Nuclide
Software Development Kit for id Tech
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As you already know, the VVM exporter (vvmtool) takes inspiration from Valve's studiomdl in terms of usage. There are slight syntax differences, primarily because the way some features are implemented differ drastically.
For example, model events can be stacked and applied to many animation sequences at once. There is no way to do so with studiomdl.
Any .vvm consists of multiple input files. These can come in the following formats:
Make sure that when you use animated files, that the bone naming and bone order is consistent among them.
This file is the head of the format. It specifies how the input files are loaded in, with additional useful commands on how to manipulate the input data. Many of these features would not be possible with an internal, modeling program specific exporter for VVM.
Here's an EXCERPT of a control file from **The Wastes*:
That's a really complicated control file, but it highlights a few things:
However, a model control file doesn't need to be this complicated:
This is models/props/computers/terminal01.qc
from The Wastes.
What each line means:
output
specifies the resulting final output file name and location relative to the control file.
materialprefix
just appends this string to any referenced material. Ideally it's the location where the .vvm itself is stored in your game filesystem.
rotate
Simply rotates all input files by 90 degrees on the Y/Yaw axis upon importing.
scene
Tells it to load one input file, which is a reference. If it was an animation it'd specify a framerate via the 'fps X' parameter.
You grab your copy of vvmtool and you either drag and drop your control file onto it, or run it via command-line:
vvmtool.exe foobar.qc
It should be as simple as that!
Some helpful tips for your content creation journey.
I recommend getting a single reference, plus the animations into your game first, then adding events and other necessary commands on top.
You can use the console command vid_reload
to force the engine to flush the model/texture cache and to reload an updated model from disk. Really useful when iterating over model exports.
If you're using the Blender Source Model tools, as of 2021, it still doesn't down-mix certain animation features into the .smd format.
This is a problem with the Blender exporter, not vvmtool (as it also won't work in studiomdl).
So if your bones seem completely messed up, try .fbx instead.
If you absolutely need to use .smd, export it as .fbx in Blender, import said output back into Blender and then export as .fbx.