WildFyr Documentation > Zanoza Modeler 3 Tutorials > How to make Rotators

How to make Rotators


Minon Lights

What you need

You will need a few things...

  • A Valid ZMod 3 Licence
  • A car model
  • A rotating light bar (Or other form of rotating light) model
  • SirenTool or the free alternative, SirenX
  • An XML file editor like Visual Studio Code

If you need a car, you can use Matt's Charger and for light bar Otaku's Vision.

Otaku's Vision does not have emissive textures for the lights, you will need to make them manually like I did. To make it easy you can copy the mesh of the reflector, pull it slightly away and apply a single colour from a lights emissive material.

These are free model from Modding-Forum, I highly recommend you check out more of the assets from Modding-Forum as it is a great resource for developers. You can also get models from devs like GeorgieMoon or Raz3r, however these models cost money so you should only purchase them after you have learned how to make emergency lights, cars in general, and feel like this is something you want to pursue long term.


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Getting started by setting up your mesh

First thing we need to do, is set out mesh part of the spinning light up. We want the mesh to spin with the emissive texture, so everything looks right. To do that we need to LOD our mesh part and make it a child of the emissive siren, that way when the carcols tell the siren to spin, the mesh does too, but the mesh will not be scaled with the siren itself.

Copy the L0 of your reflector mesh, center its axis, and convert to dummy. Just like we do when LODing a siren, by now you should be familiar with this process, the only different is we will not be scaling the mesh at all. After you have compounded all your LODs, you want to make this misc_1 or misc_ whatever name scene you prefer. I like to use numbers, and make the numbers the same as the siren number to keep me organized. Repeat this process for all the reflector meshes that you have, in my case on this Vision, I have 7. But depending on your bar you could have a different number.

Creating the reflector mesh
Compounded reflector mesh

Preparing the emis

Next, we need to actually set up the sirens for scaling. Like we did in the tutorial for normal flashing lights, we need to make a copy of the siren mesh, convert it to a dummy, move that dummy to a location hidden in the mesh, then scale the mesh down to the dummies' location. The big difference here, we do not want to move the dummy from the center of rotation. As doing this will cause your rotator to rotate off-kilter. If you need a refresher on scaling emis sirens, check out Scaling Your Mesh

Most rotator bars come with the center of rotation already set on the emis and reflectors, but if not you may have to set them manually. Take your dummy and apply the scale of 100 to your mesh, as to hide it much easier.

Moving the dummy for scaling
Scaling the mesh

Carcols creation and editing

For the next part we need to make a carcols file to scale the siren up when the lights are activated. This will be the same process as the other tutorial, using SirenTool and SirenX. Just don't apply any rotation to the siren, as they all face forward for rotators, and instead we will edit the carcols file to add the actual rotation. Also make sure you set your siren to always be on, unless your rotator also flashes instead of just spins. This is what mine looked like, sirens 1-7 where the rotators.

SirenTool screenshot

In your carcols, you want to edit each rotator. You need to locate ﹤rotate value="false"/﹥ and change it to ﹤rotate value="true"/﹥ (Or else the lights will not spin!), also you want to make sure under ﹤rotation﹥ your sequencer value is set to 4294967295.

Also, I would recommend changing the speed of the rotators. Do this by setting the syncToBpm to false, and changing the sequencer both in rotation.

Here are some values that can be used.

2147516416 - Slowest

2155905152 - Slow

2290649224 - Fast

2863311530 - Fastest

Here is a Handy Dandy Calculator to help get the correct numbers

Editing the carcols
Changing the speed

This is a WIP article. Check back later.


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