Extracting Meshes Textures - ME3Tweaks/LegendaryExplorer GitHub Wiki

Introduction

This guide is a quick guide to go over on how to extract meshes and textures from the game.

Alternatively this guide Finding in game assets quickly (Asset Database) will give you a run down of the Asset Database, which we will be using in this guide.

Tools We'll Be Using

Legendary Explorer

  • Asset Database

Getting Started

So what we first want to do is open Legendary Explorer and then go to the Utilities tab and click on Asset Database like in the image below:

Asset Database

Go to the database drop down and click the game you want to get assets from:

database

Let the database be created, if you haven't already generated it.

Using LE1 as an example the image below is what default shows:

LE1 default

For meshes and textures you want to go to their respective tabs.

Okay so now a quick run down on naming conventions for assets commonly looked for:

  • HMM = Human Male
  • HMF = Human Female
  • TUR = Turian
  • SAL = Salarian
  • KRO = Krogan
  • QRN = Quarian
  • HED = Head
  • ARM = usually in reference to bodies
    • for example HMF_ARM_CTHe_MDL is the overalls like outfit seen in the game.

Meshes

Lets break down the mesh tab:

  • The left column is the search results
  • Ride side is the packages the assets are used in.
    • so if you select a mesh in the left column it will show where that mesh is used in the game files on the right
  • Toggle Mesh Rendering - is the toggle for visually seeing the meshes in the box in the middle.

meshes tab

Now onto an example extraction, and for this example I am going to extract the base Turian head in LE1.

TUR_HED_PROBase_MDL

This little button is the button we use to extract meshes.

button

A pop up will next show on where you want to extract the mesh to.

popup

Then you will want to select the format you want to export:

format

Most commonly people will extract it as just PSK and for a lot of instances this can look perfectly fine once edited in blender and brought back into the game, however;

You may want to extract it as both psk and gltf

  • psk for the armature (skeleton)
  • gltf for the mesh itself

The reason for this is that gltf mesh normals are more correct than the mesh normals on the psk version of the mesh. However the psk armature is the one you want to use, as the gltf one is broken. Which is why we need both formats.

Textures

Lets break down the textures tab:

  • The left column is the search results
  • Ride side is the packages the assets are used in.
    • so if you select a texture in the left column it will show where that mesh is used in the game files on the right
  • Toggle Texture Rendering - is the toggle for visually seeing the textures in the box in the middle.

texture tab

Texture names most commonly follow the same naming as the mesh.

For example TUR_HED_PROBase_MDL is the mesh and the textures start with the same naming of TUR_HED and then you want TUR_EYE textures as well.

Once you found the texture you want click on Export to File:

2025-04-14_15h09_01

The next pop up will be where you want to save the texture and in what format:

texture format

Guide Suggestions

Now you have your meshes and/or textures extracted you can move on to what's possibly next.