How to: Extract textures from .tfc files

[Amphibious]

Hi guys! I'm new here but I'd like to skip introduction and get straight to important stuff. But still let's do the formalities I'm just another enthusiast modder with modest self-taught trial and error knowledge of how modding works (I enjoy working with textures the most, but can manage with hex editing and few scripts, usually I forget the stuff as quickly as I learned it).

 

I saw that there is no tut here how to extract textures from .tfc files to work on so I'd like to correct that. You can do it with texmod but that seems pretty tedious to me. I like to break my work in small fragment I can deal with, having to scroll through literally thousand of textures with no names or files sizes to eliminate the unwanted is a horrid job. I like to extract the textures to certain folder and than scavenge through it bit by bit.

 

NEEDED TOOLS:

 

Gildor's umodel (this guy is a true champand all praise should go to him I just followed what he wrote one should do to extract tfc)

 

INTRO

 

TFC files contain raw data for texture files in compressed form (lzo). In hex editor you can see that each file starts with a 4 place hex code c1-83-2a-9e.

 

EXTRACTING

 

There is no way to extract textures and other stuff directly from tfc so you must use upk files pointing to texture (give it necessary metadata).

 

1. download umodel and put all tfc from your cook files folder into umodel folder

2. look for ufc file which seems to be linked to the texture u need and copy it to the same folder (browse by size and name to make it easy) i.e. i looked for backflags so soldier_malekevlar_sf.upk was a pretty obvious choice

3. run command prompt, navigate to your folder then run command "umodel -export -lzo NAME.upk" in my case it was soldier_malekevlar_sf.upk

4. voila! browse trough extracted textures inside texture2d folder in newly created NAME folder

 

Happy hunting!

 

Also there should be a way to insert it back into tfc file but I haven't figured it out yet.

Edited January 1, 2013 by Amphibious