I’m currently working on a dumb little project pictured below, trying to recreate the Most Wanted M3 GTR as a Kei-ish car. Using decal patches in what I’m mostly convinced is the incorrect way, I’ve managed to achieve the following result so far using 26 pieces.
With that said, I'm fairly certain I could do much, much better if I could make my own paint groups for this body. Having done some research there are plenty of ways to import new bodies, but it seems no way to export existing bodies to modify them.
It seems that isn’t something you can do, but at the same time I haven’t found anything saying explicitly you can’t, so there is a bit of doubt. Is this something you can do?
While it is possible to extract a 3D model from the beamng export, you’d still be starting at zero to put it into Blender, get it back to spec for Automation, and then exporting it into the UE4 SDK to bring back into the game as a mod. At that point of effort you’re better off making your own custom kei M3 body rather than trying to bake new paint slots into this one.
Alternatively, you could make your own modded texture files for decals but no guarantees placement would be ideal. Depends on your level of skill for modding those in.
This is probably the perfect solution, but how do I get the UV map of a body I don’t have access to the model of? I’d imagine if I could somehow extract the Beam NG exported body I could do it from there, since I wouldn’t need to reimport or re-setup the body in any way. Is that something I can do?
Export your car to BeamNG, and import the model to blender.
From there you can create a new UV map for the car body, paint it and export it as an image.
When you have the texture exported, go back to automation and create a new custom image paint, import your texture and apply it to the body paint.
