Rivet
Sign in

Materials and textures

Every mesh in a GTA car uses one material: a game shader (vehicle_paint1, vehicle_mesh, vehicle_vehglass ...) plus its textures and values.

The Material Browser (Ctrl+M)

Open it with Materials in the tool header. Groups on the left (All, New, Shaders, Scene Selection, Unused, Materials Library), material spheres in the middle, the selected material's settings on the right.

Give parts a material

  1. Select the parts (Object level) or faces (Polygon level).
  2. Select the material's tile and press Assign to selection, or drag the tile onto a part in a view or the tree.

Make a material: New, or double-click a shader in Materials Library. Copy duplicates the selected one.

Change a material: double-click it for Material Properties (colours, levels, alpha / blend / depth, every shader value, and a section per texture). Or drag a library shader onto it to switch its shader.

Replace one material with another everywhere: drag one tile onto another and pick Replace (or Copy settings to copy the shader, textures and values instead).

Reorder materials (the order they export in):

  • Drag a tile between two others: a blue bar shows where it lands. Dragging near the top or bottom edge scrolls, so you can reach tiles out of view.
  • Or select it and press Move up / Move down (Ctrl+Left / Ctrl+Right).
  • Each tile shows its place (#0, #1 ...). Reordering only works while Order is Scene order; Name, Shader and Most used sort the view without changing the model.

Save materials for another car: Save writes the selected or all materials, with their textures, to a .rivetmat file; Load brings them into another model.

Groups: New group gathers selected materials under a name of your own, to keep big models tidy.

Delete: deletes the selected material (its meshes move to another one), or every unused material.

Textures (Ctrl+T)

The Textures Browser lists the model's textures, with Unused and Missing groups (textures a material asks for that aren't in the model).

  • Add a DDS, PNG, JPG, BMP or TIFF. Replace swaps the picture but keeps the name (and fixes a missing one).
  • Save exports a texture as PNG or its original DDS.
  • Remove unused and Remove duplicates clean up.

Paint

Paint materials are tagged with their paint level, as ZModeler names them: [PAINT:1] primary, [PAINT:2] secondary and so on. View > Paint Colour changes the colour used to preview body paint.