BAT4Blender is a project that aims to implement a toolchain for creating BATs with Blender. The intention is to provide an indepentent alternative to using GMAX/B.A.T. or 3DSMax/BAT4Max to avoid the drawbacks of those programs.
Some time ago, @vortext did an incredible job at implementing an initial version of BAT4Blender (original development thread at SC4D). Picking up where he stopped, I've recently started to implement a number of missing features so that creating BATs with Blender is now technically possible.
Download: https://github.com/memo33/BAT4Blender
I've tested this with Blender 3.6 (edit: and Blender 4.2+) and the Cycles renderer. For lack of actual models, I've only rendered very simple objects.
The main thing that's missing is lighting: a pre-calibrated set of lights to match the in-game colors for day and night (and darknite). As I'm not an experienced BATter, this is very hard for me to do on my own, so I'd appreciate some guidance here. (What are suitable light settings? How should night lights be handled?) (Edit: Lighting is now implemented. Thanks to @ACEfanatic02 for deriving suitable settings.)
One of the more complex things I've implemented is the slicing of LODs and rendered images if they are larger than 256×256 pixels. This now allows to export arbitrarily large models, which was one of the main roadblocks. The LODs are exported as Wavefront .obj files which can be converted to S3D using fshgen, for instance (as described in Readme).
Moreover, I've made some corrections to the computation of the orthographic scale of the camera settings. To verify this, I've applied a custom texture to an exported object. For each zoom, this displays each individual pixel without any irregularities, which shows that the scaling is now correct.
(Edit: Tagging some people who might be interested in this topic: @IDS2 @Panda @Fantozzi @Jasoncw @rivit)