Now I have been working on trying to do this for a while and I know it can be done as the .mdl files I obtained from a website CAME with animations and they were custom model files not from any source games (these are dinosaurs)
Now I have been searching this for quite a while and I dont see a way to import the .mdl files into Blender, rework the animations, and place them back into .mdl format; and so I was wondering has ANYONE had any successes with animating a .mdl file.
I would prefer help pertaining to blender from somebody knowledgeable about the subject and not some random yahoo going "erm, try doing file>import then select .mdl file u's want and do de animations" because that isnt valid and I have tried importing the .mdl file however it isnt a valid extension. Can anybody possibly point me to a blender addon that allows the opening of .mdl files?
BTW I am monitoring this thread for replies and I find this a serious request and I am looking for serious answers, google has been no help and the Valve Dev Wiki isn't helpful when it comes to blender and .mdl files.

drowning in sea of spam requests and I still need this information, so sorry for early bump. I just want to make sure that somebody that can help me sees this.

The only way I know of doing it, is by decompiling the MDL files to SMD, honestly I don't think there's any other way around that, a MDL file is not just one model, but a bunch of models (LODs body groups) etc and attributes that only source can read. I'm sure there's an SMD importer for Blender on the net somewhere.

ok, so then, i guess thats making progress. Does anybody know of a utility i can use to decompile (and then recompile later) mdl files into smd format?

Doesn't Milkshape natively handle .mdl's ? Not sure if thats useful to you, but you might be able to save/export the file as something more useful to you (or just rework it in Milkshape its self).


*Hasn't used a modelling program for 8 years*

If i recall milkshape has trouble when it comes to animations and animatics, and the entire point of this thread was to keep the animations intact however i will look into it.