Custom fixture (primarily head/taillight) designing

Here is my suggestion.
First, choose a silhouette for your fixture (the shape), and morph its edges for your desired look. and then choose the shape of the lights inside (square, circular, ovular) and then you can just move them around inside the silhouette as you please. Then, save it as your own fixture to be used on other cars.

For example, let me describe the process for this BMW headlight.


In blue is the silhouette. This is the headlight’s shape, as described previously, and can be edited by moving the darker dots’ positions. These are the “edges.”
Shown in orange are the lights. These are prefabs and should have different variants for each type (round, square…) You could also make your own variants by editing each part of the fixture’s material to your liking (eg. making a specific part chrome)
Finally, in green, are the indicators. Their shape can also be edited via its edges. These indicators can also be used as “headlights” if that is your desire. For example, if you wanted to make a headlight with only LED strips as lighting (cough, Lucid Air, cough,) you can. It’s supposed to be your unique design, anyway.

This would be a way better way of having a distinct style for your brand, rather than downloading a mod of your choosing or spending days trying to model a fixture yourself, especially at the level of detail of the headlight above or as a beginner.

The only question is if this is actually doable, or if the car’s aesthetic customization is as important as the car’s mechanical customization.

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Fixtures are a lot more complicated than that, so I don’t think this kind of thing will be possible. Autodesk 3DS Max is required for making them and have additional values beyond just the 3d model for their usage (such as bones and a UV map). Changing the colours of materials will be making it onto bodies with the UE4 change (that’s the plan, at least), but I don’t know if fixtures will get the same treatment.

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I think just having more different premade ones to choose from would be good enough. Creative use of scaling and vents already allows for quite a bit of originality.

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There was something similiar I’ve recently had in mind, which would basically consist of having empty silhouettes in various shapes, into which one would then set the actual lighting fixtures into, like reflectors, LED-strips, Xenon balls, indicators etc.

Basically have the fixtures more modular by splitting them up into hollow screens and internal lighting elements. Same for the tail lights.

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