How to create lighting templates

It's time to upgrade your Law Enforcement Vehicles

With lighting templates! By the end of this tutorial you should have a light bar added with siren glass, to add any other light heads to the template just follow the tutorial over again for each light and you can add multiple lights!

So if you light bar was made with any ounce of good development work each light head would be separate (like above), it might also all be condensed into 1 colour, if this is the case drag them all out so they look like mine, If all your light heads are combined into one UV map, you will have to split them all and re UV map them. Once you are ready you want to set up each light head, I recommend setting up the passenger on the left side, and driver on the right. Therefore people making lighting templates can see what the front will look like when looking head on. After you have set up the UV map, head into the render mode and render out a wireframe. Click on save and give it a name, I like to name these files as "lightbar_template_pt1" and each time I export a different wireframe, I change the number in the pt.

Make sure to leave ample room to add other lights too, but after we get the UV map into Photoshop add in the emis textures and put them where the templates are for each colour. Remember this is for the base release of the vehicle so you should set it up as a Red and Blue, and Blue and Blue configuration. You can add other configurations if you choose, but you should also remember that it allows for the end user to make their own configurations too.

Lightbar/Lighthead Glass

Siren glass adds an extra bit of configuration that lest the end user really customize their vehicles. I recommend also adding the glass to your template. After that you can render and bring it into Photoshop. I like keeping all the templates in a .psd file that I give out with my packs for users to use to completely modify their lights.

Finishing up with the other LODs

After you re-import the lighting template and make sure it fits right you need to now make it so all the LODs on your light bar also, This is so the light bar does not look fucked up when ever a player gets a few feet away (If you not making LODs, 2 things. 1 start, trust me 100% worth. 2 you can skip this step if you truly won't use LODs for this vehicle)

So at this point I would like to tell you the easy way out, a way to just copy your UV map to L1-L3... However, This is not the case. Sadly you will have to remap each LOD for the template. However in the end it will be worth it trust me, because while keeping the vehicle only at L0 might seem like an easy way out right now; but having multiple vehicle all loading at L0 from very far away will cause some rendering issues on lower end PC's. So, let not shy away from the work and just roll up our sleeves

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WildFyr

2 years ago - updated (1 years ago)