This is a two part tutorial, one part is the text, the other is the video. Make sure to watch and read both!

 

 

1. Create a new material
2. Set the material the "vehicle_decal"
3. Copy the body
4. Delete everything that's not part of the livery
5. Delete any parts of the livery that wont be seen, stuff like interior trim.
6. Assign the reflective livery material to the body
7. Move the reflective body slightly outward in its respective direction, that way its in front of the normal livery.
8. Attach the reflective body to their respective counterparts

The way it works is you have a copy of the body,(or just the parts you want to reflect, but for compatibility with other skins I suggest doing the main body) overlaying the model. It is set to the "vehicle_decal" material, with a special reflective livery texture.

 

The reflective texture is the same as the normal,except it only has what you want to reflect. You want to delete everything except for the reflective bits. You also don't want any unique or identifying features on it, examples would be unit numbers,  license plates, "supervisor" or "traffic unit" text. Since you can only have one reflective texture unlike the livery, it needs to match up with every one of your normal livery textures.

 

Example of the normal livery texture and reflective livery texture

Spoiler

 

 

 

Notes

• It is very important that you select "vehicle_decal" and not "vehicle_decal2", if you select the latter, the reflections wont work nearly as well.
• We only want to do the reflective parts on L0 and L1, since anything beyond that is unnecessary and will waste polys.
• It is very important when changing the material from the livery to reflective livery to edit the UV mapping and have "copy from channel 2" and "generate new mapping" selected. Otherwise some sections of the body may have bugged mapping.
• Make sure to replace the mask texture in the reflective material with the vehicles dirt texture. Otherwise, when the car gets dirty, its going to look weird.
• If you are making a specialized and unique model, (like Michigan State Police for example) you may just want to select only the portions of the body where the livery would reflect, saving many polys. 
• In the video, I rename the parts to either L0 or L1. That is just to keep things organized. It wont have any effect on the model itself.
• In this video, I only kept sections of the body that would have the reflective parts. For greater compatibility, you may want to include more, including the door trim and roof.
• Results may vary, some colors just seem to reflect better.

 

 

 

 

 

Some misc pictures and videos showing the effects.

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 23, 20187 yr by OfficerFive0

So really I came to ask about the MSP cars but also,

 

how much of a file size increase does this method yield? On top of a car that is already 100,000 polygons and has a file size of 10MB+, as cool as this is, it doesn't seem very well optimized. 

2 minutes ago, theninja35 said:

So really I came to ask about the MSP cars but also,

 

how much of a file size increase does this method yield? On top of a car that is already 100,000 polygons and has a file size of 10MB+, as cool as this is, it doesn't seem very well optimized. 

It really depends on how high poly the model is, but it really shouldn't make that much of a difference in the long run. The exception being those higher poly models that have a lot of geometry on the body. I would say that the modeler should have discretion with the model hes using and whether reflective liveries are worth the added polys.

31 minutes ago, theninja35 said:

So really I came to ask about the MSP cars but also,

 

how much of a file size increase does this method yield? On top of a car that is already 100,000 polygons and has a file size of 10MB+, as cool as this is, it doesn't seem very well optimized. 

On a well optimized model it won't add more than a few thousand polys.  A 10+mb car file is probably more like 200k-300k polys, or the L0 is copied for L1-L4 and shouldn't be used in the first place.  As long as the modeler is conscious of the model's poly count and uses some common sense adding reflective liveries shouldn't have a major impact on the game performace.

1 hour ago, steinberg4145 said:

On a well optimized model it won't add more than a few thousand polys.  A 10+mb car file is probably more like 200k-300k polys, or the L0 is copied for L1-L4 and shouldn't be used in the first place.  As long as the modeler is conscious of the model's poly count and uses some common sense adding reflective liveries shouldn't have a major impact on the game performace.

Ten megabytes between the texture files and model files is what I meant. The Forza 3 Crown Victoria is 10MB in textures alone, and then another 3 for the .yft and 4 for the _hi.yft. For reference, many of GTA's original files are no larger than 3MB, so each file individually is typically less than one MB. I just ask because so many modelers are not conscious about how large their models are, and very few seem have a lot of common sense or at least a sense of care. Cars can be optimized and still look good.

 

I appreciate the estimates, it's not as significant as I thought.

Edited May 23, 20187 yr by theninja35

@Giordano should pin this

I'm struggling to make the reflective map get dirty in game, even after changing the mask to the dirt texture it will stay clean while the normal paint layer will get dirty. any thoughts or suggestions on how to fix this?

10 hours ago, Macgregor said:

I'm struggling to make the reflective map get dirty in game, even after changing the mask to the dirt texture it will stay clean while the normal paint layer will get dirty. any thoughts or suggestions on how to fix this?

does the dirt show in zmod, you may need to copy the mapping

4 hours ago, OfficerFive0 said:

does the dirt show in zmod, you may need to copy the mapping

The mapping is correct, it seems to me like the decal material isn’t set up to show dirt, so I’m not sure how anyone else managed it

48 minutes ago, Macgregor said:

The mapping is correct, it seems to me like the decal material isn’t set up to show dirt, so I’m not sure how anyone else managed it

ill have to test that out, i never actually verified if the dirt did or didnt work.

4 hours ago, OfficerFive0 said:

ill have to test that out, i never actually verified if the dirt did or didnt work.

Yeah might be a good idea. If it does work I’ll be amazed but it’ll at least give me the motivation to keep looking for the way to get it working 

On 2/12/2019 at 9:48 PM, Macgregor said:

Yeah might be a good idea. If it does work I’ll be amazed but it’ll at least give me the motivation to keep looking for the way to get it working 

After testing it out, dirt in fact does not appear on the reflective parts. if you use decal2 instead of decal, then i believe dirt would work, but the livery wont be as reflective
 

Spoiler

 

Would you be able to do this on peds?

I know how to make emmisive textures, but not reflective.. /:

On 3/7/2019 at 10:19 AM, Frostyy said:

Would you be able to do this on peds?

I know how to make emmisive textures, but not reflective.. /:

I dont think its possible on peds.

Sorry for the thread ressurection, but this is the only topic that came up in my search...

would the reflective livery cause the car to not shine as much? Like the regular reflections off the paint from ambiant lighting seems dull.

See the image below, the taurus has reflective livery and the charger doesn't... see how the paint naturally reflects the light on the charger, like a real car's clearcoat would, but the taurus is bland.


Or did I fuck somehting else up?

Edited February 5, 20215 yr by GabLeGamer

11 hours ago, GabLeGamer said:

Sorry for the thread ressurection, but this is the only topic that came up in my search...

would the reflective livery cause the car to not shine as much? Like the regular reflections off the paint from ambiant lighting seems dull.

See the image below, the taurus has reflective livery and the charger doesn't... see how the paint naturally reflects the light on the charger, like a real car's clearcoat would, but the taurus is bland.


Or did I fuck somehting else up?

What slot have you got the Taurus in ?

Try changing the colour with your trainer

 

Edited February 5, 20215 yr by Officer Wade

I want to learn how to do that too someone said I need Zmodler to make the decal liveries relfect but I create my liveries in paint.net

12 hours ago, Officer Wade said:

What slot have you got the Taurus in ?

Try changing the colour with your trainer

 

it's SHERIFF
... and will the trainer colour matter? the livery covers the entire car. I'll check it out when i get a minute.

19 hours ago, Officer K Slimm said:

I want to learn how to do that too someone said I need Zmodler to make the decal liveries relfect but I create my liveries in paint.net

Yeah you need zmodeler3 bud. You have to duplicate the parts of the vehicle body that you want to be reflective.