@aelith-earfalas just made an excellent tutorial on using Ninja Ripper to rip models and their textures from WildStar! I’m glad, I want everyone to know how to do it but I’m not good at writing tutorials, and then my energy is limited too. Their tutorial is awesome, so go show them some love!
As an additional bit of info, if you find yourself in need of full-resolution textures because Ninja Ripper didn’t get them for some reason (it usually does, but some environment things just come back with low res textures) you can use Intel’s Graphics Performance Analyzer to grab the full res textures. Under a readmore for length:
This tutorial has a link to the program and instructions for setup. Don’t bother with the patched frame analyzer though, it didn’t work for me. Follow that tutorial for capturing a frame with GpaMonitor, then open FrameAnalyzer.exe that comes with the program. You’ll get something like this:
If nothing is showing up, click “Add” and find the frame file you captured. Here I have three frames to pick from, let’s use the one with the taxi. The reason I captured this frame was because Ninja Ripper didn’t get all of the taxi’s textures (it has three) and the ones it did get were 128x128 instead of the normal 1024x1024 resolution and I needed the full res for a mod.
When you open a frame you’ll get a load of weird info like this:
Don’t panic, most of it isn’t relevant to us right now! Look at the left side, there will be a list of “Render Targets” and each will have a number or set of numbers after it. Scroll down and look for one with several big numbers and click on it.
You’ll get another bunch of weird data, but all we’re interested in is the “Input” dropdown. If the render target you picked doesn’t have anything under Input, pick a different one. Hey look, textures!
A lot of textures, actually. Textures for every NPC, shrub, and rock nearby. Scroll through til you find the one(s) you want. They may not all be in the same Render Target! The taxi’s files were split between a couple of different ones. Once you find a texture, left click it, and then click the circled icon to save it:
Textures will often have black spots on them, I don’t know why. Usually this isn’t a big problem if you can work a graphics editor. You can copy the layer, select by color all the black specks and delete them, then blur the underlying copy to “fill” the holes.
In case you’re wondering, those brightly colored blue and pink textures are usually something called normal maps combined with specular and (I think) ambience. If you don’t know what they’re for/aren’t doing mods, it’s best to just ignore them. The purpose of a normal map is to add depth to objects, like scratches and gouges in armor or the puffy texture of the taxi seats, while the other things control shinyness and glow. It’s done by the rendering engine though so if you aren’t going to render the model it won’t do you any good. Also, each engine handles these things differently so even if you want to use them, you’ll most likely have to edit them anyway. (For FFXIV mods for example, I have to take the green and alpha channels of a WS normal map and paste them into the red and green channels of a new file for FFXIV to be able to read them, and its engine can’t do anything at all with the ambients!)
Also, don’t get too excited about that geometry tab: It does let you export a model, however the resulting model is skewed so you’ll need a fair bit of 3D knowledge to do anything with it. It also doesn’t have UV coordinates (a thing that tells a program how to use a texture) so the model is just flat.
How to fix transparent PS2 textures in Gimp Tutorial.
After experimenting different methods found from forum sites & YouTube, here are my methods. Keep in mind, these methods depend on which texture you're dealing with.
