From what I can tell, a good part of the Softimage Community are not too fond of ‘The Area’ as it is quite disorganized compared to what we used to have, and compared to other communities / forums such as xsibase.

As for the texture file, you’ll have to extract that along with the .smd file. It’ll be in a .vtf format.

It’s been a while since I’ve had to do it, so I forget if XSI can load .vtf textures. My memory tells me that it can, but if not just download a plugin for photoshop and convert it back to a .tga

As for getting the texture to display, it will depend on how they have the Boomer setup. I don’t have L4D installed on this machine, so I can’t give direct/specific instructions. Hopefully this will still be helpful though, you’ll have to do one of the following depending on how the model is set up:

A ) Hit ‘3’ to switch to the rendering menu. Select the boomer’s mesh, and go to:
Get-Texture-Image
Then select the .vtf (or .tga if you converted it)

B) Instead of using Get-Texture-Image, you could bring up the render tree (shortcut 7) and plug in a Texture Node to the material’s diffuse.

If this doesn’t work, it means they have clusters applied to the mesh in order for it to use multiple materials. I think this might be the case anyway so that the hair and eyes can have different textures. Hit the clusters button on the right side menu of XSI, find whatever cluster would represent the body, and bring up the render tree for that material (7)

Edit:  Oh nice, it seems the Area doesn’t allow me to use Chevrons and will hide any words that neighbour these brackets. Just realized it now that some of my post was missing.