Can you view character / vehicle / gun models outside of a game?

[Iceni]

There are a lot of games were I'd like to take a closer look at some of the models. The ships from nexus the jupiter incident or homeworld for instance. It can be annoying to play to a point where the model is in the game; and then fight with the games camera to try to look at the model while also trying to ignore the actual gameplay! I was wondering if there was a way to look at the model alone in some third party app. Or perhaps you can launch the game engine to view assets in isolation? I know very little about the technical side of games or what programs are out there so don't be afraid to state the obvious.

[Radium_Angel]

2 minutes ago, Iceni said:

There are a lot of games were I'd like to take a closer look at some of the models. The ships from nexus the jupiter incident or homeworld for instance. It can be annoying to play to a point where the model is in the game; and then fight with the games camera to try to look at the model while also trying to ignore the actual gameplay! I was wondering if there was a way to look at the model alone in some third party app. Or perhaps you can launch the game engine to view assets in isolation? I know very little about the technical side of games or what programs are out there so don't be afraid to state the obvious.

Sometimes, though it requires a bit of sleuthing in the game files to find the computer models, and then opening them up in the right program, which will sort of depend on how it's been created.

[Morrie Sells Wigs]

1 hour ago, Iceni said:

There are a lot of games were I'd like to take a closer look at some of the models. The ships from nexus the jupiter incident or homeworld for instance. It can be annoying to play to a point where the model is in the game; and then fight with the games camera to try to look at the model while also trying to ignore the actual gameplay! I was wondering if there was a way to look at the model alone in some third party app. Or perhaps you can launch the game engine to view assets in isolation? I know very little about the technical side of games or what programs are out there so don't be afraid to state the obvious.

Depends very much on the game, as Radium intimated. 

 

I know Warframe has reams of stuff online showing all the characters, locations, ships etc...I guess you could dig as deep as you wanted.

 

It has it's own Wiki and there is often developer stuff showing concept art and how they build it in the game engine.