I have no plans to attempt animations. If I get skinned models with skeletons done I'll consider myself lucky.
Since I'm posting I'll give an update. I have UV Mapping working, and multi-material decoding done as well.
multiple materials per model turned out to be very challenging because of a neat feature they implemented, which added a lot of complexity.
Basically each LOD model can have an arbitrary number of materials applied. and even unique materials for every LOD if they wanted. In the above case, the file had 3 materials defined, material 1 and 2 were used on LOD 0, but material 3 was only used on LOD 1. I have all this working now.
I'm also seeing that texture paths aren't reliable as defined in the files:
Here you see the paths given are saying 'centurion\batch03' but the texture files are in fact in 'centurion\batch01'
for LOD1's unique textures, it was similarly confusing, the file stated the textures would be in 'centurion\batch03\lods' but they were instead in simply 'batch03\lods'. at least in all cases I've seen so far the filenames are consistent.
blender can't read DX10 DDS files so manual conversion to TGA or another format they can read is of course required, but with textures in blender:
I'm still finding some exceptions I need to address, and then I can start trying for skinned models and skeletons. I'll probably make a release without skinning support once it's stable so people can mess with static models in the meantime.