Welcome to Blender_ioEDM

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.

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 raw .edm .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
• Exporting collision shells

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
• Complex translation of material layers, including specular, bump maps etc
• Not all geometry ends up properly placed when importing

• Installation
• Modelling Concepts
  • Animation
  • Collision Shells
  • Connectors
  • Level of Detail
  • Materials
• Developers
  • EDM Specification