Has anyone found a succesful way to export character models from within UnrealEd?

I've read some UT2004 tutorials on converting the pawns into static meshes, but this method severely corrupts the models.

I've also tried opening the .U-- files using a program called Game Extractor (http://www.watto.org/extract/) but it doesn't seem to recognize the packed file extensions.

Is it virtually impossible to obtain these meshes with the tools we have, or is there something I'm missing? Thanks.

hhhm idk im still triening to extract static models :P