adding chrome(paint) to body

[fernBurn]

ah two post in one day? bananas.

 

anyways, i was asking to see how i go about adding that chrome paint effect to the truck. not the entire tuck (avenger WF or Max-D WF) but only a certain decal to make chrome? (Titan WFXV)

Do i need to do it in Paint.net or in Blender? or both 0_0

[Davynijland]

I thought you had to do it in Blender...

Not sure, I'm also still figuring out...

[fernBurn]

yeah i keep trying to play around with it, but still no luck....anybody know how?

[Connor Richardson]

shoot me a message on aim @ monstertrucknationtv

[Alan E.]

I've been trying to figure that out for bodies so it can have that glossy look like in real life.

[Jon Cannon]

All you do is make a spec map of the original paint. 

 

 

 

Here, the top paint of Chris's Titan is the original paint, and the bottom is the spec map. He used the spec map on Titan to give a glossy feel, which will be administered by using a suttle or dark grey on the spec map, to give it that affect, and making black anything he wanted to keep the same on the original paint. Such as the front grill, which he blacked out, because the truck would not run a glossy front clip, as well as the lettering, and the hood flames, because they didn't have a glossy effect to them when Donald ran the body in the 1st quarter.

 

 

 

In Devin Doss's Deja Vu III, Devin wanted to make the lettering Chrome; So all he did was take the original paint, and blacked out the places he didn't want to change, in this case, all of the striping down the sides, and the go pro sponsor graphics. But then he kept the Lettering the same light grey or white, which will apply a chrome effect when you put the spec map on the truck.

 

 

As you can see in the release pic, the lettering has a chrome effect, while the stripes and most of the other paint stays original to the original paint, because he blacked all of that out in the spec map.

 

 

There are two proper ways to apply your recently created spec map, seeing that you must make it a completely seperate paint from the original, and should probably be named similair to the original paint, such as Devin did, with the original paint being dv3.png, and the spec map being dv3-spec.png, although this is not entirely necessary AS LONG AS there are no spaces in any of the paint names. 

 

The first and probably more popular way is to use the spec map set of coding that you would replace in the material file, replacing the original material code that original textured what you wanted to spec map, with the set of spec codes seen above. This can be more tricky, as you must know where to replace the original paint name, and the spec map name in the set of codes.

 

What a lot of truck builders use now is something known as managedmaterials, which is a much easier way of applying spec maps to your an application.

 

With this method, you go into the material file, copy the material name, then go into a .truck file, find an empty space, and type managedmaterials, with no spaces.

 

Now paste the material name under managedmaterials, make a space, mesh_standard, another space, the original texture name, another space, and then the spec map name.

 

 

What I have highlighted in the material file is what you need to paste under managedmaterials.

 

If done correctly, it should look like this in the .truck file, if your spec map is named the same as the original paint, with the addition of -spec.

 

Now you need to delete the full material name, with all of the extra crap that is used to make it auto textured through the material file, if the body and chassis are all one material file.

 

 

Although in this case, since the body and chassis are separate meshes, it is safe to remove the body material from your v4 pack, to make sure the truck now will rely on managedmaterials to texture both the original paint on the body, and to apply the spec map. If it doesn't work for what ever reason, put the material file back in your v4 pack, or if the body and chassis were one combined mesh, you may need to replace the modified material file with the original one.

 

Hopefully this helps atleast somewhat, I can explain it in a lot more detail as I'm sure Connor can, I just thought I would post it in here.

 

Always make sure to have a back up of the material, paints, and .truck file, just in case you screw something up.