Blender Tools 2.0

Since we started game development, we knew that having an enthusiastic modding community is a real blessing in this industry. With that in mind, years ago we decided to bring to our community the ultimate toolchain for anyone willing to create content for our in-game worlds and to create mods for our titles. Blender Tools supports the complete creation pipeline of any type of in-game items such as trucks, AI vehicles, models, prefabs (including support for all possible locators including AI traffic lines) and many other game assets found in both Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator.

During all those years not only has Blender Tools evolved, but Blender did too. The Blender 2.8 project was started several years ago and since its release last year, it has delivered massive changes all around. Including a big UI overhaul, new EEVEE render engine and a lot of underlying data structure changes also. Thus we were put up to a big overwrite of our tools and today we are proud to announce that Blender Tools 2.0 has arrived, supporting all new Blender 2.81 features. We have rewritten our whole material setup code to work with new render engine, which brings you even more in-game like result within Blender itself.

Thanks to the more efficient rendering of our 3D elements (locators, AI traffic lines) and rewritten several internal handlers, start-up, file saving and the overall experience should be smoother than it was ever before. As a cherry on the top of the cake, we would like to mention the new SCS Tools main menu, which enables you easy access to all Blender Tools functions and properties in one place.

These pictures show the new version in use with the truck pipeline, animations, prefab visualisation and the new SCS Main menu, in which you can find everything our Blender Tools offers.

The limits are bound only by you and your creativity! If you want to join the more creative part of the community, download Blender 2.81 here and Blender Tools here (additional info might be found on our modding wiki).

We will constantly update this toolchain, making improvements based on the feedback from our community to make it easier for them to continue doing what they do best. Or we should say a legendary 50keda will, as he's the one doing all the work there!

Do join the Blender Tools general discussion and report the bugs you'll find, please - it's helping a lot!

Changelog:

Ported to Blender 2.81 (this is THE big step, as half of tools had to be rewritten for version 2.8)

• Complete rewrite of viewport rendering based on EEVEE renderer
• Complete rewrite of custom 3D elements drawing (up to 16x times faster!)
• Complete rewrite of callbacks routines (should be less CPU consuming now)
• UI redesign to Blender 2.8 (sub-panels, icon themes, panels moved to more appropriate tabs)

Other changes:

• New SCS Tools main menu
• New caching system for libraries for the instant start-up of Blender
• New "Merge SCS Materials" operator
• New "Relocate Roots" operator
• Simplified lighting setup using reference lighting by default, without extra climate profile
• Improved blender file save speeds, should be instant now
• Added compatibility code to load old blend files (saved with SCS Blender Tools v1.12)
• Numerous other new features & improvements (see full changelog)