I've always found the process of exporting assets to beamNG quite tedious so I decided to write an addon for Blender that cuts out a lot of the renaming and parenting. This addon streamlines the process of exporting objects to BeamNG and comes with a few extra utilities to simplify the process even more. Github - BeamNG Easy Export V2
Your tool works great out of the box! It's a real time saver. I don't know if it's necessary but shouldn't the nulldetail node parented to base00 be implemented as well? Thanks for your effort! Best Alex
You should name your LODs with something like name provided XXX + a + LOD number. The letter is important if the provided name ends with a number accidentally. View attachment 893133
yeah I was thinking about how to handle the naming better and that will definitely work, I saw the devs use that for their lods too. I'll also be adding an option for Null detail objects.
The exporter now adds a _d to specify that the number is the detail size and also to prevent name conflicts, you can also add Null Detail Objects now. These changes are available on the github page. Currently I'm working on improving how lods are handled so that any amount can be added and I also plan to add saving and loading of presents in case you're working with multiple objects in one scene.
Perfect! Yesterday I exported more than twenty objects for my map project in very short time thanks to your tool. Building the scene tree yourself is very time consuming.
Here's a sneak peak of the new version, still need to go through everything and clean it up and make it doesn't break during edge cases. This new version has way more features though and should be able to export just about anything it also features presets which means you don't need to reconfigure the exporter each time.
I mentioned you in a tutorial video. I hope that's okay for you. https://www.beamng.com/threads/how-...nd-scale-it-the-right-way.89186/#post-1522796 Best! Alex
Finally got around to releasing the updated version of this addon, V2 features a much cleaner UI, Presets that let you save your export configs, as many LODs as you want, and automatic collection merging. If you run into any issues let me know, theres quite a bit going on this time around so I doubt I've caught all the bugs.
Thanks for commenting on this... I had forgotten to test the new version. I've got a new map process I'm working on, but the limiting step at the moment is the bender export. It's so tedious, and I always make an error. This has reminded me there is a better way. As an aside... For the naming, the a_xxx number at the end of each model is the number of pixels it uses on the screen before loading in (according to a dev post I saw a while back). So smaller numbers mean further distances, for your LODs. Dunno if that helps or not.
Hi average person! I wanted to ask a clarifying question - does this add-on do anything to the materials.json file needed to associate the material with model? Or is it just a better method of saving just the model and the LOD elements? Another way of putting it would be - will I still have to create a new material manually in BeamNG for each saved model?
It is just about packing the the asset in the way Beamng wants it. LODs, Collision mesh, Nulldetails, Autobillboards. The material.json hast to be done by yourself, I guess. But it is really a great tool. I always use it.
Hello, as alexkidd said this is just for cutting some of the headache out of exporting assets, I was going to dabble with setting up some sort of automatic Blender material > BeamNG material but my concern there is it would end up being more work than just manually creating all the entries in the file with a text editor. Plus I haven't done BeamNG mapping in a while. Just as a tip for that though I recommend just copy and pasting a material entry that already exists for each new material your asset includes, change all the names for the respective materials, clear the persistent ID, and then you can swap out all the textures in the in game material editor instead of having to do it all in a text editor.
