Multi-material Skins Setup

Overview

Setting up skins with multiple materials on one vehicle.

After following the Skin Tutorial and getting everything right, it could be confusing to see a car having two body colored materials not handling the skins correctly.

It’s not as complex as it may seem at first though, this article will guide you how to solve it.

Organization

Generally for skins, it’s always good to have a separate skin.materials.json file where they all are stored, it’s easier to keep it organized that way and is the usual setup we use on all our vehicles.

How to specify which skin goes where (example with midtruck):

1  "midtruck_main.skin.stripes": {
2    "name": "midtruck_main.skin.stripes",
3    "mapTo": "midtruck_main.skin.stripes",
4    "class": "Material",
5  }

Naming & Setup

The skin material name is separated into three parts, which in this case are:

• midtruck_main - the material this skin is mapped to. (usually the one specified in the 3D program like blender etc.)
• skin - the skin group; to my understanding this gives you the ability to group the skin into a certain category - for various interior colors, for example, you can use skin_interior there
• stripes - the skin name itself - this has to be the same along all bits of the skin (e.g. midtruck_main.skin.stripes, midruck_shelter.skin.stripes)

So, logically, to have the "stripes" skin assigned to both materials ("midtruck_main" & "midtruck_shelter") you need to have them assigned to the same name.

The rest of the skin setup is pretty straight forward.

In the JBeam you’ll have to set up the skin as usual and due to the correct material setup it should show up on the parts its intended to.

1  "midtruck_skin_stripes": {
2    "information":{
3        "authors":"BeamNG",
4        "name":"Stripes (Colorable)",
5        "value":500
6    },
7    "slotType" : "paint_design",
8    "skinName" : "stripes"
9}