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EDM model files - Blender Import/(Export) Addon

This is a HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL, totally UNOFFICIAL attempt to build a blender addon to allow importing/exporting of .EDM model files, as used in the flight simulator DCS world. It has been engineered by careful studying of the binary file format, intuition, research, much guesswork, and many, many crashes of the model viewer.

Firstly, an important note:

This tool may only be used for private purposes and may in no way be used for extracting models which may directly or indirectly be used for commercial gain or promotion of any commercial product i.a games, films, media, or artwork.

e.g. it should be obvious that this is for modding for DCS world and any intellectual property of ED remains the intellectual property of ED.

In its current state, it allows simple importing functionality whilst the fine details of the file structure are worked out, and basic exporting. Much of the data is reasonably easy to interpret, but translating the concepts to Blender is still a WIP. Also, there may be advanced modelling features used in DCS world modules that the author does not own, but a universal importer is less a goal than understanding the file format well enough to build a simple exporter.

What Works

  • Parsing and reading raw data for every .edm file included in DCS world (this is reading only, not importing into blender)
  • Basic importing of geometry with diffuse texture layers - textures are assumed to be in the same folder or a subfolder named 'textures'
  • Importing simple rotation, translation and visibility animations
  • Connectors, and UI integration to mark empties as such
  • Exporting basic meshes with simple animations and single diffuse textures

What Doesn't Work

  • Exporting anything in a hierarchy is WIP and really fails badly
  • Scale animation, and non-quaternion rotation animation isn't exported
  • Bone-based animations are not handled at all
  • Multiple argument animations per object - decisions on the best way to represent this in Blender need to be made (NLA? Custom Action attributes?)
  • Complex translation of material layers, including specular, bump maps etc
  • Not all geometry ends up properly placed when importing

Further Information

For further information and installation instructions, please see the documentation at https://ndevenish.github.io/Blender_ioEDM/