[TUT]Quick and dirty way to add interior lighting to standard vehicles
Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2016 5:23 pm
First off, this is not the right way to do it if you're making a mod from scratch, it's just a short route to get the fabled lights without having access to a 3d modeler and the original 3d model. Second note, it won't work with all the vehicles, especially the ones ported from older games as many of those do not have the interior decals as a separated file.
Software needed:
Creating the mod from a standard vehicle
Modding the beast:
Another thing I did it quick and dirty as the title says, so no bells and whistle on the texturing part, that is up to your and your abilities. (eg: on the dashboard texture I could have added an alpha channel to get only the center white part to light up or I could have cleaned up and edited the display on the side)
Software needed:
- Giants editor
Photo editing software with the dds plugin
text editor (notepad++ with the LUA lexer and XML tools plugin if you don't have one)
Creating the mod from a standard vehicle
- 3. Set up the mod inside your mod folder, it's convenient in this case.
4. The model will be opened automagically at the end of the process, if not open it yourself but don't pan around right away or you'll break the outdoor camera, create a throwaway camera that you'll delete at the end of the process
5. Select the camera you've just created
Code: Select all
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="no" ?>
<modDesc descVersion="32">
<author>Mono</author>
<version>1.0.0.0</version>
<iconFilename>store_fendt300.dds</iconFilename>
<title>
<en>Fendt_300_custom</en>
<de>Fendt_300_custom</de>
</title>
<description>
<en>Fendt_300_custom</en>
<de>Fendt_300_custom</de>
</description>
<storeItems>
<storeItem rootNode="vehicle" xmlFilename="fendt300.xml"/>
</storeItems>
</modDesc>- 1. Navigate to the decals transform by clicking on the + signs, if you're not sure it's the right one look with the camera to see which parts are being selected, we need the symbols on switches and stuff
2/3. Export the selected part inside your mod folder, name it whatever you please
- 1. Go to window>material editing to display the materials tab, take note of the name of the diffuse texture
2. Find it inside the mod folder, duplicate it and rename to your liking
3. Click on the red crosses near Diffuse Texture, Specular Texture, Cube Map, under the Custom Shader tab click the red cross again. Finally assign the newly duplicated file to the diffuse and emissive files by clicking on the three dots. Save the file.
- 1. Open up the file you duplicated before in your favourite editor, this is what you'll see
2.Click on the channels tab, find the alpha and click on it, select all and copy
3.Click back on the rgb channels and then paste the layer on top, set it to multiply
4.Start editing the picture, we want to keep only the parts that usually light up, so no warning stickers or exterior symbols like the ones on top left- a. This is the masking layer, keep it separated for the moment as it will be useful to edit the alpha channel at the end
b.I made another copy of the alpha channel in this spot as some symbols were originally black so they didn't light up
6.Go back to the rgb channels, merge everything down and save as dxt5 - a. This is the masking layer, keep it separated for the moment as it will be useful to edit the alpha channel at the end
- 1.Open up your modded tractor
2.Go to file>import, select the decals i3d
3.It will spawn outside of the main transform, at the bottom of the tree
4.As we want it to light up together with the main lights we need to navigate to the coronas transform of the default lights
5.Select the decals you've just imported, rename it to decalsilluminated
6.Cut the decalsilluminated transform and paste it inside the coronas one
7.You may not be able to see the lightshow at this moment because the two models are fighting on top of each other, to fix this move the decals a tiny bit, in this case I moved them in translate y(+0.01) and translate z(+0.001)
8.Go to view>camera>outdoorcamera, delete the temp camera,save and close
9.Check the disco inside the game. Tip:- gsSetDayTime in the console to get the desired hour
gsCleanI3DCache to reload the model without exiting the game while you move around the decals inside the editor, the process goes, sell the mod you're editing,clean the cache,buy the model again after you've edited and save in the editor (it doesn't work for textures, for those you've got to reload the game from scratch)
- gsSetDayTime in the console to get the desired hour
Another thing I did it quick and dirty as the title says, so no bells and whistle on the texturing part, that is up to your and your abilities. (eg: on the dashboard texture I could have added an alpha channel to get only the center white part to light up or I could have cleaned up and edited the display on the side)
