My map uses the 'ETK Driving Experience Center' map as a base, since the temperate foliage and rock texture suits the mountain map I am working on. However, no matter what I try I can not seem to successfully locate/move decals from one map to mine. This is a problem because ETK driving experience center does not have a dirt road decal. Furthermore, it also seems to use decals which do not show up on the list of available decals (such as 'wet asphalt'), despite them still being physically present in my map. I have searched through several threads here, however the only solution I have come across was posted before the PBR update, and as such the main materials .JSON file has different fields, and the solution did not seem to work for me. (The thread where somebody wanted yellow lines from Utah). At this point I am thinking it might actually be easier to physically go out and shoot my own textures of dirt roads, since it looks easier to make your own than to move them from another map. Overall I simply do not understand the file structure for decals. I can't even find out where the image files themselves are stored. (Pic related: My list of available decals seems very basic and limited. No dirt roads, mostly just road markings). tl;dr: Would it be easier to make my own decals from IRL photos or move existing decals from another map? --- Post updated --- Update: I have created a new dirt road texture from scratch, and ensured it tiles properly. However, I can not find any documentation on the correct way to export decals as .dds files. I managed to get one version of this dirt road into my map, but the colors were off, and I had some strange artifacts coming through when placing it on top of an existing decal. I am assuming I am doing something wrong when exporting as a .dds file. In his video on the subject, the brilliant Mr. Terry explains that the compression is important. I am assuming this field (the one that says 3dc) is the place to go, but nothing that I've tried has worked so far.
I'm not a map maker myself, but don't worry about the dds files. The game has something called Texture Cooker. What it does is to automatically convert png textures to dds textures as soon as they are loaded into the game, you only need to name them correctly. As I said, I'm not map maker, but for vehicles, those files are saved in the local folder (where you store your mods). If the textures I'm working with are for the gavril d series, those new textures will be in /temp/vehicles/pickup inside the local folder. Just to be clear, they are aren't inside the mods folder, they are inside beamng/0.27(or whatever version the game is)/temp/vehicles/pickup. For you they gotta be inside temp/levels/yourmapfolder/ Now, for the vehicles the textures gotta be named .color for the base map, .normal for normals, .data for metallic and roughness maps. I guess it's the same for the map textures. example: Mycolorbasemap.color.png will transform to Mycolorbasemap.color.dds, mynormaltexture.normal.png will transform to mynormaltexture.normal.dds and so on. The official textures are named like that, they also include a letter to identify them faster. b = base map (texturename_b.color.png) m = metallic map (texturename_m.data.png) cc = clear coat (texturename_cc.data.png) nm = normal (texturename_nm.normal.png) r = roughness (texturename_r.data.png) You may want to do the same so you keep it organized. Here's the documentation about this: https://documentation.beamng.com/modding/materials/texture_cooker/ The trick is to only work with the png files until your map or asset is ready, once it's ready you go find the dds textures in the temp folder and replace them. Your materials.json file doesn't need to include the dds extensions, even if your materials file is referencing png files, the game will automatically use the dds files instead. I hope this helps --- Post updated --- Brw, an easy way to acces the local folder (also called user folder) is to enter to the screenshot mode and click in the little folder icon, the screenshots are saved in the user folder so you just gotta move from there. You can do the same from where you save new configs for car, on the bottom there's a button that sends you to the user folder to look for the config files. And the best way is to open it before launching the game, when you click launch a window pops up, there is an option to open the user folder.
Just copy the decal texture files to your art/decals folder. Perhaps in an own folder like decalsUtah. Make a materials.json in the same folder. Copy the part of the needed decal out of the source materials.json to your new json file and fix the filepaths. Should work. Some people in the forums suggest to copy the whole decal folder of the source map to a dedicated new folder. This works as long as you have no duplicate names in the decals of both maps. The you can rename the duplicate. Sometimes some filepaths in the json files point to other directories. This should be checked and those files should be copied as well.
Thank you both very much for providing such detailed responses. I was not aware of the texture cooker feature, and I also haven't tried moving the entire folder yet. I archive my map every time I alter it so I (hopefully) don't mess anything up too badly. My project is pretty ambitious and I honestly think I should have started learning all of this on a smaller scale, but I had a vision and it must be made. Still made lots of progress, but it's very slow. For now, I am taking the advice of the brilliant Mr Terry and I am focusing on making roads fun to drive on before I make the map pretty. I'm just a bit worried that I'll get all the roads done and then won't be able to easily change or add materials if I need to. However, I will absolutely try both of the methods mentioned here when the time comes to add materials. Thanks again guys, much appreciated.
Yah, modding takes time, soo keep calm and go one step at a time, the important part is the process and what you learn on the way. Don't worry too much for the next steps, you gotta solve one problem and then move to the next. Good luck and have fun!
