Lucky_Strike

Absolutely. Though one big gotcha with Blender seems to be that if one opens a file made by someone else it also opens into their choice of GUI layout. I really don't get this, seems like the GUI preferences are embedded in the file, which might be alright when opening one's own files say between different work stations, but I really hate having to reconfigure my viewport just so that I can mess about with a model. This makes for very annoying user experience. I guess there may be a way around this with preferences or setting up a default user interface but boy do they make this stuff so confoundedly difficult 

Oh yes, the best thing is to specifically search for Blender and 2.79 videos in YouTube. If the video is more recent than about 2019/2020 it's probably going to be no good to you. If I can find him there's a guy who has done masses of stuff with a channel going back quite a few years, his stuff is usually easy to follow and useful.
What's frustrating is that our leading light @sbobovyc was working on an addon version for Blender 2.8x which he didn't have time to finish. Also you can bet the guys at BF don't have to jump through these hoops just to export a model ... hohum

🤣 Nigel, it only gets worse when you start looking at stuff like UV maps which just frazzle the brain sometimes. BUT I'm so glad to see another willing to have a go at this stuff, when you get it right, and you will, the delight of seeing something new in game is worth the struggle.
As you're finding things like rotation and scaling can play havoc with what looks like a perfectly good model. One thing that really helps in this respect: Once you are happy with the model and its placement relative to its origin then you select the whole model in object mode and go to the object menu > apply > scale and rotation; also apply location; you may see a little pop up palette appear in the tools pane which allows you to do all three at once. Doesn't do any harm to use the apply thing several times just to be certain. What this is doing roughly is applying all the transformations (rotation scale etc) to the object relative to its original size, location etc AND transforming that to the new origin X, Y, Z = 0, 0, 0. It's kinda nailing down all the stuff you've done. I always do these steps when ready to export though on occasion the scale one can cause other problems.
Baby steps ... we are all toddlers when it comes to Blender!

Oh yes.
Re your Church - I found the bench after importing your mdr ...

Moved it back to position and exported fine, but bombed my RT twice in a row when trying to view in 3D map in editor ...
Was going to try and redo but I couldn't find a building304.mdr that looked like yours, all mine were bigger in RT, and it's not a model in FB or BN?

Yeah I think the additional graphics may cause a bit of glitching. Overall I think this method would only be useful if we can get the menchen interacting with the meshes, moving round rather than through stuff 👻
The import/export routine is definitely not finished, as you say he was still working on it and knew that the metadata side of things needed resolution. Frustratingly he mentioned the metadata for alpha channels in his thread, with a link through to an image but that's long gone, so I can't see what he was talking about.
It's certainly a lot easier going this route, for now I would recommend this. I have another idea or two to try with added building features, but they are quite low priority for now.
Will do ...

I see updates on his YouTube channel occasionally so I think he's just moved on to other projects.
Yes the manual is actually okay once one gets to grips with the language.
I did notice in rereading sbobovyc's original thread that he said it's perfectly possible to work in a different 3D app then export the model back to Blender as an obj file to then export back to mdr. This might actually help with stuff like UV mapping when it gets too complex to understand in Blender. There are some bespoke UV mapping apps that look like they offer better interfaces, but most are pay-for often by subscriptions, so not likely to be worth it for most of us amateurs. I did find another app, FreeCAD, or something like that, which was quite useful for cracking certain 3D files that Blender doesn't open.
Now when I open newer Blenders I get spooked by their modern looking GUI and have no idea where to start, it's like learning another app all over again!

Absolutely. Though one big gotcha with Blender seems to be that if one opens a file made by someone else it also opens into their choice of GUI layout. I really don't get this, seems like the GUI preferences are embedded in the file, which might be alright when opening one's own files say between different work stations, but I really hate having to reconfigure my viewport just so that I can mess about with a model. This makes for very annoying user experience. I guess there may be a way around this with preferences or setting up a default user interface but boy do they make this stuff so confoundedly difficult 

Never liked him. Just listened to some of his songs. Terrible. 

🤣 Nigel, it only gets worse when you start looking at stuff like UV maps which just frazzle the brain sometimes. BUT I'm so glad to see another willing to have a go at this stuff, when you get it right, and you will, the delight of seeing something new in game is worth the struggle.
As you're finding things like rotation and scaling can play havoc with what looks like a perfectly good model. One thing that really helps in this respect: Once you are happy with the model and its placement relative to its origin then you select the whole model in object mode and go to the object menu > apply > scale and rotation; also apply location; you may see a little pop up palette appear in the tools pane which allows you to do all three at once. Doesn't do any harm to use the apply thing several times just to be certain. What this is doing roughly is applying all the transformations (rotation scale etc) to the object relative to its original size, location etc AND transforming that to the new origin X, Y, Z = 0, 0, 0. It's kinda nailing down all the stuff you've done. I always do these steps when ready to export though on occasion the scale one can cause other problems.
Baby steps ... we are all toddlers when it comes to Blender!

Oh yes, the best thing is to specifically search for Blender and 2.79 videos in YouTube. If the video is more recent than about 2019/2020 it's probably going to be no good to you. If I can find him there's a guy who has done masses of stuff with a channel going back quite a few years, his stuff is usually easy to follow and useful.
What's frustrating is that our leading light @sbobovyc was working on an addon version for Blender 2.8x which he didn't have time to finish. Also you can bet the guys at BF don't have to jump through these hoops just to export a model ... hohum

So you might like this:

Who left that in here?!

... and where'd these barrels come from?

Even goes transparent like buildings ...

Fully destructible - vaporised! by some Russian 75mm HE
To get the Opel Blitz and barrels to appear I reparented them to a sub-object rather than the main object. So for the barn (indie building 200) the main object is called level 0, with sub-objects named roof, wall-front-level 0, wall-left-level 0, wall-right-level 0 and wall-rear-level 0. The OB is parented to the front, the barrels to rear and left. They are still at the floor level rather than the ground underneath, so they sit correctly in the building.
The building seems to behave as normal - clicks with modifiers do what they should to the textures and degree of damage; snow appears on the roof and snow winter textures appear for the walls when snow is laying round about. The walls also react to their locale, so the barn changed from wood to stone for Germany '45.

Notice stone winter texture and damaged structure - missing door - who left those barrels there?
Now the caveats that I observed. The pixeltruppen could care less about the extras, they just walk right through them. The truck doesn't change camo to whitewashed even though others on the map do. The tyres do adopt a snowy tread though - go figure!

As shown, they are a bit too destructible. Also if a single wall, to which the object is parented, is clicked to fully destroyed then the object disappears as well. And if viewing the building and looking through a wall which disappears from sight to allow a clear view, objects attached to the disappeared wall also vanish from sight.
I'll put the mdr here on Dropbox for any intrepid investigators or if you just fancy a garage to park your OB in. No other special textures are required.

Lol... just had to remind myself of the old modding tools thread here:
There´s still whole lot of great user info sharings in there and some important ones from sbobovic himself. Before reinventing the wheels and try on stuff that either failed or worked already. 🙄😅
Edit: Umlaut´s flavor adding thread is still of great use as well. Here´s where he shared his guide as PDF file.
 

This will make ya laugh or cry like me...lol Firstly Blender is a Fookin nightmare so I tried a couple of work arounds, I made a gate up in illustrator then exported as a svg file, loaded into blender then exported to .MDR file... guess what it worked but was huge and in the sky... Ok I know I can scale it, but the point is easy things like Gates Railings etc, Tall Chimneys, can easily be made and saved as a flavour, its ok as well because no need to enter etc. 
Result below.

Next I thought of another workaround, I imported the SVG file and extruded it in PS 3D, this would even save all the hassle of doing it in Blender PS 2 mins Blender???????????? Then I exported the PS 3d file as An .OBJ file which I knw blender can read. Imported to Blender. I scaled the object down and placed in the centre etc then exported to .MDR and this time it exported ok but appears below the bloody map surface... Can this be sorted and can the ability to move rotate as other flav objects do???? If it cant then I will forget it but it is a very quick way to get very basic things into game. Thinking Used Shells, bullets, gates, railings, Chimneys, fences, the lists is endless?????? My blender skills are zero so I cant help myself very much. It is the most unfriendly user experience i've ever had...lol They change the UI interface so much that newer videos of just the basics are useless because everything changes... just basic things like scale and rotation (now thats a laugh) are made so badly for a 1st time user it makes me so frustrated, nearly smashed my beloved Mac up lol   I know its because I dont know what im doing.. and an old pro would show me in seconds stuff that takes hours to figure out...

As you can see good ideas but I cant implement them properly....HELP PLEASE.

Thanks. That one is based on a Scot's pine, but it plays havoc with frame rates at the moment. I need to look at the top again to get it under control. I have a big Spruce that I made with quite dense lower branches touching the ground almost, that was before I had a better understanding of the meshes so I need to rebuild that one as well:


Nice for mountains ...

All coming sometime ...
 
 

There's so much good stuff that needs to be absorbed.
Yes if my test on the Opel Blitz Barn are anything to go by I suspect the ruin object will disappear with the building and leave us with just the collapsed rubble and ruin. Which would be okay for game play.
 
Your grid would no doubt be useful in this.

My vote is for historically and geographically correct as possible within the constraints of the game. You'll have to produce an instruction manual addendum for how to create and manage steep terrain in CM.

Thanks. That one is based on a Scot's pine, but it plays havoc with frame rates at the moment. I need to look at the top again to get it under control. I have a big Spruce that I made with quite dense lower branches touching the ground almost, that was before I had a better understanding of the meshes so I need to rebuild that one as well:


Nice for mountains ...

All coming sometime ...
 
 

So you might like this:

Who left that in here?!

... and where'd these barrels come from?

Even goes transparent like buildings ...

Fully destructible - vaporised! by some Russian 75mm HE
To get the Opel Blitz and barrels to appear I reparented them to a sub-object rather than the main object. So for the barn (indie building 200) the main object is called level 0, with sub-objects named roof, wall-front-level 0, wall-left-level 0, wall-right-level 0 and wall-rear-level 0. The OB is parented to the front, the barrels to rear and left. They are still at the floor level rather than the ground underneath, so they sit correctly in the building.
The building seems to behave as normal - clicks with modifiers do what they should to the textures and degree of damage; snow appears on the roof and snow winter textures appear for the walls when snow is laying round about. The walls also react to their locale, so the barn changed from wood to stone for Germany '45.

Notice stone winter texture and damaged structure - missing door - who left those barrels there?
Now the caveats that I observed. The pixeltruppen could care less about the extras, they just walk right through them. The truck doesn't change camo to whitewashed even though others on the map do. The tyres do adopt a snowy tread though - go figure!

As shown, they are a bit too destructible. Also if a single wall, to which the object is parented, is clicked to fully destroyed then the object disappears as well. And if viewing the building and looking through a wall which disappears from sight to allow a clear view, objects attached to the disappeared wall also vanish from sight.
I'll put the mdr here on Dropbox for any intrepid investigators or if you just fancy a garage to park your OB in. No other special textures are required.

There's so much good stuff that needs to be absorbed.
Yes if my test on the Opel Blitz Barn are anything to go by I suspect the ruin object will disappear with the building and leave us with just the collapsed rubble and ruin. Which would be okay for game play.
 
Your grid would no doubt be useful in this.

Ok a while ago I made a set of Modular builds, my brief to myself was I wanted them hollowed out but needs auto window placement on any width building, so the user (and me) do not have to piss about clicking the windows to fit. I remembered seeing Mod 7 in the vanila Modular buildings files folder. This was so different to the rest, what it does is basically have apertures in the walls for windows, as normal, but the window does not show, there is just the square hole were the windows usually are, you can still put the window frames on the regular windows it also has some depth in the window apertures where when i cut them out they are paper thin. So I had an idea what if I used Mod 7 as a template and built 1-9 Modular builds, as this fitted the brief perfectly... this would allow the user to play the vanilla maps or any RT game without messing the windows format up, and in my style of damaged texture look that I like, rather than the defaults (so clean they look like they had just been built...lol). I don't know why but it worked the whole 1-9 buildings were ok after I changed the graphics and added my own textures. So now if the player likes he can just use these... Not as immersive as using my full set of mod builds but a great solution to what used to be a big problem for me. See below...
I think this concept was by Benpark if I remember correctly, i have just utilized it further than BF dare to go... Cheers

I like it when you can see the troops in the buildings...

You can clearly see that firing and observation is not obstructed at all...

On the ground floor notice no windows or doors,.
 
 

LOS is broken!
Well, this is a very frustrating experience. Soviets are advancing in the direction marked in red arrow. They are still 300m away from the woods.

With that intelligence I move my JPz IV into a prepared fire position.
I thought this is going to be a prefect ambush place. It has LOS cover the open field and the road out of the town. The woods blocks advancing Soviets’  LOS, forcing them either go through the open field and take the flank shot or get into the woods (which should trigger the early warning as I have a lot of infantry units watching that area).


 
The result? It just feel like that T-34/85 has thermal sight, one round of 85mm AP shot through dense vegetation, penetrated JPz IV through “Forward Bottom”? What the heck?
 


 
 
OK, review the pervious turn save file, maybe, just a maybe this magic AP round was shot through a tiny gap between woods. But how come it penetrated through the bottom when my JPz IV is in a hull down position?
 

 
Frustrating….
 
*******************************************************************************************************************************************************************
This is not a blame or a complaint that the game is broken.
I just want to speak out my frustration…..
Now I feel much better. Time to get back to my cockpit and resume my battle
 

 

So you might like this:

Who left that in here?!

... and where'd these barrels come from?

Even goes transparent like buildings ...

Fully destructible - vaporised! by some Russian 75mm HE
To get the Opel Blitz and barrels to appear I reparented them to a sub-object rather than the main object. So for the barn (indie building 200) the main object is called level 0, with sub-objects named roof, wall-front-level 0, wall-left-level 0, wall-right-level 0 and wall-rear-level 0. The OB is parented to the front, the barrels to rear and left. They are still at the floor level rather than the ground underneath, so they sit correctly in the building.
The building seems to behave as normal - clicks with modifiers do what they should to the textures and degree of damage; snow appears on the roof and snow winter textures appear for the walls when snow is laying round about. The walls also react to their locale, so the barn changed from wood to stone for Germany '45.

Notice stone winter texture and damaged structure - missing door - who left those barrels there?
Now the caveats that I observed. The pixeltruppen could care less about the extras, they just walk right through them. The truck doesn't change camo to whitewashed even though others on the map do. The tyres do adopt a snowy tread though - go figure!

As shown, they are a bit too destructible. Also if a single wall, to which the object is parented, is clicked to fully destroyed then the object disappears as well. And if viewing the building and looking through a wall which disappears from sight to allow a clear view, objects attached to the disappeared wall also vanish from sight.
I'll put the mdr here on Dropbox for any intrepid investigators or if you just fancy a garage to park your OB in. No other special textures are required.

Thanks. That one is based on a Scot's pine, but it plays havoc with frame rates at the moment. I need to look at the top again to get it under control. I have a big Spruce that I made with quite dense lower branches touching the ground almost, that was before I had a better understanding of the meshes so I need to rebuild that one as well:


Nice for mountains ...

All coming sometime ...
 
 

Thanks Harry. Your mention of LOD issues made me look again at what I'd seen before. As you say it may well be a price worth paying for some improvements in performance on tree heavy maps. I suspect that BF have investigated this themselves.
I'm going to experiment with one tree style - tree 5 since it's so important at the moment - to see what I can do with poster styles and the various LODs. I already have a system for making the individual billboards, and I seem to recall that I found a Blender addon or tutorial for creating these poster LODs, but dismissed it because they were too complex for our LOD 4 models, but maybe they're useful after all ...
I  know 😪, in my dreams ... but absolutely yes I think ReShade could well help in this respect. The same depth map that aids with stuff like DoF could be used for mapping colours in some way. I must get that explanation of depth maps sorted.
🤣 🤘🎸 it was too quiet here ... 

Yes I remember that. This happens as an error quite a lot. What I see in Blender is an empty material slot, but this is how it is when the mdr is imported so there's something else (metadata) which governs this. If only BF would release an official plugin we would be saved from all this nonsense and time wasting. Guess it's just not important enough when you've got a busy schedule of new releases to manage (cough, cough, How hot ... cough, top poster in thread).
Well it actually worked okay when I didn't have the 3rd party model inside. Seemed perfectly normal and the pixeltruppen were happy enough to do their usual. Everything in the editor worked as expected. The only thing I couldn't do was get the furniture to appear. Interestingly, once Blender knew about the placeholder textures it seemed to remember for a subsequent new import of the same building model, so it linked to the textures without me telling it about the removal of the (00) suffix.
Yes that's a god idea. I'll open one of those up. Want to do some other experiments with them at some point anyway so good to familiarise myself with them. But yes the parent/child mesh thing is generally very useful and not fussy about the names for the child meshes so long as the parent mesh is left alone. I have used it for all sorts of cheats in other models, but buildings are, I suppose, more complex.
Yes I think there's probably loads we can do, it's a matter of time. Just being able to import, edit, and save without futzing up the model is a start. It may just be something very simple like how the interior objects are placed. I noticed the floors are always above the ground mesh so it could somehow relate to that. I was careful to put the objects on the floor, but perhaps they needed to be on the ground. Alternatively it could be that the model naming needed to be edited to somehow match the expected building names, there are a couple of textures with versions a and b so perhaps there is scope there to add further sequentially named textures. Just needs more xperiments, it's exhausting though, when it fails.