I also had no experience in modding games or making anything 3d apart from in a CAD program back in school 15yrs earlier. And that didn't include any texturing.
I wrote this back when I started as a way for myself to learn and hopefully get others to follow. Back then it took me days to do something basic. And I'm not kidding when I say I spent months before just looking at and trying to get a grip with blender to just do those basics, learning some of the keyboard shortcuts makes all the difference in blender I think. I started by making a tree, and no way could I get that thing in banished... or any game. Don't even want to say how many faces it has.
I also now texture as I make the 3d model, it is nicer to do, allows more experimentation with details I think.
For a while I did unwrap the models so each plane had it's own place on the UV, but now I overlap quite a bit and re-use same parts of textures, and yes mirror them also sometimes.
Sometimes I can spend 1-3hrs making a model, or others can take me upwards of 36hrs+ on something with more detail. Sometimes I can do it within a day, other times it can get frustrating and work on the model slows to over a month or year...
basic code to get a model in the game can be quick once you get the hang of it : 10-15min.
but once you start getting into it more and experimenting with different code and UI, things slow down. For example the last week i have been updating mostly only the UI of the styth tower mod, I've added a few other models but at the most the 3d modelling/texturing has contributed to maybe 2-3% of the time spent on it. I've spent I think over 48hrs so far on it.
I thought this update would take a day at the most, but modding banished is a bit like a puzzle that has no solution, and very much like falling down a rabbit hole...
