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Vehicle tools

Find them on the Vehicle tab, the Vehicle menu and the tool shelf's Vehicle section.

Preflight (check before export)

Preflight checks the car for what the game needs: part names, the chassis, wheel and seat dummies, collision, triangles per detail level, texture sizes, missing textures, meshes without a material, broken triangles, unwelded wheel seams, and parts that aren't under the chassis.

  • Click a row to select what it's about.
  • Fix / Fix all where there's an obvious fix (add a missing dummy, rename a misspelt part, link parts under the chassis ...).
  • Export shows it first when there are errors.

LODs (detail levels)

GTA draws a lighter model further away: L0 (close up), L1, L2, L3.

  1. Generate LODs.
  2. Tick the levels and set each one's share of L0's triangles. The preview shows the counts.
  3. Pick Whole model or Selected parts and press Generate.

UV seams and material borders are kept. One undo step. (To lighten L0 itself, use Poly crunch: see Repairing geometry.)

Collision

The game uses simpler shapes for collision, in [COL] parts.

  1. Generate Collision: pick the parts, the shape (box, convex hull or simplified mesh) and the material (CAR_METAL, the car glass grades, RUBBER ...).
  2. Collision Material changes it later.
  3. Turn COL on in the Structure tab to see them.

Lights and sirens

  • Light dummies: add headlight_l / r, taillights, indicators, brake and reversing lights at the selection.
  • Light materials write the light id the game uses into the vertex colours.
  • Siren: adds siren<n> and siren_glass<n>; selected polygons become the siren glass.
  • Sirens from carcols (Modify > Sirens): reads the car's carcols.meta and sizes the siren lights the way the game expects (stored small), or Back to full size for editing. Apply shows what it will do and asks first.
  • Siren preview: plays the carcols siren pattern, and can light up the model as the game would.

Rigging

Assign parts, polygons or vertices to a bone, or weight vertices between bones. Normalise (Rigging tab) keeps at most 4 bones per vertex, as GTA needs.