What you're missing is that a mesh has to be tied to its armature. Every vertex in the mesh has to be specified as being part of certain bones, or the character will not animate correctly. That means, if you add any vertices, or move them in a way that would require a different bone influence. That data is not currently imported into blender, and therefore can't be changed. If all you do is tweak the vertices of the existing mesh a little without adding any and without moving any very far, then your approach might work, otherwise, it's likely the character won't animate correctly.codo85 wrote:Umh... I fear I'm missing something...
This is my naive approach to the matter.
Even if we wrote an exporter based on what we know now, it probably wouldn't work, as there is unmapped vertex data in some of the models - probably normals, binormals and tangents (used which can all be calculated in 3DS Max or Blender when needed, but stored in game files because they are too slow to calculate at runtime. Until we know which bits of unknown data are what, the exporter would be failing to provide certain data that is needed.
As I said, though, I think tazpn over at Dragon Age Nexus has figured out what goes where, but he hasn't documented it, so right now, it means either more reverse engineering or digging through tazpn's fairly complex code, neither of which I have the time for at the moment. But, if nobody else does it before I have time, I'll look for a solution when I can.