How to make livery texture maps? e.g matte chrome, metallic

[sanchitrathi13]

Hey all, I have been going through the forums to find any knowledge on editing the liveries to change the materials of the skin. I see some fragmented info and even some mods but I dont know where I can find a resource that gives me a specific answer.

I am used to the RF2 material system where you assign the materials by creating masks in photoshop for different colours. and then in the game the material can be selected.

I was wondering if anyone can help or point me to the way to get these materials for a livery im making. I want to have a silver (matte chrome) finish on the paint, a shiny decal, and a matte carbon fibre finish on the materials on the car.

Thanks in advance for the help!

 

[Stereo]

AC doesn't let you mix materials, instead you have a single material that's fairly flexible dependent on the textures you use with it. There's the alpha channel of the diffuse texture which controls whether the detail texture gets shown, and then all channels of the maps texture controlling reflections & specular highlights. So for your example, you'd have carbon fibre in the detail texture and mask those areas off first (100% = no detail, 0% = diffuse & detail multiplied together). And then shiny stuff gets a certain maps colour, matte gets another one, the exact amounts depends how the car material is set up.

In general silver is not going to be accessible so you'll also need to edit the material properties to one that allows that. Most of the time it's set up so 100% on all maps channels produces a regular gloss paint, and then decreasing the channels reduces reflectiveness, reduces sharpness, and increases specular spot size.