Hi there!

I'm trying to rip the game files - those lovely spaceship models especially! It took me few hours of try and error to figure out the proper technique but all i could do was extract ship models - the textures always came up as black. I've used 'Unity Studio' and 'Unity Asset Extractor' from http://hwmod.wikia.com/wiki/DOK_Tools with no luck...

Can anyone had tried it before? Any success?

 i would love to see those beautiful ship model into an Endless Space 2 Mod for Homeworld 2 Remastered, did you suceed in extracting these files ?

Would also like to know to start making skins

If you mainly wanting to extract ship models & textures there is a built-in asset extractor, If you hover over the mods menu there is an asset extraction option.

It may take a few minutes to load after clicks (as its loading all the assets) but should give you the option of extract the models and textures of planets, ships & weapons.

The one downside is assets must be extracted one by one. 

Each extracted ship generally has a :

[asset]_AmbientOcclusion.png, [asset]_Normal.png, [asset]_AlbedoTransparency.png and [asset].dae (XML model format) (some models have more than one set of textures) each extracted item also comes for a outdated legal text (It Talks of Endless legend not Endless Space 2 and about an non-existent accept button (if your reading amplitude you might want to fix this))

I tried changing some skins but didn't see them come up in game. Has reskinning been implemented yet? Even the example reskin mod didn't seem to do anything.

The Reskin Mod does change the Riftborn homeworld textures but as you said it makes no changes to ship textures