After taking a master Udemy Blender course, I saw things later on that made me rethink how to build Zielonka City in a modular/section-based way. I can make all of the city inside Blender and keep the relationships in XYZ positions without moving the assets so much inside GIANTS Editor. It’s way less work than placing each 3D asset with separate and different XYZ locations. In other words, it means that the XYZ location for an asset in Blender (related to the point of origin) is the same as that in GIANTS Editor. In this case, the transform group (a parent) holds the XYZ location related to the XYZ = 0 (zero) to origin. The children of that parent will then also have an XYZ = 0 (zero) location to the parent.
I also learned about the mirror modifier. I can now make a UV map for just one mesh and mirror the whole thing since many architectural buildings are more or less symmetrical. It’s like slicing through a 3D mesh, cutting out the other part, and then doing mirror modelling and mirror UV mapping. Of course, I was somewhat at a beginner level when I moved into this project, not knowing the essential features of Blender with my 3ds max background. The workflow can be simplified way more than before because what is critical is that the UV mapping is about the visible surfaces of a 3D mesh, so I can correctly apply the texture maps and shaders.
Keeping things way more organized is crucial to me. When this project gets completed for real one day, this mod for the Farming Simulator will hold hundreds of new assets, and many of those will not be the vanilla assets that are included with the Farming Simulator. On top of that, each asset has its own or shared texture maps.
Now, people may ask: Why put so much work into it?
The answer is simply: I don’t want to be a game modder who just uses the same assets made by GIANTS Software and ports them over to a new Farming Simulator title, which many modders do—with a bit of change to their “new mod,” of course. But that’s not my style of modding.
I see how textures and assets are repeatedly used in game mods made for Farming Simulator, and it’s quite frankly not that interesting to watch and play in the long run. On the other side I applaud when I see someone making a unique mod for this game rather than someone just reusing and reusing the same content over and over.
Respectfully, many will have opinions and preferences for mods they find interesting for this game on a personal level. Me myself is more like:
- Do I need another harvester in my mod collection?
- What is so unique about THAT harvester?
- Does it have something other mod harvesters don’t have?
- Is it a new design I haven’t seen before?
- Does it have an attachment for other tools than just the header?
- What features does this harvester have that other harvesters don’t have?
If there is nothing new, then I just move on.
