You'd need the source meshes. There is no way to reverse format a sculpture out of a low poly model. The best you can get is the low poly model and work with custom materials to give it the illusion of high detail or sculpt out of the low poly mesh. Best bet that I know of is vray materials.

You would need to edit the textures, use larger and not compressed dds for more HD look, or add more detail to the model itself then texture those areas separately.

not really to sure what the mtl file does, it is created along with the .obj. Here is the one for the TEC battleship

# 3ds Max Wavefront OBJ Exporter v0.97b - (c)2007 guruware
# File Created: 05.08.2010 22:42:55

newmtl wire_213154229
Ns 32
d 1
Tr 0
Tf 1 1 1
illum 2
Ka 0.835294 0.603922 0.898039
Kd 0.835294 0.603922 0.898039
Ks 0.350000 0.350000 0.350000

I do the texture connections differently or manually in XSI so I don't use the mtl. That is from 3DSmax export and I did not connect the textures, so it does not show the links.

Connect the textures from the game install directory, if you have Diplomacy/Trinity, use those, they reduced the quality on a large amount of ship textures for Rebellion. 
soase.x90x.net/?i=xsi/Tutorials/Texturing.html

What program are you importing to?

Is that the screenshot from the guys who made the Sins intro video? If so I wouldn't be expecting anything quite that nice, I believe they were given the high quality versions the artists made. The model and texture details have to be lowered in game for performance reasons.

Hey, axxo2.  I've wanted to do this for quite some time, so I have to thank you for asking the question.  Turns out, this is quite easy to do; I just did it in about 3 minutes with a Kol Battleship in Blender, and I am by no means a master at the program.

Now, unfortunately it seems that there is no *.MESH importer for Blender, which means we are limited to the models found at http://xsi.soase.x90x.net/Scenes/.  If there were one, we could import any file in the "Mesh" folder of SOASE (anything from an asteroid, to space debris, to the Eradica).  However, I haven't done a full-blown internet scavengar hunt for one, so I'll keep you posted. 

At the same time though, we can use the textures found in the "Textures" folder, which is where I got these from.  It's a pretty simply process, and if I have time and you're really interested I'd be willing to make a tutorial.

The overall quality is just as good as the game, if not a bit better.

--ksswm for sure that would be awesome!!

If you could eventually upload the six titans and the rest of the capital ships for TEC and the new cap ships for Advent and Vasari that would be great.

I did find a few *.MESH importers for Blender, but I can't seem to get them to work right (probably because I don't have Python and I need that in order to read the scripts).  I'm still working on it though.

I have no idea what you are referring to honestly.... the points seemed to be just fine.  Whether I just got lucky or Blender does something automatically is beyond me, but I did not notice any "point-flipping" so-to-speak.

Just FYI, it could easily be a few days before I get the time to make a tutorial (like perhaps Tuesday).  If you feel like trying it out though, I would suggest reading the "Texturing" page that myfist0 gave (soase.x90x.net/?i=xsi/Tutorials/Texturing.html) and one of the tutorials about texturing for Blender (Blender Bootcamp) if you're really new to Blender.  If you understand the basics, I'll go ahead and try to give a brief explanation of how I got my model.  

Essentially, after you import the model into Blender (let's say the Kol Battleship - CapitalShip_TechBattleship.obj), create a new work-space and change the view to the "UV/Image Editor."  Then, go to the Sins Rebellion file folder for textures (C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\sins of a solar empire rebellion\textures\) and drag and drop the three textures for the Kol model: "CapitalTechBattleship-cl.dds," "CapitaTechBattleship-da.dds," and "CapitalTechBattleship-nm.dds" (all three are discussed on soase.x90x.net/?i=xsi/Tutorials/Texturing.html so you know exactly what they do) into the "UV/Image Editor" work-space.  Then, select your Kol model, go into edit mode, press "a" once/twice to select everything, and then press "u" and "Unwrap" the model onto the "CapitalTechBattleship-cl.dds" texture.  Then, go into "Texture Paint" mode and view your fully textured Kol Battleship. 

Now, unfortunately Blender can only apply one texture at a time (as far as I know), which means that only 1/3 of the textures can be displayed (the "CapitalTechBattleship-cl.dds" giving the best effect out of the three), which does limit the overall quality of the model.  But, there may be a way around this that I have not found yet...

Exactly 

I can possibly export the flipped one to obj if you can't import the flipped fbx.

You can look through my skydrive models folder http://sdrv.ms/1cvBiiE

Someone uploaded the titan OBJs to dotOBJs folder at that link, you can select the folder checkbox and download the whole thing or click individual files.

thanks ! i followed the instructions and this is what i get.... or just pain grey

i wana make some art with these i think they are more hq then in the game and if i figure out hoe to edit the texture and sharpen it up and add extra stuff- that would be awesome!

when you start to render, learn how to add lights, now that really brings a model to life.

here I managed to connect the -da and get the lighting map to render

and in XSI, you can add actual lights of different types, this render had many many lights for a pitch black scene

Engines are lit, running lights, inside the hangars the ceiling is lit, and there is a spot light on the Hiigaran emblem 

Yes, although I tend to keep each channel as a separate lossless TGA as compressing to DDS over and over loses a lot of quality. So for the -cl. I would view the RGB and select all, copy and save to new TGA called TEC_Battleship_RGB.tga and then select the Alpa, select all, copy to new sheet and save as TEC_Battleship_Alpha.TGA. Edit the desired TGA and select all and paste into the .DDS texture sheets channel you edited, do the same for the RGB. This ensures you have lossless no matter how many times you edit and you can keep different tga copies and 1 final .DDS compressed texture.

Hopefully I didn't confuse you to much, and I am sure others do it differently, this is my self taught method.

For rendering, you can use tga, or jpg or whatever your program can handle and the team colour don't show in renders unless you specify the alpha, in game only for that one usually.