Replacing weapons models tutorial

[Eliteone]

By Thatdarnowl 

Originally posted to Moddb.com

 

This is a tutorial going over how to export new weapon models from Blender into No One Lives Forever.

Posted by LithTechGuru on Dec 16th, 2025 - Advanced Weapons Modelling

Introduction

No One Lives Forever runs on Monolith's Lithtech engine. Lithtech 2.1 to be precise. It uses a proprietary model format called .abc created by Blackangel studios back in the 1990s. .abc was also used for other Lithtech engine games before being fully replaced by .lta when Lithtech Jupiter was made. Because Lithtech is relatively obscure, documentation on .abc is extremely rare and hard to come by.

Thankfully though, there is a Blender plugin for .abc. As of this writing it works with .abc... kind of. I'll explain more as I go on.

What you will need

1. Nolf's toolset - These are included with the game but can also be found here.
2. Purge's toolset - This toolset is highly useful and we'll use it's version of ModelEdit. It can be found here.
3. Blender - As of this writing the plugin works the best with Blender version 4.5.
4. StenApp's Blender plugin - This can be located here.
5. Winrez studio - This can be located here.

Installing the Blender plugin

This can be a bit confusing as the Blender plugin doesn't install through the traditional method by downloading the zip and installing it from there. You need to extract the zip into your plugins folder.

First, download the plugin by going to code->Download Zip.

Next. Navigate to your Blender plugins folder. This can be located here in Windows.

C:\Users\*YOUR USERNAME HERE*\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\4.5\scripts\addons

Copy the src folder into this folder.

Next. Go into Blender and go to Preferences, then addons. Make sure to activate the plugin Lithtech Tools.

Congratulations. You have now installed the plugin.

Install NOLF's toolset

Next make sure NOLF's toolset has been installed. I recommend following my level editor tutorial here. If it has been installed, all of the game files should be extracted into the game's folder. Into a folder called "NOLF".

Install Purge's toolset

NOLF's toolset has some limitations. Mainly how it's version of ModelEdit is a little broken. It also doesn't support .lta which we'll need to use for this process.

However, Monolith did upgrade Lithtech 2's engine into Lithtech Talon. Which does support .lta and uses the exact same model format as NOLF. So it's version of ModelEdit is what we need to use. There were two games that ran on Talon which recieved toolsets. AVP2 and Purge.

AVP2's toolset does not run without installing the game, but Purge's does. You can use it's version of ModelEdit or Purge's. For the purpose of this tutorial I will use Purge's. Install Purge's toolset and extract it somewhere in the game's tools folder.

Importing a gun

Next let's import a gun from NOLF. I'm going to pick the AK-47.

In Blender go to file->import->Lithtech ABC (.abc). Navigate over to \NOLF\GUNS\MODELS_PV\

Checking "Import animations" is less necessary with this version of ModelEdit, as you can actually import animations from other .abc files via ModelEdit. But feel free to leave it checked.

There it is.

Replacing the weapon model

Next, we'll need to get rid of the assault rifle that's already there. We can simply select it's object (cube2_4_1) and delete it by hitting x.

Importing your new gun

Now let's import a gun. For the purposes of this tutorial I'll import an M16.

Now position the gun into Cate Archer's hands.

Next, parent the rifle to her rig. Select "With empty groups" when prompted.

One last thing we'll need to do. We'll need to either weight paint the gun to the rig, or more conveniently assign it to one of the original vertex groups. I prefer doing the latter as it's much quicker with low poly meshes like this. Select all of the vertices and assign them to the cube1_1_2_1 group. Ideally when making your own custom animations you'd assign them differently, but for a test like this just use one group. Unlike with Shogo/Blood 2. We don't need to join the mesh in with the hands.

Because we imported animations, if we move the playback forward we can see how the gun animates as well.

This version of the plugin also includes some other bells and whistles. Like we can preview individual animations under Object Properties.

There is a rather convoluted step we need to do next in-order to export the mesh

Rotate the model

Unfortunately the LT2 plugin is buggy and has some issues with rotation. This step took the longest to figure out by far. I've since figured out a mostly consistent way of exporting the model so it looks exactly how it should in-game.

I recommend saving your .blend file now. Then select your gun and go to object->apply->All Transforms.

Next we're going to need to rotate the gun. Lithtech uses a rather random set of rotation coordinates. It's automatically applied to the hands model but not the gun we're importing. In object properties, set the rotation to 90 in the X axis and its scale to -1 in the Z axis.

Then apply all transforms again.

One last step. Setting the scale in the Z axis will flip our normals. So flip them again in edit mode by selecting all of the vertices and going to Mesh->Normals->Flip.

This will prevent the mesh from looking inside out.

Now you're ready to export.

Exporting the mesh

First I'd recommend backing up the original assault rifle mesh. Then go to file->export->Lithtech LTA.

Make sure you select Lithtech Talon. Then Export as Lithtech LTA.

Open ModelEdit

Next we'll need to open ModelEdit. Either Purge's or AVP2's. Then go to Open and select .lta from the dropdown.

There's our gun. If we go up to File->Save we can now save it as a .abc. This is the file the game will actually read.

Now fire up the game and make sure you set the game's launch to boot into the Game folder. You can do this by typing in

-rez Game

in the advanced options in the game's launcher.

Load up the game, find the assault rifle. If you did all of the steps correctly you should now see it.

Improving our model

While our model will now load, there are some bugs present. For starters, it doesn't fire, Cate Archer's hands aren't showing the correct texture, and the M16 is still using the AK-47's texture.

To fix firing go back to ModelEdit.

Go to the first frame in the Fire animation and type in FIRE_KEY. Then hit enter (it's very important you do this). Then save the model. It will now fire in-game. We can similarly fix reloading by putting SOUND_KEY 1 in the correct spots. I recommend opening the original model in ModelEdit and matching accordingly.

Next we should fix Cate Archer's hands. Select HandRight_zTex1 under Pieces. Then go to Piece->Piece Info.

Set the Texture Index to 1. Then press OK and save again.

There we go.

Fixing textures

If you read my previous tutorial on Shogo, I mentioned you had to edit the game's source code to import textures. Thankfully with NOLF they adjusted the engine so we don't need to do this. Weapon attributes are located in plaintext files inside of \NOLF\ATTRIBUTES.

Open up WEAPONS.TXT and scroll down to AK-47.

You can set the PV skin right here. To import a new .dtx file you can use Dedit the game's level editor. I recommend importing a 32 bit .tga file.

Once you've imported the textures the model will now load correctly and animate accordingly.

Conclusion

There's a lot more to importing new models. Like animations, or some of the nuances with character meshes. But for the most part this is the easiest way to export a new gun into NOLF. I wrote a sister tutorial to this one for AVP2. I hope this helps.