How to make a vehicle texture paintable?

    Hello, I'm trying to figure out how to make a vehicle interior texture paintable at any LS Customs or using a trainer. To be specific, I'm not talking about making a livery, but actually making the texture compatible with in-game paint shops while preserving details such as stitching and bump mapping. I've heard it has something to do with an alpha channel, or possibly an opacity map? The texture I'm using already has an alpha channel but when I try to paint it in-game, it remains the same default brown color (see images). If anyone knows, how would you setup a vehicle texture to be paintable in-game?


    What I already know:

    -Most vehicles use shader material "vehicle_decal/badges/detail2" for interior paint.

    -Most vehicles use shader material "vehicle_paint3" for exterior paint.

    -You need to assign one of the following paint layers to the vehicle mesh you want to make paintable:

    [Primary]

    [Secondary]

    [Wheel]

    [Interior Trim]

    [Dashboard]


    Help is much appreciated. I'm using Blender-Sollumz and GIMP btw.


    I am pretty sure the texture has to be transparent when coloring, the same way liveries and paintable cars work. When doing that you have to find a brown color in game, and use the id for that in the carvariations in the right spot for it to spawn in brown.

    Not transparent, just has to be greyscale/white-ish, since the color ingame gets added to the texture's existing colors. Desaturate and lighten in case of a detailed diffuse, in your case since it's just a solid color texture, just fill it with a 90% white color (100% white looks usually too bright ingame).

    Thank you very much for the advice guys. It sounds like this should be simple enough.


    Unfortunately, I believe I may have discovered a bug in Sollumz. After changing the diffuse texture to grayscale white, converting the shader material to "vehicle_badges" and setting the paint layer to [Secondary], it still failed to change color in-game. So I re-imported the model into Blender only to find that the paint layer was still set to [Not Paintable]. So it seems to me that Sollumz might be exporting the model incorrectly. I'll probably have to run this by the Sollumz discord to see if anyone else is encountering this problem.

    Just to confirm for everyone else, Sollumz v2.4.2 is bugged. It doesn't apply Paint Layer settings while exporting vehicles. I imported the vehicle into Zmodeler3, set the paint layer to [Secondary] and it worked perfectly. So you can use that as a workaround until Sollumz gets an update.

    Zmodeler and Blender have different pros and cons, most material stuff you should try to learn Zmodeler on, it helps me a ton. I find UV maps are high quality and efficiently made in blender, then .cols and materials are easy and simple in zmodeler.

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