WoW 3D: One-click imports from wow.export

The most important thing about any workflow is efficiency. Why press fives keys if you only need to press one? With that in mind, in this post I'm going to go over one of the recent improvements I've made to my 3D workflow which allows me to get things from wow.export into Blender in one click.

While this post is written with Blender in mind, the concept is applicable to any software and workflow; although for non-Blender users you'll need to write your own code.

wow.export

The first thing you'll need to make sure is that you have an up-to-date version of wow.export. You'll need to be on version 0.1.26 or above. Whenever you load up wow.export, you will be prompted at the top to update, so it's a breeze to get the latest version.

Don't have wow.export? You can download it from wow.tools. 

Since 0.1.26, wow.export now writes a file called last_export to the user data directory. For Windows users, the full path of this file is %LocalAppData%\wow.export\User Data\Default\last_export

Above is an example of what you might find in that file after an export. Something to note is that if your export fails for any reason, this file will not be written.

The format of the file is as follows. Each line is an individual unit that was exported in the format of TAG:PATH. The path will be the full absolute path to the relevant file. The tag will vary depending on what you exported.

Most tags are structured as A_B with A being the original format (M2, WMO, ADT) and B being the output format (OBJ, GLTF*), with the exception of textures (exported manually from the textures tab) which use the tag PNG alone.

* GLTF support is currently in development and not public at the time of writing this post.

Blender

Now that we have access to the latest export, we can use this to import into Blender. If you haven't already, click the Blender icon in the top-right of wow.export and install the add-on that comes with it. We'll be calling the functionality of that add-on for WMO/ADT importing.

Let's get into the code...

That's all it takes! As the comments in the code dictate, it will read the last_export file from wow.export and then iterate over each entry, importing them with either the wow.export plug-in (for WMO and ADT) or the built-in OBJ importer (for single M2 files).

Keybinding

This wouldn't be very efficient if we had to run some Python code every time we wanted to access the functionality, so let's key-bind it.

To do that, we're simply going to install the following code as a Python macro using my recently release add-on. Not familiar? Check out my guide here!

https://gist.github.com/Kruithne/04cbdf0dd67540ba77c5772e996c8827 

Once you've installed, go into Keymap and add a new binding (under the Window section). Set the bind to macro.wow_export_quick_import and map it to get key you desire.

If everything went as planned, you're done! Clicking your designated key-binding will now import everything from your last export into the scene!

Being able to instantly import doodads and buildings over from wow.export is one thing - and all the seconds you save do add up after thousands of actions - but there's an even bigger advantage to this method: it works on maps too!

That's right! Forget having to import map tiles one at a time or keeping track of which tile you were on. Just select all the ones you want in wow.export, export them, and then hit your  new keybinding in Blender and wait for the magic to happen!

Since we're invoking the Blender plug-in that comes with wow.export, this will also bring in doodads and WMOs for map tiles, as well as doodads inside exported WMOs. Give it a try!