Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Extract Textures & Models

Note: All tools used are linked at the bottom of the post.

In this post, I will not be covering how to unpack the game content as I have already covered this before in a previous post. You must unpack the game files before starting here, so for instructions on how to do that please follow the other guide I created, and then come back to this post which is purely focusing on textures and models.

Please also note that some knowledge of Blender is required for some of the later steps that I will not be covering, such as UV editing and changing materials. If you need help with that, I recommend looking up the Blender reference manual or looking at some instruction videos on YouTube.

Searching for the model using bigfile.xml

1. After extracting the files you'll have many folders and subfolders with all the game content. Because of this, it can be pretty difficult to navigate the thousands of files to find something in particular. To help you, the extraction process creates a file called bigfile.xml
   
   
2. You can open the .xml file in a text editor and do a text search. In this case, I was looking to extract the futuristic motorcycle "Blade of Shintaro" from Pritchard's Tech Lab office in Sarif Industries. Meshes and textures are combined into one .drm file for every object, so if you find that, you're in the correct position to begin. I managed to locate it pretty quickly by searching "motorcycle".
   
   
3. Next, you'll have to manually locate the file following the file path as shown in the .xml file (or you can just search the name via file explorer). Once you find the .drm file you can now open it in DRMEdit and view what is inside.
   
   

View and export textures using DRMEdit

1. Run Gibbed.DeusEx3.DRMEdit.exe from the Gibbed DeusEx3 HR tools set.
   
   
2. Once open, click the Open DRM button and select the .drm file you want.
   
   
   
3. A list will appear of all the files contained within the .drm file. There isn't any way to view the mesh from here, but you can check the textures by selecting the Render Resource from the list you want to inspect and then clicking the View Object button if you want to confirm you have the correct mesh.
   
   
   
4. You can also save the textures as .png files. This may be useful if you want to edit the textures, as the mesh export process later does not allow you to export textures (an error occurs in Blender if you try to save any of the images for some reason).
   
   
   
   

Install CDC Unit / DRM mesh Blender add-on

1. Install Blender (the latest version) if you haven't already. Then download and extract the zip of the dxhr CDC GitHub project that contains the .py scripts we need. They're within the tools folder.
   
   
   
2. Place all of these scripts into your Blender add-on folder. The folder is located at (the version number might be different):
   C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\4.3\scripts\addons
   
   
3. To confirm these scripts were installed properly, open Blender, click Edit in the navigation bar > Preferences > Add-ons. In the list, make sure the two CDC add-on checkboxes are ticked and click Save.
   
   
4. Now you should be able to import the mesh via File > Import > CDC Mesh (.drm/.cdcmesh) > and selecting the .drm file.
   
   
   
5. For me the mesh imports really big, so I had to zoom out a lot to see it. You can resize it quickly to a more reasonable size by tapping S on your keyboard and moving your mouse towards the object.
   
   
   
6. Depending on your viewport settings, the mesh might be white. You can select Material View from the Viewport Shading settings (top right of the main window) to see the texture on the object. You can export it as an .obj file and modify the textures or whatever you like at this point so you're no longer restricted to the .drm file type.
   
   
   

Note: You will notice the texture is a bit weird in some places, and that's because the tool we used to import the mesh doesn't preserve UV coordinates very well. If you go into Edit mode instead of Object mode, select the entire mesh and then open the UV Edit tab, you will see that the UV layout is all over the place. You can click the image dropdown if the wrong texture is being displayed and find the correct one, but you will have to manually fix the UV layout, which is a tedious process. As I understand, this is the case with older tools that did the same thing so unfortunately there is no way around it as of the time of this guide being written.

Tools

• DRMEdit (from Gibbed DeusEx3 HR tools):
  https://www.moddb.com/games/deus-ex-3/downloads/gibbeds-deus-ex-hr-tools
• Rrika's CDC unit mesh .drm Blender importer:
  https://github.com/rrika/dxhr/archive/refs/heads/main.zip
• Blender
  https://www.blender.org/download