UE Viewer is a viewer for visual resources of games made with Unreal engine. Currently all engine versions (from 1 to 4) are supported.
Previously project was called "Unreal model viewer", however the name has been changed in 2011 to meet demand from Epic Games.
There's a place where you may discuss the source code: gildor.org forums.
The source code is available on GitHub. You may either checkout it using any Git client, or download it as a Zip file.
We are using own build system to compile UModel. You may find a Perl script in Tools/genmake. This script generates makefiles from some human-friendly project format. After that you may build generated makefile using 'nmake' for Visual Studio or 'make' for gcc. Build process is controlled with build.sh script.
To list all options, run build.sh --help. Current options are:
--64compile for Windows 64bit--debugmake a debug version of executable--vc <version>specify which Visual Studio version should be used for compilation, default is latest compiler installed on your system
UModel is compiled using Visual Studio. Required VisualStudio 2013 or newer. Older Visual Studio compilers are not suitable because UModel's code using some C++11 stuff.
Currently build is performed with Visual C++ 2019.
Build system utilizes GNU Tools for building, in particular - Bash and Perl. I've packaged Windows versions of these tools which was a part of MinGW/MSYS project. You can get everything what you need for a build here. This page contains BuildTools. You should download it and extract into some directory (press the green button "Clone or download", then "Download ZIP"). Let's say you extracted them to C:\BuildTools. After that, add C:\BuildTools\bin to the system's PATH environment variable. As an alternative it is possible to create a batch file which will temporarily modify PATH and then execute build script. Here's an example of such file:
@echo off
set PATH=%PATH%;C:\BuildTools\bin
bash build.sh
To launch a build process without a batch, simply execute
bash build.sh
Despite we're providing only 32-but builds of UModel, it is possible to compile it for 64-bit platform. To do that, you
should change a variable in build.sh: PLATFORM should be changed from vc-win32 to vc-win64. Also 64-bit build could
be initiated with launching build.sh --64.
This system has everything what is required for build by default. You'll only need to install SDL2 development package (and of course gcc). To build UModel, simply execute the following command from terminal
./build.sh
UModel contains project files needed for opening and running it from Visual Studio Code. Just open UModel's folder in VSCode, and you'll get everything. Project already has a build task and launch actions set up. Of course you'll need a C/C++ extension installed.
VSCode project comes with additional build command which could be bound to a key. Just use
{
"key": "ctrl+f7",
"command": "workbench.action.tasks.runTask",
"args": "Compile"
}
and then Ctrl+F7 key will compile a file currently opened in editor. Of course, it won't work for headers and other non-cpp files.
UModel is dynamically linked with CRT library, so it requires CRT DLL files to be installed onto your system. It is possible to statically link with you compiler's CRT by changing a line in common.project (with cost of growing executable file size):
LIBC = shared
to
LIBC = static
UModel uses custom CRT library for being able to link against MSVCRT.DLL. MSVCRT.DLL is chosen because it allows to reduce size of UModel distribution without needs to install compiler runtime libraries on system - MSVCRT.DLL present on any Windows system. You may disable MSVCRT.DLL linking by commenting out line
OLDCRT = 1
Please note that custom CRT library will not be compatible with Visual Studio 2015, so it must be disabled in order to build with this or newer Visual Studio version. There's no needs to disable OLDCRT manually if you're correctly setting vc_ver variable in build.sh - it will be disabled automatically.
You might also want to disable OLDCRT if you didn't install MSVCRT library as described below.
If you want to use MSVCRT.DLL, you should extract MSVCRT.zip archive available here to the directory LIBS one level above of UModel directory. So, the directory structure should look like this
├── Libs
│ └── MSVCRT
│ ├── include
│ ├── lib
│ └── msvcrt.project
├── UModel
│ ├── Core
│ ├── Unreal
│ ...
│ ├── build.sh
│ ...
Also you may change MSVCRT library path by changing WDKCRT variable in common.project.
UModel was released without a Visual Studio solution. By the way it is still possible to debug it within an IDE. You
can build a Debug version of UModel by uncommenting #define MAX_DEBUG 1 in UmodelTool/Build.h and rebuilding the
project. After that you'll get executable with optimizations disabled, and with some extra features. For example,
if umodel.exe crashes, and it is started with -debug option, standard Windows window appears with prompt to close
program or debug it. You may choose "Debug with Visual Studio" there.
Also you may use --debug parameter for build.sh script. This will generate separate set of object files and link into
debug version of the executable (with the same executable file's name). You may quickly switch between "debug" and "release"
builds without having to fully recompile the program.
If you want to debug umodel.exe in Visual Studio without having a crash, you may load it either from IDE (File | Open | Project/Solution, then select umodel.exe), or you may type
devenv umodel.exe
from console.
It is recommended to use Visual Studio 2013 IDE or newer because it has more advanced debugging features than previous studio versions. You may copy Tools/umodel.natvis file to C:\Users\Your_user_folder\My Documents\Visual Studio 20NN\Visualizers, and after that you'll be able to view TArray and FString structures during debug session.
As was mentioned earlier, UModel source code comes with Visual Studio Code project. You may easily edit, launch and debug UModel with it. For debugging, there are 2 configurations: "No arguments" runs UModel with default startup UI, and for command line use you may launch 2nd "Volatile" configuration, which reads command line string from file docs/cmdline.cfg - please refer to Response files documentation for details on its format.
Below is the list of major folders which exists in this repository or which are generated during build process.
├── .vscode # Visual Studio Code project files
├── Core # corelibraries not related to Unreal engine
│ └── GL # OpenGL wrapper builder
├── Docs # miscellaneous text files
├── Exporters # exporters for different object types
├── Libs # third-party libraries used for building
├── MeshInstance # mesh renderers
├── obj # all compiled object files goes there
├── Tools
│ ├── CompatTable # source of compatibility table
│ ├── MaxActorXImport # ActorX Importer script for 3ds Max
│ ├── PackageExtract # Unreal package extractor source
│ └── PackageUnpack # unreal package decompressor source
├── UI # library used to show UI on Windows
├── UmodelTool # source code of umodel itself
├── Unreal # source code of Unreal Engine framework
│ └── Shaders # shaders used in UModel's renderer
├── Viewers # viewers for different object types
├── build.sh # main build script
├── common.project # main project file, reused vetween different sub-projects
├── t.bat # Windows CMD caller for test.sh
└── test.sh # internal script used for testing
The code is not covered with any existing license yet, however I'm thinking about adding BSD 3-clause license. I just probably need help from some people who knows about that more than I.