor to do this. For our Thorax example, the .mtl file should be altered to look like:

newmtl shape0
Ka 0.5 0.5 0.5
Kd 1 1 1
Ks 1 1 1
illum 7
Ns 256
map_Kd gc400.tga
newmtl shape1
Ka 0.5 0.5 0.5
Kd 1 1 1
Ks 1 1 1
illum 7
Ns 256
map_Kd gc400.tga

Finally, we need to manipulate the image to align it correctly with POV-Ray's uv vector alignment. To do this we flip the image across the x-axis, as can be seen in the following example:

NOTE: Also need to clear alpha channel for POV-Ray. Probably the best way to do this is to save the image as a standard .bmp file as that doesn't carry an alpha, then save again as .tga

That is all that needs to be done to get the models and textures out of EVE and ready to render. The next step is to convert the .obj file into a format POV-Ray understands.