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EnidanBri edited this page Jul 15, 2026 · 8 revisions

5. Exporting (via the Giants i3d Exporter)

This add-on only imports i3d files. To send a model back out as an .i3d, you can use the official Giants i3d Exporter for Blender (a separate add-on from GIANTS Software). My i3d Importer is built to round-trip cleanly through it and to save you setup work along the way.

If you don't have the Giants i3d Exporter yet, download it from the GIANTS Developer Network.

There are other i3d exporters out there, but I did not test them together with my add-on. I can't tell how good it will work. That depends largely on how the exporter is built. The only tested and verified way is with the Giants exporter so far!

The one-click way: Prepare for Export

At the top of the i3d Importer sidebar tab, the Before Export box has a Prepare for Export button. One click gets the scene export-ready and takes care of most of the checklist below at once:

  • shows all snow/ice and all GE-invisible objects again (so nothing exports as invisible),
  • resets the store-config preview (re-shows every part a configuration hid),
  • restores the pristine (un-baked) wheel meshes and writes the rim/connector shader parameters onto their export materials,
  • switches every imported mesh back to its re-export material — scene-wide, so hidden helper meshes can't leak a debug material into the export.

Two things it does not do, so handle them yourself when they apply:

  • Sync material-settings changes (step 2 below) — do that first if you edited any sliders.
  • Load the config XML for vehicles/placeables (step 5 below) — and, if you loaded wheels only for the preview, click None in the Wheels section, since the game loads wheels at runtime anyway.

The rest of this page explains each step in detail, whether you use the button or do it by hand.

Prepare your scene manually

If you'd rather do it step by step, run through this checklist in the i3d Importer sidebar tab. Each item exists because of how the Giants exporter reads your scene.

1. Save Blender file to preserve relative paths / custom textures

If you used custom textures whose path is not $data/... (for example a mod's own texture which is in a subfolder of the .i3d), this will only round-trip when your .blend is saved in the same folder as the imported .i3d.

If this is applicable to your model, please save your blender file accordingly. If you only used base-game textures, this is not necessary!

Reason: The Giants exporter resolves these texture paths relative to your .blend file. If the .blend lives somewhere else it would contain an unresolvable path for the Exporter and the i3dConverter.exe would silently drop the texture from the exported i3d - the map then goes missing in-game or give you errors upon opening in the Giants Editor. The importer warns you about this at import time when a model contains such maps. Game ($data) textures are not affected.

2. Sync any material parameter changes

If you adjusted something in FS25 Material Settings, click Sync to Export Material for each material where you made changes. Re-export reads the export material, not the debug sliders, so without syncing your changes won't appear in the exported file. See The N-panel tools.

3. Unhide snow/ice and invisible GE-objects

The Giants i3d exporter writes visibility="false" for objects whose Outliner eye is closed. Anything you left hidden would therefore be exported as invisible. You can of course also change it in the Giants Editor, but here, you can reset the visibility with one click. In the Visibility panel, before exporting:

  • Snow & Ice ▸ Show (the button shows the count, e.g. Show 12)
  • Invisible in GE ▸ Show

4. Put meshes back on the re-export material

If you switched any meshes to the debug material (or imported with Attach debug materials to mesh turned on), switch them back in Material Switch:

  1. Leave Only selected unticked to cover the whole scene (or tick it and select the affected meshes).
  2. Click Export material.

Only the re-export material round-trips cleanly; the debug material carries additional nodes that will not behave correctly in the export.

5. (Vehicles & placeables) load the config XML and drop preview wheels

If your model is a vehicle or placeable whose config XML has an <i3dMappings> block, open the Store Config & i3dMappings panel and, in the i3dMappings box, click Load Config XML to assign the mappings (and edit ids if needed). They are then written back by clicking Update XML in the Giants i3d Exporter. See i3dMappings.

If you loaded wheels in the store-config preview, click None in the Wheels section before exporting — the game loads wheels dynamically at runtime, so leaving them out avoids duplicate static wheels and keeps the <i3dMappings> index paths identical to the original XML.

The locations are already filled in

A big convenience: on every import, the add-on writes the paths from your Importer preferences settings straight into the Giants i3d Exporter, so you normally won't have to touch them anymore:

  • FS25 game data folder (from preferences) → the exporter's Game Location field.
  • Re-export output folder (from preferences) plus file name of imported i3d → the exporter's Output File field.

Just double-check they look right in the exporter before you export. You can still change them. If you left the output folder preference empty, set the Output File location manually.

Export

In the Giants i3d Exporter panel:

  • Export All — exports the whole scene.
  • Export Selected — exports only the currently selected objects, so select first what you want to export.

Optional: exporter patches

Three small, optional patches for the Giants i3d Exporter ship with this add-on, in the blender_i3d_importer/patches/ folder. They fix three exporter bugs you may hit (not only on imported content).

Each patch is a small edit to one or two files of the Giants i3d Exporter. Step-by-step instructions for these fixes are in blender_i3d_importer/patches/README.md 🔗.

  1. If you want to export a scene which contains referenced nodes (common on vehicles and many buildings), you will get an error message from the exporter: KeyError: 'i3D_referenceChildPath'. This happens because the Giants i3d Exporter has a bug there.
  2. Every exported material from the Giants i3d Exporter gets emissiveColor="1 1 1 1" in the Giants Editor even when the original had none. This is easy to fix with the "X" next to emissive Color in the Giants Editor for a single material. But if you exported a scene with a lot of materials, it quickly gets annoying having to go through them all and remove the wrong default emissive color.
  3. Merge groups exported by the Giants Blender exporter currently end up in root space (FS22 style) and miss the noBindPose flag that signals the FS25 convention. Side effects: child positions shift on re-import (cumulatively per round-trip), and the Giants Editor's dissolve merge group function corrupts the mesh, normals and UVs of those files. The patch keeps merge-group vertices in each member's local space and writes noBindPose="true" on the IndexedTriangleSet.

For re-exporting to FS22, a separate patch set makes the FS22 exporter (9.1.0) run on Blender 5.1 - see patches/fs22-exporter-blender-5.1/ 🔗:

Optional: Exporter patch for FS22 Giants i3d Exporter 9.1.0

Re-exporting to Farming Simulator 22? The official FS22 exporter (9.1.0) only runs on Blender up to 3.6.9. To use it on Blender 5.1, follow the step-by-step guide under patches/fs22-exporter-blender-5.1/README.md 🔗. The importer writes its render and physics attributes in the casing the FS22 exporter expects, so the round-trip stays faithful.

Good to know — what doesn't round-trip

  • Terrain is import-only. The Giants exporter can't export it. The architecture of the terrain is fundamentally different from 'normal' shapes. In fact, the terrain is not even a shape in the Giants Editor, but is completely driven by mask files for height, textures, foliages etc.
  • Reference nodes (sub-i3ds) are exported as empty transform groups unless you apply the patch for referenceChildPath for the exporter described above.
  • Skinned-mesh joints now round-trip to their original place in the scenegraph automatically (chained joints via bone parenting, the rest via "Child Of" constraints on the bones). The only leftover is one empty zzz_armature transform group (the Giants exporter doesn't collapse armatures) — it's harmless and you can delete it in the Giants Editor.

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