#datool

In this multi-part tutorial we're going to look at extracting and retexturing a mesh, and then making it available for in-game use by the player. In order to recolour the mesh, we need to extract a number of files from the game; the mesh, its textures, and the material definition files that link the two. Thankfully there's a tool that does that easily for us, called "DATool".

When we run the tool, it will complain that it's not the most current version; sadly this is a lie, there is no more current version, so just ignore the error message.

This tool works as a mesh-viewing program. The first step is to tell it what kind of mesh we want to look at. We'll start off in the first available "Characters" category, as characters is where clothing and armour pieces are stored (also hair, beards, eyeballs, and eyelashes). So File -> Browse Models -> Characters -> Dwarf Female, as shown below:

A set of armour - or at least the torso of such a set - will appear on screen. To switch to the next mesh in the category, you need to press CTRL-→ while to scroll backwards to one you've already passed you use CTRL-←. Scroll forward past the armour and boots and so on until you reach the clothing, the first item of which is the "Commoner A" retexturing of the clothing mesh:

Now we want to extract that mesh and all its associated files to an easily relocatable location. Thankfully, DATool makes that simple; just click on File -> Save As. A folder-selection tool will pop up; create a named directory somewhere to save the files into. In my case, I'm going to put them in a named subdirectory of my "D:\Dragon Age" folder that I keep all my working files in.

Once the folder has been created and selected, I can click "OK", and the DATool will extract all of the files relevant to this mesh and place them in my new folder.

With very few exceptions, most meshes and textures are available in linked pairs for both sexes, so the next thing I need to do is to repeat all of these steps for the dwarf male version of the Commoner A mesh. Instead of creating a new folder, I'll tell the tool to "Save As" all the files into the same folder as the female version.

And then I go through all the steps again for the female and male elf, and female and male human versions of the mesh. Bonus points if you extract the Qunari male version as well!

Once all of this extracting is done, I can go to my file folder, and there are all the files I need in order to modify the textures of this mesh and have it be available for all races and both sexes.

But what is this mess of files? What are they all for?

PHY - this is the physics file for the mesh, which contains collision information for it (an approximation of the shape of the physical surface, reduced to geometric objects such as cylinders and spheres).

DDS - Direct Draw Surface texture files, a format from nVidia that is a way of optimizing textures for graphics/gaming application use. If our OS has the ability to view DDS files (a utility for which is linked to in the Getting Started page), we can see them in thumbnail view:

MAO - Material Object file, this is a small text file that esstentially tells the game "these DDS files are the ones to be used with this mesh to create this particular texture variation". Note that in this case there's only two of them; the "pf" and "pm" at the start of their file names means that one if the definition for all female versions of this mesh, and one is the definition for all male versions of the mesh. Or to put it another way, the dwarf female, elf female, and human female versions of the mesh all use the same material object definition, and therefore the set of textures used is applied in the exact same way to all. And then all male version of the mesh do likewise with a second set of textures.

MMH - model mesh hierarchy - how the mesh hooks up to the invisible skeleton that drives animations of the mesh. If we were going to modify the mesh itself, and not just the texture on it, this would be important.

MSH - mesh file - the shape of the actual mesh, ie where vertices are and the triangular polygons that link them all together to form a visible surface. If we were going to modify the mesh itself, and not just the texture on it, this would be important.