Exporting Vehicles

Step-by-step guide for exporting vehicles to Blender

Summary

Created by Simarilius Published May 2023

This guide aims to walk you through finding and exporting a vehicle to blender.

If you'd rather watch a video Boe6 goes through a basic example in the second of his vehicle modding videos here. You still have to read below if you want an non default appearance.

Requirements

Vehicles have different challenges from the characters, but the Blender Addon is fully up to the task, as long as you give it the right info.

Importing vehicles to blender needs the .ent, .app & .rig files in .json format, along with all the meshes and the main .anim file for the vehicle as .glb. Fortunately, there is a script to do the heavy lifting – and this guide will tell you how to use it.

.ent files for pretty much all the vehicles are listed on the Cyberpunk modding wiki here.

You need to find the one for your vehicle, and add it to your project.

Once you've added the .ent to your project, you now have two options, of which you can use either:

  1. "Find Used Files" from the context menu, then manually add them all to your project

  2. Use the script from Tools -> Script Manager -> Export_Vehicle_Ent (the box below has documentation)

Being lazy people, we naturally recommend the second option.

Script documentation

The most recent version of this script is shipped with Wolvenkit (find it in Tools -> Script Manager -> Export_Vehicle_Ent). The code below is here for the purpose of documentation and will not be kept up-to-date, so do not run it. If you want to get the script's most recent version, find it in the Wolvenkit-Resources Repository.

By default, it will ignore shadows, proxy and FX meshes. To include them anyway, set the corresponding flags to true – find include_proxys, include_shadows, include_fx. (If you don't know why you'd want them, you won't!)

Check your project tree to make sure that you have the vehicle's .anims file. If there is one, you can go directly to the next section.

If the script hasn't found an .anims file

If no .anims file is exported (as for example with thee Arch), you need to find it yourself.

You can either

  • browse through the folder \base\animations\vehicle

  • or put \base\animations\vehicle > .anims into Wolvenkit's search bar.

Once you have found the .anims file, add it to your project and export it to .glb with the export tool. (The script should now pick it up, but – better safe than sorry!

Get a specific appearance

If you're fine with the default appearance, you can go to the next section and import your project into Blender.

Otherwise, you need to enter the exact appearanceName into the Blender open dialog. You can find the appearance name in your .ent file inside the appearances list:

The same file that you picked in Step 1

Your entity in Blender

In Blender, select File -> Import -> Cyberpunk Entity. You need to point it at your exported vehicle entity – find it in your project's raw folder, it should be the only file with the extension of ent.json.

If parts of the vehicle are missing, undo the import (ctrl+Z) and use Export All in Wolvenkit's Export Tool, then do it again.

At this point, you should have a full vehicle. The meshes should be

  • aligned to the armature bones

  • bound to special bones such as doors etc. via ChildOf constraints

You can find animations in the dope sheet > action editor. If you select the rig, you can select them from the dropdown to play them.

If you have misaligned parts

Have noticed some bits are still coming in slightly misaligned, but haven't worked out why yet. Steering wheels seem to be a common one, applying a copy rotation constraint to them aimed at the armature seems to fix them. The following code will apply one to everything selected, you may need to change the target object name.

I've built shaders for most of the materials that I've encountered in my testing. Exception is the dashboards, which are controlled by inkwidgets rather than normal materials. If you want the texture, open the corresponding inkwidget in Wolvenkit, switch to the Preview tab and use the Export to Images button. You can now use this texture for the dashboard material's BaseColor attribute.

Importing multiple entities at once might be screwy. If you want several vehicles in a scene, import each into a separate blend file, then use File -> Append to merge them.

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