Hello all, I'm trying to make a custom hood so that it matches the body color of the vehicle. Currently it is a much darker shade than the rest of the car and not nearly as reflective. I assume it has something to do with the Diffuse and Specular maps, but I can't find any good tutorials especially in regards to matching it to the default body maps. I've tried visually replicating them since I don't know the settings or process used to bake/export them in blender. But now I'm left with a hood that has no reflectivity and doesn't match the shade of the body. I am using Blender 2.79, GIMP and paint.net Is there any thing or anyone out there that is willing to show me how to properly match my parts color to the rest of the car? Any information is much appreciated!
So I think I've narrowed this down to actually being a Normals map issue. All of the tutorials I see talk about creating normal maps with a high poly mesh and mapping to the low poly mesh, or sculpting in details to then map to the mesh. As I am just editing the low-poly hood and do not need to sculpt any extra details, I'm not exactly sure how to make the normal maps for BeamNG. How would I go about this when the only mesh I have is an edited ETK K hood? I've been trying to trial & error my way through this with online tutorials, but it's becoming rather frustrating with fail after fail. Any additional information would be greatly appreciated.
Welp, finally solved this for the most part. Turns out it had nothing to do with the normal maps. Apparently GIMP 2.8 does not like to play well with the .dds export plugin as it wasn't saving the alpha layers. After importing to paint.net and editing the transparency there and saving with interpolated alpha, it finally worked. I still have some weird shading in the corners and around the edges. Anyone have any ideas where I'm going wrong? I can include my maps too help if it helps.
Try applying an edge split modifier in blender. Only thing I can think of to make wired shading like that. And also try while in object mode applying smooth shading from the left menu.
Yo, almost forgot about this thread. This was actually the issue all along, and a little playing around with edge split mod got all of my parts looking much better. Thank you for this!