OpenW3D Blender Plugin (fork of OpenSAGE.BlenderPlugin): a free, open source Blender plugin for the Westwood 3D format used in Command & Conquer™: Renegade and other RTS titles from Westwood Studios and EA Pacific. The project is a fork from the OpenSAGE contributors, and we remain grateful for their groundwork.
Please see Installing the plugin
Please see Setting up for development
- End-to-end Renegade parity: added the new W3DObjectSettings/material pass data model, selection helpers, naming wizards, LOD/damage helpers, terrain-mode filtering, review-log popup, and dazzle preference override so Blender can author Renegade assets like the 3ds Max tool.
- Exporter/importer rewiring: every export/import path now consumes the new object/material data (multi-pass serialization, stage animation data, terrain-mode options, collision flag threading, dedup/AABTree toggles, etc.), plus the importer backfills the new properties after W3D loads.
- Material pipeline overhaul: Blender materials now hold multiple passes/stages with shader settings, texture animation, stage hints, and per-stage image picks that serialize/round-trip in W3D.
- Terrain + collision fixes: terrain mode no longer ejects Normal meshes, collision warnings were removed, exports operate on evaluated mesh copies, and collision flags map directly to
W3D_MESH_FLAG_COLLISION_TYPE_*. - UI & tooling polish: rebuilt the object/material panels to mirror the Max roll-ups, added pass-stack controls with Vertex/Shader/Textures tabs, selection/naming/instance-copy operators, and presets for billboards/dazzles/collision boxes.
- Branding refresh: rebranded the add-on to OpenW3D (crediting OpenSAGE) and bumped the version to 0.8.0; README/metadata reflect the new name.
- Added a
Push Display Textureoperator that mirrors Max’s “Assign Material to Selection” behavior by applying the Display-enabled stage bitmap to the Blender material graph. (not fully working) - Introduced a scene-level “Use Renegade workflow” toggle so geometry context drives mesh/object type synchronization automatically and forces hierarchy/HLOD/AABTree chunks to match the 3ds Max exporter.
Enable the new workflow per scene: open the Scene properties sidebar, expand the W3D Workflow panel, and check Use Renegade workflow. That tells the exporter to treat Blender like the Max Renegade tool—every export (including “Mesh”) will emit hierarchy/HLOD chunks, keep mesh object types in sync with their W3D geometry context, and always build fresh AABTrees, so you no longer have to flip object types or export modes manually.
NOTE: When importing weapon animations import the base mesh first, then import the animation with "Keep Rigid meshes static".
The plugin is still in beta and the behaviour may change between releases. Also bugs might still occur, which we'll try to fix as soon as possible. This fork is for W3D engine games and SAGE support may be and likely is broken. Do not expect support for SAGE content from the OpenSAGE community from this fork.
- This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by EA in any way. Command & Conquer is a trademark of Electronic Arts.
- This project is non-commercial. The source code is available for free and always will be.
- If you want to contribute to this repository, your contribution must be either your own original code, or open source code with a clear acknowledgement of its origin.
- No assets from the original games are included in this repo.
We have a growing OpenW3D community on the W3DHub Discord.