tools of the trade: GCFScape

As I was going through the models in Face Poser and Model Viewer in the Source SDK, I wondered where all those models were stored, because I was thinking about looking at the construction of a couple of them to get some ideas about how to build our own. Model files in Source have a .MDL extension, so I did a system search for ".mdl", but no results! Strange.

I began poking through the folders and found these large files with a .gcf extension. After looking at the wiki, I found out that these are where all the resources for the games are stored. To get into these files to get out resources, you need a tool.

This is where GCFScape comes in. You can download it here:

http://nemesis.thewavelength.net/index.php?p=26

So, you use this little program to extract out all the files used in the game. For example, I'm considering using one of the Half Life woman models for our patient's mom. I opened "source 2007 shared models.gcf", looked in hl2/models/humans/Group02 and grabbed all the files beginning in Female_02, and now I have all her data. I'll have to decompile using another program to really get to the inside of her, but that's a start!

So, when you see these mysterious figures from nowhere in your programs, now you know that they are contained in the gcf file and you can get to them if you want to :)