Hi. I've been wanting to use more vanilla cars as police cars so I figured I'd try and make them myself. With no prior experience to modding, I've only learned to use zmodeler3 as little as I have by trial and error, so what little guidance and help (like F5544's thread on custom lights) I have found on the forums looks like Chinese to me, I can't understand it. 

 FIRST OFF: all the lights were taken from the 'police' model and yes, the sirensettings value is 13

The lightbar works fine, but the other emergency lights do not. I understand the brightly lit parts (mesh, I think they're called?) change position and size intermittently, but I have no idea how to predict where they're going to "flash" like that. For the rear lights, I even tried ripping it straight off the vapid cruiser without re-scaling it, and it still doesn't work!

I understand the axes have something to do with it, and I actually got the flashing bit to show up in the right place, but then I had to move the axes back so far they emit light in a visibly inappropriate place. 

      

The yellow circle shows the axes for siren10 (red on the workspace, blue in-game), blue is the chassis, including the glass cover for the light

And as for the rear emergency lights ... couldn't get them to work at all, no matter where I put the axes, the result for all of them is this the same

 

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. I understand it's probably something incredibly simple and obvious to the people who mod everyday, but I've only just began to scratch the surface of GTA V vehicle modding.

Edited February 16, 201610 yr by Aquamenti

So assuming I'm correct about the meaning of the words "siren dummy" and "mesh" and "pivot point", I don't think there's much I can do for emergency lights on the Primo's grille, as a 'correctly' placed mesh will be partially visible through it even when the lights are turned off, unless of course I move the pivot point back so far the emissive light looks misplaced. So I'll have to find another place to put them, or remove them altogether, which really takes away from the spirit of it. 

If anyone who knows better happens to stumble upon this thread, please share your insights, because I've done a lot of searching on both LSPDFR and z3 forums, and haven't found much other than how to fix lightbars, but I'm not having trouble with my lightbar.

I've now completed a couple of semi-successful cars.

1. The grille lights didn't work because I hadn't included the siren dummies which were under 'bodyshell'
2. I couldn't get the rear emergency lights from the 'police' model to work with other models no matter what. I used police2 emergency lights for other vehicles which worked fine.
3. However, I encountered two more problems - the dials didn't work and the windows didn't break. The windows are fine now - when importing a model, zm3 will dump its window crash data files in the folder you imported from; these files should also be present wherever you plan to export.

However, the dials still don't work, and they don't work on any of the cars I made. For example, they won't work on my Sultan-based police5 even though the vehicles.meta lines for police5 call for the VDT_SULTAN dashboardType, as well as vehicles_sultan_interior.ydt. I'm unsure what I have to do, I just want the original dials to work again.

New problem: I've templated my cars but I don't know how to add multiple liveries to the model. Just renaming them _1, _2 etc doesn't do it, it will still only spawn in the first texture.

 

Here's a nice picture of a Primo. 

Edited February 10, 201610 yr by Aquamenti

I don't know what you mean by dummy lights. The issue i'm running into is that my lightbar works and so does the lights in the back window. But 1 out of the 4 lights in the front grill of my car aren't flashing.

I mean the grey little LED "lights" when they are inactive. 

Fixed the dials too. I had been importing the wrong LOD models which didn't include the dials.
So here's a few notes for any (z)modders that may run into similar issues:

1. in the beginning it's easier to add than replace cars
2. when importing vanilla gta cars into zm3, import both the _hi.yft and the regular .yft
3. when importing siren lights from the default police cars, don't rescale/move/rotate any flashing/moving parts or their axes
4. if the sirens can't be activated in-game or they don't work properly, fix your carvariations.meta and vehicles.meta lines
5. if none of the siren lights flash with the LED surface appearing right, try breaking your windows and see if they work then. if yes, open materials browser in zm3 and rearrange your siren lights material to be above the vehicle glass material