ndevenish / blender_ioedm

Experimental Blender Importer/Exporter for .EDM modelling files

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/

blender_ioedm's Issues

Having list of errors when importing EDM model to From DCS to Blender

Hi! i can`t bring in to Blender EDM models from DCS.
I get list of these errors:
https://ibb.co/23mS8w7
Can you advice what to do?
Thanks!

Nothing works anymore in any versions

Hi there,

For some reasons, I cannot install Blender EDM in any versions of Blender ( 2.68 to 2.8, all tested ), and when it was installed, any import is bound to fail.

I've heard about some new stuff since DCS 2.5.5 that would prevent importing, but that would not explain why it cannot be even installed anymore ...

Any ideas ?

Thanks !

Plugin not working with actual DCS Version (2.x)

Hi ndevenish

As it looks like the plugin does not work properly with the current DCS version. Since I would like to adapt my Cockpit for VR to DCS it would be great if there was some way to extract it from DCS. Can anyone help me?
You could contact me on reddit.com: Hawkeye_CH (with underscore)

Kind regards

Hawkeye

Blender 2.8 compatibility

Hi. Any idea if this add-on will be updated to work with Blender 2.8?

Error parsing F14 EDM's

I get this error when trying to import either of the F14 EDM's into 2.78. Any help or fix? I'm using the fork https://github.com/DartShinigami/Blender_ioEDM/tree/patch-3 provided here.

Not working with Blender 2.9.3

It says to upgrade to blender 2.8x, but it doesn't work with Blender 2.80 up to 2.93

Error when importing model

Hi:
I have this error when trying to import the new F-18C if you could help or point me to were I could get help.
https://imageshack.com/a/img924/1459/DKhGr2.png

Best Regards

Can't install plugin

Hello, when I tried to install the plugin it gave me the error you can see on screenshot http://prntscr.com/dpbib8 .

Can't install the ad-on

Hi, I can't install your EDM import add on... Do you have an idea to fix this ?
Tx

Blender 2.77a
macOS 10.13

Writing hierarchical animations broken

test/MonkeyCannon.blend currently looks like this:

Which pretty much matches what the blender import looks like, which is partially good news, at least. Also, the texture seems to be messed up but that might be a modelviewer artifact when some textures are missing?

File format change due to __VERSION__ change

I'm doing a C++ import library to get a better understanding of the file format, I'm not a Python coder and TBH I hate the language. Anyway model::rootnode->property["VERSION"] can now be 2 or 3.
if( VERSION == 3 ) then unknownA is NOT present so just start to read the bounding boxes.

error when trying to export 3d model

DCS 2.5.5 No longer loaded v8 files

Need to more the exporter to version 10 of the file format.

Bounding box too big

On the basic Suzanne test:

The bounding box is being calculated on object bounding boxes, perhaps something is going wrong in the axis reordering?