N Panel Tools
After importing, press N in the 3D viewport to open the sidebar, then click the i3d Importer tab. This tab is the control center for working with imported models.
At the top of the tab sits the Before Export box with the Prepare for Export button (see Exporting), and - when the scene contains a tree - the Tree Season dropdown. Below that are the sub-panels, in this order:
- Material Switch
- Material Settings
- Visibility (Level of Detail, Snow & Ice, Invisible in GE)
- Debug View
- Store Config & i3dMappings (vehicle/placeable config XML - see i3dMappings and Store configurations)
As explained on the Importing page, each material exists in two versions: a clean re-export material and a debug material that mimics the Giants Editor look. Material Switch changes which version your meshes use.
- In Material Switch, decide the scope with the Only selected checkbox:
- ticked — only the meshes you have selected are switched;
- unticked — every imported mesh in the scene is switched at once (the safe default for export).
- Click Debug material or Export material.
With Only selected unticked, the choice also becomes the scene's material mode, so parts you load later - for example wheels from a store configuration - come in the same way instead of reverting.
Only the re-export material round-trips cleanly back through the Giants i3d Exporter. The debug material carries extra preview nodes that are not export-safe. So if you've been previewing in debug, switch back to Export material before you export - or just click Prepare for Export, which does it for the whole scene. See Exporting.
Please note that the debug material is only an approximation of how it will look in the Giants Editor or in-game. It is not the exact same thing. Since we do not have the exact Giants shaders available in Blender, the debug settings can only mimic the look.
This panel lets you tweak a material's Farming Simulator parameters with sliders and color pickers — things like vehicle brand colors, multitint, clear coat, and the scratches / dirt / snow / wetness amounts.
The sliders appear only when the active material is a debug material that carries FS25 parameters.
More specific:
- Select a mesh and make sure its active material is the debug version (use Material Switch ▸ Debug material if needed).
- The panel then lists the parameters, grouped by topic (for example Vehicle Brand Color, Clear Coat, Multitint).
If the active material isn't a debug FS25 material or does not have any specific options, the panel says "No FS25 parameters in this material" or No active material. That's expected — there's simply nothing to edit on that material.
- Select the mesh and switch its material to Debug material.
- Adjust the sliders / colors in the grouped list. The viewport updates live.
Your changes live in the debug material only. Re-export reads from the paired export material, not from the debug sliders. So whenever you change something here and intend to export, click Sync to Export Material — this copies the slider values across to the export material. The panel shows a permanent reminder at the top: "Debug only — click 'Sync to Export Material' before re-export."
Some parts of an import are hidden after import to keep the viewport clean, and some models carry multiple levels of detail. The Visibility panel gathers all of that in one place. Each group only appears when the scene actually contains such parts.
Models with several detail levels (LOD0 = high detail, LOD1 = lower detail) show a Level of Detail (LOD) group. Click LOD0 or LOD1 to display that level across the model.
Maps and many objects contain snow heaps and icicles, which can be auto-hidden on import. This group shows or hides all of them at once:
- Show N — make every snow and ice mesh visible.
- Hide N — hide them all again.
(N is the number of snow / ice meshes in the scene.)
Some objects are invisible inside the Giants Editor itself — for example collision volumes and other non-renderable helpers. They are auto-hidden on import so they don't clutter your view, but they are still part of the model:
- Show N — reveal every object that is invisible in the Giants Editor.
- Hide N — hide them again.
⚠️ Hidden objects are exported as invisible. Before exporting, show the snow/ice and GE-invisible parts again — or just click Prepare for Export, which un-hides them for you. See Exporting.
This panel overlays a mask or the vertex colors of the active material directly on the model, so you can see data that is normally hidden inside the shader. It's an inspection tool — it doesn't change your model.
The active material must be a debug FS25 material. If it isn't, the panel says "No FS25 debug switch in this material."
- Select a mesh whose active material is the debug version.
- Open the Mode dropdown and pick:
- Default — the normal material, no overlay;
- one of the mask entries — overlays that mask texture;
- Vertex Colors — shows the mesh's vertex color data.
- With Only active material ticked, only the active object's active material changes. Unticked, the change applies to every FS25 material in the file at once — handy for inspecting a whole scene.
- In Vertex Colors mode, use the Vertex Color layer picker to choose which color attribute to display. There will only be entries when the model uses vertex color.
(A short, non-exhaustive overview just to give the overlays some meaning.)
Masks tell a shader which regions of a surface get which treatment. In the vehicle shader, for example, a vehicle mask (the vmask, carried on a secondary UV channel) together with the always-on color mask decides which parts take the configurable brand/tint colors and which areas accumulate the scratches, dirt, snow, and wetness driven by the scratches_dirt_snow_wetness parameter; masks also gate decals and switch between metallic and non-metallic detail, or dirt and moss on buildings. Viewing a mask shows you exactly which parts of the model a given channel controls.
Vertex colors are mostly used as data in FS, not as visible color. In the vertexPaintShader, for instance, which is used for most roads in-game, the RGB channels store the info for blending detail layers (R) or snow overlays (B). Inspecting them with this tool helps you understand more deeply what the shaders do and how to use it. You can also paint Vertex colors in Blender or set them with the Giants i3d exporter tool.
These are examples — different shaders use these channels in their own ways.
When the scene contains an imported tree (a material that uses the seasonal tree-branch shader), a Tree Season dropdown appears near the top of the tab. Farming Simulator trees pack all four seasons into a single leaf texture and choose the season at runtime; Blender can't do that on its own, so this control lets you pick which season the debug material shows.
Choose Summer, Autumn, Winter, or Spring and the leaves of every imported tree update live: the leaf colour switches to that season's look, and Winter shows the bare branches with no leaves. This only affects the debug visualization — the re-export material is untouched, and the real seasonal behaviour in-game is driven by Farming Simulator, not by this setting.
The last panel loads a vehicle/placeable config XML and lets you preview its store configurations - designs, motors, wheels, colors - right in Blender, and assign/edit i3dMappings. It has its own pages: i3dMappings and Store configurations.
Next: 5. Exporting →