Blender 2.8 Tutorial 08 - Export for Giants Editor with i3dexport (English)

so hello and welcome to the quick start guide on how to use the blender to i3d exporter for farming 19 um as a very first quick starter here is a quick explanation on how to actually install it first you have to go to the i3d blender add-on github page from sdn and then basically where you can get it you have the release here and then you can either get the prerelease builds uh that are always unstable or um this is later going to be the stable build so uses your own um you want so we can just download the exporter zip here it's going to save it or usually your download folder you then start blender go to edit preferences install and then go to download there is the i3d exporter and then you just enable it on the github page also you can open issues if you find any or if you wish for something that is not included yet but beware first things first we want to make this work in the current state so if you find any crashes or any bugs when it's not exporting please open in github or if you want you can also visit the vertex design discord there is a channel where you can ask questions and usually get an answer fairly quick so let's talk about modifiers now this exporter um it can apply all modifiers upon export and here are a couple of examples this is just a standard mesh there's no modifier on this one this one has the mirror modifier as you can see here this one is not only mirrored but it also has some array modifiers and then this one has a subdivision modifier there's also something that is especially with this because what we have here is a so-called linked mesh so this these two meshes are instances of each other so if i change one mesh as you can see here it will also change the other mesh so let's re-enable the subdivision modifier again and if i simply export this file to the i3d um you have to make sure that you have apply modifiers on and then we will simply export it and it will create an i3d as you can see down here it just finished if we check on it you can see here that everything is exported correctly so it applied the mirror modifier at applied here in the mirror and the two array modifiers it ex applied here the subdivision modifier and as well it made those two unique again this exporter can also export meshes with special smoothing i've set up a small file here we have a single heart shaded mesh here we have one mesh here that is soft shaded so completely soft as you can see then we have a mesh here that has average normals and then we have here that has face weighted vertex normals that is achieved via a modifier you can see the result of this shading here and then we have two special meshes over here one is um they're both the same meshes from the geometry just that the bottom mesh so this one here is also average normals while the one on the top has have or has um base weighted vertex normals by enable and disable them again you can see the difference so this exporter also can export these kind of vertex normals because it was made in mind with those modern ways of smoothing and also manipulating the vertex normals so for the result and actually see here how this looks like and then um you can see it most visibly here how the shading drops off here so you have this average to face normal here and here the top one you can see it a little bit better that this is perfectly flat or you can also see it here however this blends into each other while on this one which has the average normals at the face weighted vertex normals um it is perfectly weighted the exporter is also able to export textures all you have to do is set them up in the correct way so for anything that is not using a special shader the setup is enough so you plug the color map into the base color and the normal map into a normal map node that is also going into the normal input here make sure that your normal map is in the color space for non-color otherwise it will not look good in blender so now we export these and because i have the file structure set to moth up what it will do is it will create a folder inside here that is called textures so i can actually show you right now in a second so i'm exporting this and it created me the i3d here and the textures folder what i will also do is it will invert the roughness so i have set it to 0.75 here inside of the i3d because it still uses glossiness it should be inverted so you can see here there's a small running error but it is 0.25 the texture is also set up in the correct way if you want to export an object that uses a special shader like the vehicle shader there's a couple of things you have to pay attention to first of all how we set up the textures it uses no base color texture only a specular map and a normal map so we'll plug these in right now first of all let's plug in the normal map so set it to color space look for the normal map mode connect these and this one into this input for the specular map it's a little bit different get it in you can do this via drag and drop go to add and look for the separate rgb node now plug in the color into the image click the separate rgb click this little arrow here and make sure to rename this to gloss map also to make it a little more visible change the label this is still temporary and we're not really sure how to make this better so if you have any suggestions let stern and me know now go over to your material tab scroll down and you will see the i3d shader settings you can open the vehicle shader here so you can go to your data where you installed from simulator 19 go to shaders and look for the vehicle shader it will now open the whole shader tab where you can select your variation so in my case i want to do a color mask now i can change the materials here so first of all i will set the rdt's to 0 and 0 and i will make it yellow so let's make it 0.05 in red and oh no let's make it for red one and maybe a little bit of the other colors since i have this setup to use the first color matte as my color that i can change now you can simply export it as well again and it should automatically have set up everything inside of the giants if you can see here now it has the color setup it has the correct gloss maps also included as well as the normal map and it has the shader assigned here with the correct colors um as you can see here i can add my rdt's so my where and my dirt let's take a look on how to set up merge groups in blender with the i3d add-on all you have to do is first of all make sure that all the materials that are supposed to be in the single merge group are sharing the same material so you can see here that the three barrels are half uh share the rossi barrel material then you go to the one that you want to be a root and name that whatever merge group name you want make sure you click the root of merge group check box and then add the name of the merge group to the other object i can simply export them and take a look in giant's editor and as you can see here the transform groups exported correctly so you have the meshes here while they're still skinned to empty transform groups let's take a look now on how to set up the skin meshes it's a bit different than what you would expect in maya 3ds max but it's not very difficult once you get the hang of it so i have a couple of hoses here that i want to skin so it moves together with this part right here and you can see that i already have a bone set up right here and i have another one right here the trick is though this is not just a single bone but it is a full armature and that is because um in blender it's very difficult to actually have bones or separate objects or rather it is impossible so a bone can only ever be a child of an armature so if you just want a single bone to move around somewhere it has to be in a separate armature so i will show you now how to set it up and actually use it with this atom because this is uh what we think is the best approach for it so you can see that i have root bone right here and i have another bone right here that i simply call cedar bone so to skin these hoses now to the bones all you have to do is select the hoses first and then an armature and then you there is the armature deform the best way to actually do this is just to parent it with empty groups because what it does is first of all as you can see here it sets up an armature modifier and it also sets up a vertex group with the bone inside so now you select the hoses again first and then the other armature and you do again uh current with empty groups and now you can actually clear the parent so what you should have now is two vertex groups for each bone and also two separate modifiers which i will actually rename now so this is the cedar teeth and the other one is my root so if we now go to the weight painting and check out the weights i would suggest for weighting hoses like this to actually weight them manually so you can see that i have selected a couple of vertices here and what i will do now is with my root bone selected i will give them a weight of one and the cedar bone a weight of zero now we'll invert this and give the cedar bone a weight of one in the root bone of zero this is we have to do this because blender cannot comprehend the vertex weight of different armatures and i can actually show you the issue of this right here so let's just take this bit here and give this a weight of one for the root bone in other programs you would not expect that it would normalize those values so it means like because i have set it up here on one for the root bone it would be zero for the cedar bone but this is not the case in blender blender doesn't really understand this because it's in separate modifiers if we would now export it it would also not really work because this down here now has a overall vertex weight of two and not one so what we have to do now is to mask the bones and blender has a feature for that that we discovered so in your armature modifier go down here and you find the vertex group name which influences the modifier so here you select for the root your root and for the cedar i select my cedar bone imagine this as a mask so whatever is masked or weighted to this vertex group is also only influenced in this armature so now we can actually work with this let's simply make it a little bit smoother so i'm simply using the bender smooth function now and just smooth it off slightly so let's do let's say 60 iterations now you can see again that if i switch over to the cedar bone it still uses the same um yeah the same vertex weight and it's not smoothed off and this is what i meant with blender not understanding overtakes weight so now since we smoothed off the root bone we'll also smooth off the cedar bone so with the same settings i will just click smooth again and it should now be equal we can actually test this now in blender so i will select this bone right here go into pose mode and i will just rotate it slightly and we'll see that it didn't work so let's check out why this did not work so first of all i will go into my modifiers and you can see here that i did not select the bones correctly uh the vertex groups not the bones this is vertex so for the root i will select the root and for the cedar bone the cedar bone so let's try this again go into pose mode and you can now see that it actually behaves as as it should this is the limitation we have in blender so we can actually export this right now but there's a slight thing that we have to remember if we export this now as is the armature itself would become a transform group with another transform group for the bone inside there's a setting in the export options though so if we go into export you see that it's called collapse armatures so what this does is instead of creating a first of transform group for the armature node itself it will simply ignore it and only export the bone so we will now click collapse armature and export this now let's open the i3d check our hoses you can already see here that my root bone exported only as my bone and now that is a full armature so now i go into cedar go here into my cedar into this group and there's my cedar bone so if i should if i'm moving this now up and down you can see that the uh hoses are moving with it so let me just get into a little better position you can see that if i rotate this they're also moving with the this bone and transform group accordingly so this is how you set up skin meshes with i3d and blender now let's take a look at how the i3d mapping works first of all if you go into the scene properties right here you will find that there is the i3d mapping option where you can select your xml file what it will do is it will check your xml so i have a very very basic one here for the i3d mapping tag now in blender itself if you go over to object properties down here you can see the add to mapping checkbox so we have this one ticked all it will do it is will automatically write the i3d mapping and the index nodes to the corresponding xml file so you can see i have a couple of meshes now i'm added to the i3d mapping now i will simply export it all and what i will do is as you can see now here just paste them all into the xml with the correct node mapping it is also possible in blender to set up all your collision meshes as well as the object properties that you could also edit in the giant's editor so on the main component for example you can go into the object properties here and set the rigid body type to dynamic as well as make it a compound for implements the collision mask is 2002 and now you see that i have several more of these collisions here so what should do now is make them a compound child also set this to 202 you can right click here and copy this to selected it will now also copy this to all the selected pieces you had now because these are compound childs we have to make sure that they're actually a child of the main component that is also the compound so if you want to edit on make them non-renderable go into your object data properties and click here to make them non-renderable so now i can export these make sure that on its main components that they also have a material otherwise it will not export correctly i can open the i3d i just exported now and if i click the main component you can see that the main component is the correct compound dynamic and that the collisions of the address that we just set up are compound childs and also they're non-renderable so that's it for this first quick glance and explanation of the editor if you have any specific questions you need answer please comment or as i said earlier visit the vertex design discord where you can find me under the tag at red phoenix in the next video we will use my mulcher that you can see here and set it up the full way um to actually make it work in the farming simulator 2019 without editing a single thing in the giants editor so thank you very much for watching and see you in the next full tutorial series

Channel: Redphoenix

Views: 14,688

Keywords: modding, blender, farmingsimulator19., farmingsim, farming, tractor

Id: lRDPuKh9gow

Length: 21min 31sec (1291 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 24 2020