Plumber 1.1.2

New install method

The addon must now be installed by dragging and dropping the .zip file into the Blender window instead of the old method.
Blender 4.2 or above is required.

Improvements

• Fixed material importing erroring in Blender 4.3, and possibly broken materials in Blender 4.2.
• Changed the addon to install as an extension.
• Changed the license to GPL-3.0 (recommended by Blender).
• Removed support for Blender versions 4.1 and below.

Plumber 1.1.1

Improvements

• Fixed "Import VMT" not working from the import menu or game file browser (import finished but no materials showed up in Blender)

Plumber 1.1.0

New features

• Import some metadata for entities and materials to open up new possibilities for external scripts and addons (thanks @hisprofile)
  • Some extra metadata is imported as custom properties in Blender 3.0 and above.
  • Can be used by external scripts and addons to further process the imported data.
  • Includes full paths for props' models and materials as path_id, and Source engine-defined properties for entities as props.
  • Can be found from here:
    

Plumber 1.0.2

Improvements

• Added support for Blender 4.1. (Fixed model importing not working)
• Added ARM64 build for Apple silicon Macs.

Plumber 1.0.1

Improvements

• Added support for Blender 4.0. (Fixed material importing not working)

Plumber 1.0.0

The addon has been rewritten and renamed to Plumber!

Comparison to io_import_vmf 0.6.9

Improvements

• Major performance increases: typical VMF map import time reduced from 5-30 minutes to 2-30 seconds.
• Manual game configuration no longer required: the addon automatically detects installed Source games on Steam.
• No longer depends on other addons to import models: a built-in MDL importer has been implemented.
• No longer caches anything on disk.
• MacOS support in addition to Windows and Linux.

New features

• MDL importer with animation support.
• Game file browser: easily import MDL/VMT files straight from game files without manual extraction, or extract any files/folders.
• Option to remove animations or animations and armatures from dynamic props to prevent problems when exporting maps outside Blender.
• Option to merge solids into one mesh object per brush.
• Option to import unknown VMF entities as empty objects.
• Support for 4WayBlend materials.
• Support for $layertint1 and $layertint2 parameters in materials.
• Support for Vindictus props.
• Fixed brushes being smooth shaded in Blender 3.6 (made brushes look wrong)

Missing/removed features

• Enhanced QC importer: removed due to the new MDL importer.
• Enhanced AGR importer: missing.
• Reusing previously imported data: missing.

Internal improvements

• Switched to custom VDF (Valve KeyValues) parser, which fixes the current parsing issues.
• Game files are no longer indexed, and are instead searched for on-demand, leading to better performance.
• Importer is now multithreaded.
• Importer backend and Blender glue code are now separated, possibly allowing reusing the backend for other projects.
• Mostly written in Rust for better performance.

Changes to Plumber 1.0.0-rc2

• Changed default import settings: texture format back to PNG and brushes back to separated

Plumber 1.0.0-rc2

The addon has been rewritten and will be renamed to Plumber.

This is a release candidate, please report any bugs you may find.

Also see release notes of previous beta versions for differences to io_import_vmf.

Hopefully there's no more bugs so 1.0.0 can be released.

Improvements

• Added option to import textures as PNG
• Internal improvement: any thread can load any asset types, there's no dedicated material+texture loader thread anymore
• Internal improvement: generic asset processing & caching

Bugfixes

• Fix possible invalid geometry in overlays (could have caused eg. Blender crashes with modifiers)
• Fix a possible race condition with prop import, leading to errors when importing some props
• Fix brushes being smooth shaded in Blender 3.6 (made brushes look wrong)
• Fix brush origin not being at center when using separate option

Plumber 1.0.0-beta4

The addon has been rewritten and will be renamed to Plumber.

This is a beta release, please report any bugs you may find.

Also see release notes of previous beta versions for differences to io_import_vmf.

Improvements

• Add file name filtering to the game file browser.
• Directly open import dialog when a full file path is pasted into the game file browser.
• Add a recent directories list to the game file browser.
• Add support for 4WayBlend materials.
• Add support for $layertint1 and $layertint2 parameters in materials.
• Add a workaround for updating addon on Windows without restarting Blender.
• Add "Detect from gameinfo.txt" button to preferences.
• Add support for Vindictus props.

Bugfixes

• Fix "file not found" errors due to paths sometimes having multiple sequential slashes.
• Fix game file browser not working with a trailing slash in the path.
• Fix hidden solids or entities causing errors in VMF parsing.

Plumber 1.0.0-beta3

The addon has been rewritten and will be renamed to Plumber.

This is a beta release, please report any bugs you may find.

Also see release notes of previous beta versions for differences to io_import_vmf.

Improvements

• Make sure imported asset names stay consistent between manual and automatic imports.
• Allow creating setting presets for importers.
• Add scale setting to mdl importer.
• Add vtf importer.
• Verify that native code and python code versions match on addon startup.
• Add option to import unknown vmf entities as empty objects.
• Show an error in console when trying to import models with unsupported external animations in .ani files.
• Detect local asset search paths when importing models/materials that are in a Source-like directory structure.

Bugfixes

• Fix missing library folder failing game discovery.
• Fix wrong gameinfo.txt being detected sometimes.
• Fix vmf embedded files directory not being detected when using game file browser.

Plumber 1.0.0-beta2

The addon has been rewritten and will be renamed to Plumber.
This is a beta release, please report any bugs you may find.
Also see release notes of previous beta versions for differences to io_import_vmf.

Improvements

• Add path info to game discovery errors.
• Allow importing VMFs using game file browser.
• Add game file browser to 3D view sidebar.
• Improve game file browser interface.
• Add file extraction functionality to game file browser.

Bugfixes

• Fix recursive patch materials being unsupported.
• Fix game discovery errors stopping discovery process.
• Fix file system opening error on missing VPK file (changed to warning).
• Fix incorrect $detail in materials.
• Fix inaccuracy in material blend data.
• Fix being able to browse outside game files using game file browser.
• Fix some out of bounds errors when reading certain models.
• Fix some panics when reading certain models.