| Category | Blender Exporter |
| Created | 24.03.2025 00:34 |
| Andrew Savage (ASava2) | 24.03.2025 00:34 |
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| I installed blender exporter 10 on blender 4.4 and the exporter tool bar is empty. it only has the bar and when you open the bar there is nothing underneath it. |
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| Lyn Lynch (Turnip) | 25.03.2025 03:42 |
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| Mine as well! |
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| Paweł Kwiatkowski (DjElektron) | 26.03.2025 22:01 |
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| I confirm, I have the same problem with version 4.4.0 - you need to revert to version 4.3.0 |
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| rcard | 26.03.2025 22:29 |
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| Same here. I'm getting this error: Python: RuntimeError: could not create instance of I3D_PT_PanelExport to call callback function 'draw' |
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| John Deere (BarkerFarms) | 31.03.2025 23:26 |
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| Paweł Kwiatkowski, How are you getting it to work I have tried multiple versions followed the instructions but it still does not pop up in the exporting bar? Please help |
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| David Zadnik (DzInLa) | 01.04.2025 04:22 |
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| Have you watched any of GIANTS free tutorials? https://gdn.giants-software.com/videoTutorials2.php In Blender, the GIANTS I3D Exporter EXPORT function is in the right-hand side bar TAB. |
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| Vidhostice S D K (apickwick) | 01.04.2025 14:43 |
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| Hello, in "i3d_ui.py" on line: 1143 change line: def __init__(self): to def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs): super().__init__(*args, **kwargs) I haven't tested it yet, but the add-on will load ;-) https://docs.blender.org/api/4.4/info_overview.html#construction-destruction Enjoy it! |
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| David Zadnik (DzInLa) | 01.04.2025 19:47 |
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| Apic Kwick (apickwick) Which Blender version are you using? |
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| John Deere (BarkerFarms) | 01.04.2025 21:22 |
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| I have tried 3.6, 4.3, and 4.4, but let re attempt every thing lol |
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| Zoltan Horkay (HorkayZolee) | 01.04.2025 21:30 |
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| Works on versions 4.4.1 and 4.5a |
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| John Deere (BarkerFarms) | 01.04.2025 21:42 |
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| Oh guess what! I found it its on the bottom left somehow but thank yall for all the help!!! |
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| Zoltan Horkay (HorkayZolee) | 01.04.2025 21:51 |
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| Works on versions 4.4.1 and 4.5a |
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| John Deere (BarkerFarms) | 01.04.2025 22:07 |
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| Ok i will try those |
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| John Deere (BarkerFarms) | 01.04.2025 23:00 |
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| So it works but on the to right like you said its just clear it pops up but isn't visible? Nevermind I figured this all out just what does it mean if my Mesh_01 is to big? |
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| David Zadnik (DzInLa) | 02.04.2025 04:03 |
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| Apic Kwick (apickwick) What does the change that you suggested in "i3d_ui.py" do? |
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| Vidhostice S D K (apickwick) | 02.04.2025 10:10 |
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| Blender version 4.4 and higher must be in the constructor function __init__(self): -> __init__(self, *args, **kwargs): and in this function the constructor of the inherited class must be called first super().__init__(*args, **kwargs) I'm not a programmer, more of an artist with Ctrl+C Ctrl-V from Stackoverflow :-D -- VidhosticeSDK |
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| Evan Wwww (EW2022) | 29.04.2025 22:15 |
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| I had no issues once I switched to Blender 3.6 LTS. For anyone having issues with Blender 4.4. |
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| Isaac Clewley (theisatron123) | 04.05.2025 15:49 |
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| it wont even show export as i3d.. |
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| David Zadnik (DzInLa) | 05.05.2025 06:01 |
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| Have you watched any of GIANTS free tutorials? https://gdn.giants-software.com/videoTutorials2.php In Blender, the GIANTS I3D Exporter EXPORT function is in the right-hand side bar TAB. |
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| Philipp B (oehi86) | 11.05.2025 21:34 |
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| where is the constructor-function? I use Blender 4.4.1 and it#s not possible to use the export-addon. Can anyone help with this? |
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| Nadine Brinkmann (judith_21) | 18.05.2025 19:59 |
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| Thanks, Vidhostice S D K (apickwick)! With your adjustments, the i3d-Exporter is working fine for me in Blender 4.4. |
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| Nadine Brinkmann (judith_21) | 18.05.2025 20:01 |
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| @Philipp B (oehi86): Press N in Blender to open the sidebar. You will find the Giants i3d Exporter there. |
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| Guillaume Villecroze (Ge3kwoo) | 22.05.2025 22:21 |
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| Hello, effectively it works with the workaround from @Apic Kwick (apickwick) You have to modify the i3d_ui.py script, AND RESPECT THE INDENT ! Look like: def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs): super().__init__(*args, **kwargs) global g_modalsRunning Thanks for the help ! |
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| BlvckRaven | 23.09.2025 12:49 |
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| Eliezer Rivera (Efrain) | 27.09.2025 23:05 |
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| What's happening? The export option doesn't appear anywhere. Everything installs correctly and the plugin name appears, but in the section that is supposed to be for exporting, nothing appears. I've already tried with different versions, and it's supposed to be for fs 25, but I've spent hours and I can't find the solution. |
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| David Zadnik (DzInLa) | 28.09.2025 01:32 |
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| I would suggest you watch GIANTS TUTs. Exporting is explained at the 25 minute mark. https://gdn.giants-software.com/videoTutorials2.php?s=1&p=0&c=2&LANGUAGE=en |
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| David Brown (mrscsi) | 31.10.2025 17:56 |
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| Well what's happening is what Giants always does, they put all their hopes in maya's basket, I watched them do it with Max, now I use blender, but even if I step back and run an old blender so that the Giants exporter works, it doesn't export any textures correctly, material names are all screwed up, it's practically for all intents and purposes worthless except for one little item It installs a conduit between the game and blender that the unofficial Giants I3D exporter that you can get from git hub works perfectly and 4.5.3 which is what I'm using now, haven't fired it up in one of the 5.0 alphas yet to see but probably will today… But once you install the Giants exporter just uncheck it in your add ins and have the unofficial Giants I3D exporter installed and checked and have it set to the little program the Giants exporter actually uses to convert to I3D Works every time, you can find shaders and such under your textures rollout, materials are named perfectly and it's never missed a texture yet, and I have been exporting roads using CRM and geometry nodes where a particular road may have 20 materials in it with three images per on average and some have custom shaders and it is never missed one yet Can't say the same for Giants official exporter |
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| David Brown (mrscsi) | 02.11.2025 18:51 |
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| David Zadnik, Not really that interested in using blender 4.3… Why is it they can expel resources for Maya and create an exporter that does everything and buys you breakfast, and blender and Max get scraps? I say this, if giants won't do it and someone else is, go with someone else |
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| David Brown (mrscsi) | 02.11.2025 18:51 |
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| David Zadnik, Not really that interested in using blender 4.3… Why is it they can expel resources for Maya and create an exporter that does everything and buys you breakfast, and blender and Max get scraps? I say this, if giants won't do it and someone else is, go with someone else |
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| David Brown (mrscsi) | 02.11.2025 19:10 |
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| Okay, I did try Vidhostice S D K's edit to the script, and it does run and even export in blender 4.5, now I'm going to look at the tutorials again, and I'm going to give it a valid try… On the test that I just did (with a single object, single texture and single material) it got two out of three right, while and while that may not be bad for meatloaf, it's unsatisfactory for me at the moment when the StjerneIdioten/I3D-Blender-Addon gets it right every time. But I am all about giving giants a fair shake, why they couldn't alter that script with one line of code however is something that should be making everybody stand up and ask questions. Because blender 4.5 is not some cutting edge new beta, it's the LTS for Christ sake. I actually confirmed that the StjerneIdioten/I3D-Blender-Addon works with the new 5.0 betas and even the 5.0 alpha, go figure. He's figured out how to make it upwardly workable, I would think the Giants and their brainpower would have that ability to do it as well. Farming similar lives and breathes and grows on the backs of content creators, to expect them all to run Autodesk Maya to get premium benefit of an exporter is to me unrealistic, the vast majority of their content creator since we're not selling content are using BLENDER. We are not fancy production houses with budgets and multi-seat licenses, no they need to rely on people like that at release time to create their maps that they bundle with the game, but that doesn't mean that they should short shrift the rest of us who create content either for ourselves or for others. I'll hop off my soapbox now, get back to working on my map and leave you all to kick this around as you like |
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| David Brown (mrscsi) | 02.11.2025 21:53 |
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| Well I've been beating my head against the wall all afternoon. I went out and looked on the tutorials here on the GDN, and I didn't see one specifically about exporting from blender, working with blender but I already know how to do that but I'm not sure what the one poster meant when he said go back and watch the tutorials, because if I want to make a blocky looking truck in blender, I don't need a tutorial at this point. So having gotten the exporter to work with blender 4.5.3 here's what I'm seeing. And keep in mind that's exactly what I see in blender 4.3 so it's not the modification to the script that's causing it, it does the exact same thing because I replicated it in both versions. I use a blender add-in called CRM or city road maker to create roads from curves, it works brilliantly and with a little help can be made to work flawlessly with giants editor and thusly farming similar. Now if you do a roadway, put on bike lanes and bus lanes and sidewalks and patches and manholes etc. you're going to have a mesh that has 20 or 25 materials, the roads work great, so I don't need any of this "giants can't handle that many materials" mantra because with the StjerneIdioten/I3D-Blender-Addon these roads export perfectly fine, and when they hit giants editor I have to do nothing to them, keep this in mind nothing. I digress, using the Giants exporter on a road, I set up with bike and bus lane, patches and manholes and lane markings which is about 8 or 10 materials give or take. I then went under the attributes panel and told it was a rigid body and a roadway (being that it was rather short and I knew would go because the mesh was not that complex) I had previously set up the came location, so I went back to the export tab and exported it. It exported without any errors, I opened the file in giants editor and the mesh is there, absolutely no textures whatsoever on the mesh, if you look in the material editor all the materials seem to be set, they look good to me anyway, but absolutely no actual textures aside from a random normal map was in any slots, it completely ignored the diffuse and metal. It also did not pass the rigid body attributes. Now I've gone out and looked on YouTube, and there are some tutorials dating back to 19 and 22 but I'm not sure how much it's different than it was then, I may watch one just to see. But being that this exporter does the exact same thing in two different versions of blender, one with scripts intact as giants intended and one with modifications to allow it to run in blender 4.5.3 when it does the exact same thing, you can pretty much bet it's something internal to the scripts themselves. But I can't justify setting textures for 25 materials in one asset let alone 20. Not when StjerneIdioten/I3D-Blender-Addon doesn't miss a beat and gets all the materials correct and all the textures selected and slotted properly, it even makes a texture directory wherever you drop your shape and I3D that contains all the files textures. That's handy if I must say so myself. I'm going to give a little more to it, maybe watch some videos of the one in 22 and see what's what and if I see something that I'm not doing right that is glaringly obvious |
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| Kristian (krisjo01) | 03.11.2025 22:26 |
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| Hey David Brown, really glad to hear the community I3D exporter is working well for you! You're absolutely right, Giants official Blender exporter has been a source of frustration for years, which is exactly why the community exporter started back in early 2020 by StjerneIdioten. Back then, Giants exporter was basically the same add-on re-uploaded from FS15 to FS19 with minimal fixes. The big "rewrite" for FS22 finally made it closer to the Maya exporter feature-wise, but it still carried over a lot of structural problems. During FS22 I reported over a hundred issues and suggestions on their feedback tracker, most of them with the exact code required to fix the problem. In one of the reports, I even uploaded a complete reworked version of the exporter. It included everything from UI refactors and performance improvements to bone export fixes and proper RNA property definitions. Some of those changes did make it into the FS25 exporter, but the most impactful parts were unfortunately left out (probably due to time constraints I guess) After spending that much time in their codebase, it became pretty clear that the Blender exporter is heavily based after their Maya exporter, both in structure and in how it's presented to the user. They tried to replicate the same workflow and layout from Maya, where everything (export buttons, export options, object and material properties, etc) sits in a single panel. That approach might make sense in Maya, but it just doesn't translate well to Blenders ecosystem. In Blender, we expect things to live where they belong: object-related settings in the Object Properties panel, mesh-related ones in the Mesh/Data panel, material settings under Material Properties, and export options under File > Export > .i3d (or through the Collection Export system if preferred (personally I love this :-P)). The community exporter follows that logic, which makes it feel far more natural and user-friendly, especially for people who already know their way around in Blenders UI layout. Giants exporter, on the other hand, hides all of that in one custom panel inside the 3D View, which is confusing and breaks with Blenders conventions. On top of that, much of their internal logic still feels very "Maya-like". Some of the code even looks like it was written by someone more used to C or C++ than Python, not necessarily wrong, but it leads to a lot of unnecessary complexity and weirdness hehe... That's also why many users think "attributes don't save". Their system uses scene-level properties instead of proper RNA object properties. You have to click "Load" to pull an object's data into the scene props, make your changes, and then click "Apply" to "push" it back to the object again. It's not intuitive at all, and they even have modals running in the background to keep things synced, one optional for object props, and one mandatory for materials (if that one isn't running, good luck changing anything haha). The texture export issues people see are mostly due to how their exporter expects your folders to be structured. It assumes your Blender project folder is a 1:1 mirror of your final mod folder. If you work directly inside your mod folder, that's fine, but if you don't, all texture paths break. The community exporter solves this with options to automatically copy used textures to the export directory, choose file structure modes (flat, Blender-style, or Modhub layout), and decide whether to overwrite existing files. Much cleaner and much more flexible. After FS25 released, I decided not to do another full rewrite of their exporter like I did for FS22. Instead, I moved over to help improve the community exporter, and that's been time much better spent. It's now fully updated for FS25, even works with Blender 5.1 alpha from my testing, and even includes a working conversion tool for old UDIM-style materials that Giants own operator never handled properly. The community exporter isn't perfect, but it's far more aligned with how Blender is actually meant to work. It supports the new Collection Export feature, has "live" attributes that reflect what's really exported, handles files intelligently, and is designed to stay compatible with future Blender versions. The only major thing missing is proper documentation, but that's in progress. (worth to note that most properties have proper descriptions when you hover over them in Blender) To anyone else reading this: don't waste time trying to fix the official exporter every time Blender updates. Just switch to the community exporter, it's stable, maintained, and lets you focus on creating instead of debugging! :-P |
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| Paweł Leśniak (PawelLesniak) | 21.11.2025 11:27 |
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| Thank you Kristian. Installed it already and seams to working really well. But i have one question. Why after exporting my model i dont get additional file .shapes? I am currently working on mod based on vertexPaintShader and i've noticed that after exporting mesh from blender and importing it in GE i got yellow warning saying: Warning: i3d contains non-binary indexed triangle sets: I know that when I just click save in GE i get additional .shapes file and when open GE next time that warning disappears but. I have spend couple of days trying to get my model to work the way i want, I cant find any information on the internet even no reply from community. I want to make my mesh to work like original mesh which is working the way i need so i know it's possible. You can read my post here if u want: https://forum.giants-software.com/viewtopic.php?t=216761 And i am wondering do .i3d file carries vertex color information by itself. Maybe that's the case in my problem? I've tried almost everything I know and I'm slowly giving up. But i dont want too cause its looking great in game when i put it on my farm and I think others will like it very much too. |
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| Kristian (krisjo01) | 24.11.2025 13:57 |
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| Hey Paweł, I guess you haven't setup the "I3D Converter Path" in the addons preferences :-) When you get there it should give you instructions on what to do. https://imgur.com/a/JMRiHm5 .i3d should carry over vertex color information yes, I am not very familiar with map making tho, so uhm... |
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| Paweł Leśniak (PawelLesniak) | 25.11.2025 20:16 |
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| Thanks again. I did as you wrote, but that wasn't the problem. However, I've managed to solve my problem. It turns out that vertices can have an alpha color/channel in addition to RGB colors. I didn't know this, and that's exactly what my vertices were missing. |
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| Wayne Norman (Kobra299) | 16.01.2026 14:48 |
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| question can I use the new exporter on older Fs games eg 19 |
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