I guess i won’t use wordpress for that common “it’s 10 pm at the moment and i’m going to bed now” microblogging stuff, but rather to post some geeky computer related thingies to the big internet world out there.

So this first blog entry will just deal with a random topic, that i’m currently working on:  EVE Online stuff in Blender 3D.

A couple of weeks ago i asked myself if it’s possible to use 3D models designed by CCP in Blender. To summarize it: Yes, it is. And it is not even that difficult. You just have to know basic knowlegde about Blender and GIMP and learn how to use the TriExporter.

Ahh, we’re already talking about the tools you need. Alright, let’s name them.
This is everything we will use right here to import a 3D model including textures into Blender:

• Blender 3D (how obvious)
• The GIMP with DDS Plugin
• TriExporter and the granny.dll

TriExporter is the tool you need to export EVE Online models out of their packed filesystem into a single obj/3ds file, which containt the 3D data of that single model.
Getting the exporter with the granny.dll (which is neccessary and used to read the EVE filesystem) is kinda tricky, because it’s a community developed tool and there is no real website with a single “Download now” button.
You should try this download. But like almost every direct link it may become a dead one in future. So, if that link doesn’t work, try to browse this thread. Just look for your actual newest version at the end of the thread.
For the granny.dll just ask Google or search for it in the EVE board.. OR use this link if it works.

Now you have all your tools and we can start the work, right? Sure.
I will just assume now you know what GIMP does and you have enough Blender knowlegde to actually use the models you want to import.

1) Export the model files from EVE Online

First you have to copy the granny.dll in your TriExporter directory. That should not be that difficult, so I won’t insert a screenshot based guide for this now.

Start TriExporter. If it asks for the EVE Online folder, just select it, or do that by using the menu at the top: File > Set folder…

Now it should look similar to this:

Open the virtual directory res/dx9/model/

This is the folder for the primary EVE Online models, like ships, stations, wrecks, cargo containers and whatever. In this tutorial we will import a ship, the Harbinger, because it has a couple of textures you need to import and set up correct in Blender for the ships material.
So we open the folder res/dx9/model/amarr/abc2/

By the way: I guess abc means Amarr Battlecruiser. af would be Amarr Frigate etc.

You should be able to see a couple of files now and their size:

There always should be three different file types:

• red: This file contains the scripted stuff for the game
• dds: Mostly 3 different files for the models textures
• gr2: A default and a low detail model with 3D data and texture coordinates

Double click on the gr2-file without the low detail name-postfix.
In the right 3D viewport you now should be able to see the model. In the new version of TriExporter you can zoom in and out by using the mouse wheel if the viewport is focused.

Now click on the File menu at the top and select Export model…

Choose your directory and filename (e.g. harbinger.obj) for the new model file. Also select Obj files (*.obj) at the bottom of the file requester window.

TriExporter will create two files now: One with .obj extension (3D model file) and a .mtl file (containt material data).

In the TriExporter directory list, select now the folder containing your model. In our case that would be abc2.

Now we will unstuff everything in that folder to have the dds-texture files instead of unstuffing every dds-file separately (because TriExporter currently can only unstuff a single file or a complete folder but not multiple selected files).

With the abc2 folder selected, click on the top menu File and click Unstuff…

Choose your destination folder. I recommend you use the same folder, in which you exported your model.

For the purpose of using EVE models I created a own little folder structure for example, like: /Ships/Amarr/Harbinger/

You now have the complete abc2 folder in your directory. This is useful, because we can now load and edit all the textures, save them to the upper folder (Harbinger in my case) and delete the created abc2 folder after that, because we dont need the .dds files anymore and neither the .gr2 and .red ones.

You can now close the TriExporter if you want to.

2) Convert the texture files with GIMP:

First of all a quick note about the texture conversion with GIMP:
Serveral people now told me they are using the exported DDS files directly in Blender. Indeed Blender is able to load this image format and split up the color channels via Texture-Nodes. However, there are some limitations in Blender which make this way not practicable for me: As far as i know it is not possible to generate an image (yellow nodes) in the Texture-Nodes, which should be used then as tangential normal map on a material. Additionally Blender can load and decompose the diffuse and ngs map, but not the paint map. Don’t ask me why.

That’s the reason i will explain the somewhat longer, but probably better looking way to export the textures with GIMP.

Install the DDS plugin in GIMP.
If you don’t know how: Browse the plugin website for details or read the readme.txt file provided in the download archive.

Start GIMP.

Load the first .dds file, the diffuse map: abc2_d.dds

The DDS plugin will ask you some questions now:

Since DDS files commonly contain game textures, pre-processed mipmaps are already provided there. This step saves computing power when loading the 3D Model in the game, because we don’t have to scale down the image a couple of times everytime we load the texture. For importing the models into Blender, we don’t need those mimaps, so we uncheck the mimap option. To tell GIMP “don’t ask me that stuff everytime I wanna load a dds file” uncheck the second option too.

You probably will now see a completely transparent image. Don’t panic, that will happen mostly everytime you load a diffuse map from the dds file. Why the alpha map is (almost) complete empty? Just continue reading.

On the top menu select Colors > Components > Decompose…

This function will create a new image and assign one grayscale layer to each color/alpha channel in the source image.

In the dialog box select RGBA and Decompose to layers:

If you successful import the dds file you will now see the diffuse map image. Precisely: You only see the grayscaled red channel of the diffuse map, because its fully opaque and it is the topmost layer.

Note the four layers (RGBA of the source dds image) in the layer window.

We will now disturb our regular tutorial program for some quick information about the textures of EVE models
Just take a look at this devblog image released in 2010. Almost every EVE model currently has three DDS texture files:

• The diffuse map file, which contains the basic RGB colors of the model and either the glow map or transparency map in the alpha channel, representing either the small bright lights on the models surface or the transparent pixels (e.g. the solar fins on minmatar ships). This usage may vary even from material layer to layer for a single model with a single “lights” map.
• The “ngs” called file, containing a normal map on the channels green (normal X) and alpha (normal Y), a sub-mask map on the red channel and a specular map on the blue channel.
• The paint map file with a single grayscale mask.

Until now I haven’t really figured out which of the mask maps is responsible for the faction colors or the cube mapped reflections in the game. Most commonly now I use just the sub-mask map from the ngs file for mirror reflections.

Now you have to disable visibility for each extracted layer, except the alpha layer (via the small eye icons next to the layers). You should be able to see the light map now. Just use the Save-As option now to save it to your models folder. I suggest you name it something like lights.png since thats what the image contains and PNG is a lossless free image format (due to the dds compression the quality of your textures already will be a little crappy sometimes, no need to make them even worse by saving the textures in JPG). Congratulations, you exported your first texture. Usually 4 more to go.

Close the other source dds image in GIMP so the only image remaining is your layer based grayscale thingie. Now in the top menu click again Colors > Components, but this time we will Compose… the layers back. Do it like this:

GIMP will again create a new image. This time you can see the fully colored diffuse map as a single RGB image.

Save it as diffuse.png in your models folder. 2 of 5 textures done.

You can now close the diffuse image and the grayscale image.

Import the abc2_ngs.dds image to GIMP.

This time it will look like a mixture of green and blue colors, everything strangely translucent. Great!

Decompose the image again to RGBA layers and close the source dds image.

For the Harbinger you will see a black image now, since only the red channel is visible (it contains the sub-mask map, remember?)
Seems like the poor Harbinger has no sub-mask.

Disable all channels except the blue one. This is our new specular map.

Use Save-As and save it as specular.png to your models folder.

If there would be a sub-mask map on the red channel, you would have to do the same procedure there and save it as submask.png or similar.

Go to the Colors > Components > Compose… tool. We will now create our normal map out of the green and alpha channel. Since this is a bit tricky, here is a screenshot of the settings you should use:

The red output channel will contain the information of the normal map for the X axis. This was our green channel in the ngs image. The green output channel contains the Y axis, our alpha channel in ngs.

Usually the blue channel in normal maps is used too, but since we will use this normal map later in tangential mode on the model in Blender, it doesn’t really matter. So set it to zero. [Note: Actually it’s better to set it to 255, since only that provides a legal normal map)

The result will be a yellow-greenish (zero) or purple-blueish (255) normal map with some red spots, right? Good, you did everything right.

Save it as normal.png to your models folder.

The last texture we have to import/export is the paint map. This dds texture is also a bit tricky to convert, since it only uses the alpha channel.
Load abc2_p.dds in GIMP and click on Image > Mode > RGB in the top menu.

Now decompose it to RGBA and disable all channels except the alpha channel:

Save it as mask.png.
Now you can close GIMP if you want to.

You should now have five different .png texture files in your folder, the .obj file and the .mtl file and the folder containing the source .dds textures, all the script stuff and the gr2 models. Delete that abc2 folder so you remain with just the useful PNG images and the two model files.

3) Import the model files in Blender 3D:

Start Blender 2.5 or newer with a new, almost empty scene.

Select File > Import > Wavefront (.obj) to import our generated model.

Navigate to your model folder and select the .obj model file, in our case: harbinger.obj

The EVE Online models are quite large, so select your new model object in Blender and make it a little smaller. I’m always scaling them down to 0.01 (so 1% of the original size).

Go into the Edit-Mode (press Tab) and use the Triangles-To-Quads function you can find in the popup menu Mesh > Faces. Use this function 2 or 3 times. By doing so Blender tries to convert as much triangles to quads as possible and we will later have a better result if we’re using some Blenders modifiers to improve the models quality.

Set the model’s shading type to Smooth.

The following few steps are optional and you don’t have to apply them to your model.
I was unsatisfied with the details and polycounts of the original EVE models, so i tried to find a way to make them look … better (especially useful for Amarr and Gallente models).

In the Edit-Mode make sure every vertex is selected

Go to Mesh > Vertices > Remove Doubles
This will remove all vertices at the same point except for one.
If we don’t do this step, the subsurf modifier will look crappy.

Apply a Subsurf modifier to the object.

Disable the realtime display button (the eye) if you want to. I would suggest doing so. Otherwise you will end up with a bunch of high detailed models in your 3D editor windows and the realtime preview will become a non-realtime-judder-preview  :-P

Set the subdivisions for view and render to 1 and select the Simple mode.
This will help to maintain the basic details and geometry of the model, while still improving the polycount for a smoother shape.
Make sure Subdivide UVs is still activated.

Add another Subsurf modifier and make sure it’s located “later in the modifier queue”.

Use the same settings as for the first modifier, but use Catmull-Clark this time.

Add a Smooth modifier to improve the surface and minimize weird speculars created by the Catmull-Clark subsurf modifier (which is quite ”sensitive” if he has to deal with long thin triangles and will produce some ugly edges).

Play around with the Factor and Repeat settings. Don’t forget to activate the other two modifiers temporary to see the complete model result.

We will now apply the textures we exported earlier with GIMP.

Select your Harbinger object and go to the Material tab.
You can see three materials for this object. These different material slots are necessary if you import a more complex model with different diffuse, ngs and mask maps. In our case we can use the same single material for each of the three used material slots. Simply connect all three material slots to a newly created material named Harbinger.

Go to the Texture tab. There will be already something like Kd.005 or similar. Just silly imported material file stuff (remember the .mtl file thingy?).

Delete the link to that material and in the first texture slot just add a new one, name it Harbinger Diffuse.

Set the material Type to Image, load the diffuse map, hopefully named diffuse.png in your model folder and name the image Harbinger Diffuse too.

Open the category Mapping and set the Coordinates to UV.

The Influence type will be 1.0 to Color by default. We will keep this setting here, because that’s all we want the diffuse map to do: Affect the color.

If you haven’t already, set your viewport shading type to GLSL. This will use blenders built-in shader scripts to display the 3D preview. To do so press N in your viewport and search for the Display category. There should be a selection with Multitexture. Change it to GLSL.

Now change your viewport shading from Solid to Textured by clicking on the white sphere at the bottom of your viewport toolbar.
The result should now look like this:

If you think this is rather ugly and not like in the game, youre quite right.
The reason for that texture mismatch are wrong UV coordinates. We will correct them now.
Note: We could also just flip all textures vertically with GIMP in the extracting process. Besides, that might be also faster.

Split your viewport and in the new window select UV/Image Editor.

Go to Edit-Mode and and in the UV/Image Editor select everything by pressing A.

Select your Harbinger Diffuse image as background image for the UV editor.
Ah, there is the problem:

We have to mirror the UV layout on the x axis, so it will fit exactly to the texture.

Open your toolbox thingy on the left by pressing N in the UV editor and activate the Normalized option. This will display the UV map values from 0.0 to 1.0 rather than in pixels, which makes the following step more easy.

To mirror the UV layout we first have to set the mirror axis. In this case we use our 2D cursor point for that.
Set your 2D Cursor Location to 0.5 on x and y so our cursor is right in the middle of the texture.

It is important that you have set your Rotation/Scaling Pivot to your 2D Cursor, instead of Bounding Box or Median Point.

Now press S (to scale the UV layout), press Y and type -1. This mirrors our layout vertical on the x axis.

Does the 3D preview look better now? I hope so.

Now it’s time to use all our five textures:
Use your Harbinger Diffuse texture on the next 4 texture slots. make a single user copy for every one and rename them like this:

• Harbinger Diffuse (already exists)
• Harbinger Normal
• Harbinger Specular
• Harbinger Lights
• Harbinger Mask

You have to do the same procedure (single user copy and renaming) for the four new images.

Now select the correct PNG file for every texture. Be sure you did the last step, otherwise you will just replace your single image for each texture.

The five textures have to affect their specific parameters of the materials settings.
You should play a little bit with the parameters for each single ship to make it look perfect, but these are the Influence settings I used for the Harbinger:

Of course you have to adjust the material settings too if you want stuff like ray traced mirror effects:

Finally build your own EVE scene and enjoy rendering

With a background and some other improvements you can make the Revelation look like this in Blender:

I hope you like this tutorial and if there’s something wrong or unclear: Just send me a note or post a comment However, advertisement and spam will be deleted.