I am wanting to create some additional material textures for tyres, without replacing the textures already in game. I would have thought I can achieve this by copying the JBEAM files for the tyres, renaming them to something unique, then mapping them to the new diffuse map that I have created, however I can't find any reference in the JBEAM to assign a certain part to a material in the material.cs file. The only reference to the names given in material.cs seem to be in the DAE and CDAE files, which look a lot less friendly to modify. Am I missing an obvious thing here or is the only way to add new materials via a 3D software?
Take a look at this for a possible idea? https://www.beamng.com/resources/nitto-racing-tire-skin.100/
That was my original inspiration, all its done is make a new .DDS file that replaces the existing one. I want to have an additional one that doesn't remove the existing materials, hence the need to add new maps.
Ahh so basically its not possible to create an additional .DDS for the model to use without remodelling it?
You would need to replace materials.cs which defines which texture is used for material name given to mesh. In practice you would need new copy of the mesh, which has different material name, then use that name in materials.cs to point to your new texture. It is not very difficult to do I think, no modeling required, just rename material and export, then texture has to be same size and painted to same spots as original one because UV map of mesh defines which part of texture is applied to which polygon of the mesh, but nothing too difficult, certainly no need to remodel anything, just copy and rename.
Useful info there, is that something I would need Blender or similar for? Or can I do it without any modelling software?
A DAE file is editable with notepad but it's way easier i think to rename the mesh and the material name of the mesh in blender.
Thank you, I did think that was the case as I could manipulate the file when I was rooting round. I'll have a play with some spare files and see how much everything breaks
Something about exporting objects: https://www.beamng.com/threads/content-creation-and-import.55577/#post-881111