Noesis is a program for viewing and extracting 3D assets from video games, and was created by a guy named Rich Whitehouse. Unlike the FFXI Model Viewer and Altana Viewer, Noesis is a universal model viewer designed to work with (almost) any video game. Thankfully, FFXI happens to be one of the games it works with.
Advantages:
- Can view any .DAT file, including zones, not just character models.
- Can export .DAT file models directly into several standard file formats, including .obj and .fbx formats.
- Unless specifically disabled by the user, character models retain animations upon export.
Disadvantages:
- Because Noesis was designed as a universal model viewer for all games, and not a model viewer specifically for any one particular game, the process for loading models involves just using a standard Windows Explorer window for loading files, which makes it a pain to find things if you don't already know exactly where to look. It's recommended that you use either the FFXI Model Viewer or Altana Viewer to find the file locations of the character models you want to load before you go browsing through the FFXI game folders via Noesis. Good luck figuring out which files to load for zones, though.
Noesis appears to have difficulty reading information for models that do not exist as a single, self-contained file. This means character models for NPCs work just fine, but models for player characters don't work. Or at least, I haven't figured out how to get them to work. Maybe I'm just not using the program correctly. I dunno. I'll have to experiment with this a little more.
EDIT: There is actually a way to display and export character models, you just have to create a special scene file to do it. The scenes directory has an example.
Noesis can be downloaded for free from the "Resources" section on Rich Whitehouse's personal website, richwhitehouse.com. The direct link to the latest version is listed below:
- Direct Download: Noesis - version 4.175— (11.45 MB) - (uploaded: 1/1/2016)
Additionally, there is a game modding forum called XeNTaX that has an old topic (though it seems to have been recently necro bumped) which is specifically about using Noesis with FFXI, and has some useful information. You can read the topic here:
Based on the comments in that topic, the moderator MrAdults appears to be Rich Whitehouse, though I'm not completely sure about that. Confirmed. MrAdults is Rich Whitehouse.
