If it works with the built-in normals system then it must be a bug with the addon. The exporter doesn't do anything fancy with the normals, it just writes the value given to it.

Floating-point rounding errors mean that the vertices won't be in exactly the same positions as they were when you imported, even if you didn't move them. I'm all but certain that Studiomdl uses a binary comparison when matching VTA vertices to SMD vertices, so even the smallest of drifts matter.

The blend file you uploaded doesn't contain any flexes. Are you trying to compile meshes exported from Blender and VTAs from another source at the same time? That won't work.

Of course.

Right, I see what you want now. This scene is set up incorrectly for skeletal animation export. You need one armature with a bone for each brick, and one animation of that armature. (If you were targeting Source I would tell you to create a vertex animation and save all of this bother, but that's not supported in GoldSrc.)

I wrote a script to create all of the bones you need and add constraints to them:


You'll need to create an armature, enter edit mode on it, and delete the starting bone Blender made for you before running that script.

There is work to do beyond that point. You'll need to play back the animation and capture it as bone keyframes; then remove the bone constraints; then add an armature modifier and vertex group (named after a bone) to each brick. At that point the bricks will be following the bones instead of vice versa and the animation export should start to work correctly.

You may prefer to keep doing the workaround instead!

I don't understand what you mean. SMD doesn't support multiple sub-objects, it just merges them all into one.

Are you trying to create bodygroups?

Add them to a group.

If you're OCD and want them all to be exactly the same size then it wouldn't be great, no. I'll push something on GitHub if I have the time.

It's a bug. I've fixed it locally but it's not worth making a new release for.

You can select the bones you want, switch your pivot point to individual origins, then scale them. That's much better than having to remember which setting to use when first importing the file.