Early screencapture from Farming Simulator 19 PC-version.
Short introduction about myself
Hello there! Where to begin? I'm a Norwegian citizen born back in the early 80s, year 1981 to be more specific. Both my parents grew up at farms in Norway, and I'm born into a farmers city in the eastern part of Norway, in a great valley named Gudbrandsdalen, north of the city Lillehammer...or somehow known as "Lilyhammer" from the famous TV-series with Steven Van Zandt. As a kid I worked on a farm close to my birthplace in the neighborhood with some pretty interesting farmers as I remember. It was a middle sized farm with cows, pigs, sheep and a beautiful horse. My parents are not farmers, but my mother who still lives in my neighborhood grew up at an old farm close to a famous mountain for climbers named Andersnatten - located at Eggedal in the municipality of Sigdal in Buskerud. She's a professional artist, 78 years old and still going strong .
When it comes to modding, my experience with modding started many many years ago with the light version of Autodesk Gmax, where I made some ship models for a game called Virtual Sailor. After a while I moved over to "big brother" Autodesk 3ds Max v.8-9 and the known 2D editor named Adobe Photoshop. Since then I moved over to console gaming (PS3, PS4 and currently PS4 Pro) and haven't really been into modding or PC-gaming since then. So yeah, kinda have to refresh my memory and get into the workflow again.
For gaming in general, I'm mostly into first-person shooter games and simulators such as Microsoft Flight Simulator, Euro Truck +++ Ship Simulator Extremes, and city building games like Cities Skylines.
Norwegian Dream 2020
Well it may not be released in 2020 but who knows... This project aims to establish a Norwegian playable mod map for Farming Simulator 19. The concept is a mixture of fictional and realistic assets (terrain, objects, peaceable objects etc.) in a somewhat Norwegian environment.
First 3D terrain model generated in World Machine64.
Stage 1 - Landscaping (current stage per 12.8.2020)
The first stage of the project is to create a landscape inspired by the western part of Norway, with fjords and alpine terrain, and some farmland here and there. First stage is an "experimental stage" where I play with different variations of 3D terrain models that is outside of the map border. As a base map for the project I've decided to use Felsbrunn SDK, as this map got a similar concept theme.
Screeencap of 3D terrain model optimized with Editable Mesh in 3ds Max 2020.
Terrain models are exported into Autodesk 3ds Max 2020 (main 3D editor and DDS-texture rendering tool) from World Machine https://www.world-machine.com/ terrain generator, and then converted to editable 3D mesh for optimization and material texturing.
Later on I'm using 3ds Max's FBX Exporter to get the file ready to be imported into Giants Editor.
Textures are mainly CC-textures (Creative Commons) that are prepared with PixPlant https://www.pixplant.com/ - especially for textures that are repeating seamlessly. This tool is also great for making sub-materials like normal maps, bump maps etc.
I also use GIMP 2.10.20 to work with 2D variations of the texture - especially 2D painting. GIMP has some bugs with making DDS-files, so the work around is to put the texture material on a Plane-object in 3ds Max and use rendering to save it as DDS (DirectDraw Surface) DXT5 with mipmaps.
Project Norwegian Dream 2020 is developed on a brand new PC rig:
Lenovo Legion T530
GeForce RTX 2060, Ryzen 5 3600, 16GB RAM, 512 GB PCIe SSD, Windows 10 Home
Monitor:
MSI 27" Curved screen, type Optix MAG272CQR.
Resolution: 2560x1440
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Okey, that was some general information about the project, and I'm grateful for any feedback, tips and more from mod developers that wants to pop-in and help me out now and then.
I'm like a newbie puppet to modding for Farming Simulator, but I learn quickly and I'm happy to contribute my time and effort for Farming Simulator and the community. So let's hope for the best!
(...and hopefully my right mouse-arm gets better with a new ergonomic mouse. I just hate that pain... )