Use utf editor to open the .mat file for the ship. It's pretty straight forward then, just so long as you realise that a texture that uses the mips node needs to be exported as .dds and if it uses the mip0 node it needs to be exported as .tga.

turned out reasonably well.
I messed up when I imported the dds back to the mat, but otherwise it went fine. ^_^



*writes note to self to fix ship texture transparency later*

the ship isn't pretty or anything like that, but it was just a very basic test of how colors look in game versus in my image manip program...

In addition to UTF editor, which is awesome for importing/exporting dds and tga files, you may eventually find yourself wanting to change things that don't have a mat file, but instead have the textures loaded in the .cmp file itself. For this, I suggest "Freelancer XML Project" which will allow you to basically decompress the files you want to tinker with, spitting out xml files (can also extract images and audio clips from files by checking the options in the program).

Example: I wanted to create new thumbnail icons for ship vendor for my new ships... I got the images taken of the ships, put them in 64x64, but could not find the .mat files associated. After decompressing the .3db file, I opened the .xml output and found the image the .3db used. Selecting "extract images" from the XML Project program, I was able to extract and replace the image. After a little editing of the .xml file, I was ready to recompile/compress the contents back into a .3db file with a new name (all values in .xml changed as well as image name changed). After compiling the .3db back together, I now have my icon thumbnails for my added ships..

FreelancerXMLProject has been very useful for much more than just texturing as well.. but just covering where you're starting..

Also, if you do adjust your textures to allow transparency, system light color does not alter the appearance of your ship as greatly as if it were solid w/ no transparency.