Material issues on vehicles will usual appear in the form of an orange NO MATERIAL or NO TEXTURE appearing on your vehicle.

Your first reflex with any material issue should be to check the console (` by default) for error messages.

Error messages will show up in red in the console, while warning messages show up in yellow.

No Material

No material errors show up as a NO MATERIAL orange material on the vehicle. Keep in mind that it might not be super clear depending on your UV map, however NO MATERIAL issues are a specific shade of orange.

Thos errors happen because the material assigned to those surfaces cannot be found in the material definition.

If you check in the console. You should see an error like this:

[NO-TEXTURE] Unable to find material mapping to: material in unknown

This sort of issue has a few possible causes :

• The material isn’t defined in the materials.json file, or there is a typo in the “mapTo” parameter.
• There is a syntax error in your materials.json file
• There are conflicting material files, often with the automatically generated materials file in the vehicle folder, or when you have a second main.materials.json file for a vanilla vehicle.

If the material is missing or has a typo, you will simply need to correct that.

As for syntax errors, the easiest way to troubleshoot them is to copy the content of your materials.json file into a json checker like this and fix the issues that pop up.

If neither of those issues is the problem. What can be happening is that your vehicle has 2 overwritting materials file, with the primary file not having all the required materials.

The first possible cause is that you have a temporary materials file in the vehicle folder. This file could have been creating either when trying to load a vehicle that had no materials file, or from saving changes in the materials editor. Removing that file should fix your issues.

The other possibility, which is specific to mods of pre-existing vehicles, is that you are overwritting the materials file of the previous vehicle. To fix this, you should move all of your mod’s file into a sub folder.

No texture

A no texture error can take multiple forms. The most obvious one will be if the diffuse texture shows as a yellow “NO TEXTURE” material. As with material issues, you might not see the text depending on the UVMap, but it’s a specific shade of yellow.

You might also see the issue come up as a “NO TEXTURE” bump map, orange reflexions, or white textures when they should be colored.

In the console, you should see a message telling you the specific file that cannot be loaded, as well as the material it’s used in. Here’s an example:

Failed to load ‘diffuse’ map ‘/vehicles/pigeon/pigeon_main_c.color.png’ for state 0 of material ‘pigeon_main’

There are a few possible causes, however the most common ones are a missing texture file or a resolution that isn’t a power of 2.

Missing file

The most common cause of issues with texture loading is when the game cannot find the file.

This will appear in console with a message similar to this :

Missing source texture /vehicles/pigeon/pigeon_main_c.color.png

This can either mean that the file doesn’t exist into that specific folder, or that there is a typo in the file path.

Resolution isn’t a power of 2

This issue will appear in console as :

Error on texture[texture path] : Unable to load compressed texture with non pow2 size

This means that the width and/or height of your texture aren’t of a dimension supported by the game.

Both width and height of every texture needs to be a power 2. This includes numbers like 256, 512, 1024, 2048, etc.