Vehicle paint definition

A vehicle paint is essentially a preset for the color palette settings. It can be picked while spawning the vehicle via the vehicle selector, or when repainting it using the paint menu of the vehicle configurator.

Vehicle paints as shown in the vehicle selector. These represent the factory paint colors available on the vehicle.

Vehicle paints as shown in the vehicle configurator. Aside from the factory paints, this menu also shows appropriate custom ones, and the user’s own saved paint presets.

Defining the paints

The most basic way to define a paint is inside the vehicle’s main info.json file. Inside this file, each paint has a header with its name, and several basic properties:

• baseColor: RGBA color of the paint in 0-1 scale for each color. The Alpha property defines the paint’s Chrominess parameter, which is a legacy feature not supported by Physically Based Rendering system.
• clearCoat: Defines the strength of the clear coat effect.
• clearCoatRoughness: Defines the roughness of the clear coat effect.
• metallic: Defines the metallic factor.
• roughness: Defines the roughness factor.

"paints":[
  "Mica": {
    "baseColor": [0.5,  0.42,  0.39,  1.2],
    "clearcoat": 0,
    "clearcoatRoughness": 0,
    "metallic": 0,
    "roughness": 0.07
  },
(...)
],

A basic paint definition.

An additional property of the paint is class. When set to custom, the paint will appear under the Custom list in the paint menu inside vehicle configurator.

"Noce": {
  "class": "custom",
  "baseColor": [0.16,  0.1,  0.06,  1.2],
  "clearcoat": 0,
  "clearcoatRoughness": 0,
  "metallic": 0,
  "roughness": 0.07
},

A custom paint definition.

Default paints

Each configuration of the vehicle has its own info.json file, with the info_[config name].json naming scheme, for example a configuration called “standard” will have its info file called “info_standard.json”. Inside this file, among other things, a default paint name for the configuration can be defined. It is the one shown on the thumbnail, which the vehicle spawns with when the user doesn’t select any paint in the vehicle selector. This default paint is shown in the first paint slot, in the top left spot of the paint selector.

A selected vehicle configuration with its default paint highlighted in the first paint slot.

This is set with the defaultPaintName1 property. Similarly, defaultPaintName2 and defaultPaintName3 can be used to set the default setups for the other palettes.

"defaultPaintName1": "Yellow",
"defaultPaintName2": "Yellow",
"defaultPaintName3": "Black",

Default paints setup.

The vehicle’s main info.json file can also contain a list of default paints for the vehicle for each of the color palettes, which will be used when the selected configuration doesn’t have its own paints defined at all. As this is merely a fallback, sometimes only the first default paint is defined, which means the same color will be used for all 3 palettes.

Internally, the setup with defaultPaintName properties gets converted into a multi-paint setup , more on that will be explained in later pages.

Paints in user configurations

The user’s custom configurations don’t have their own info.json files. The paints setup will instead be saved inside the configurations’s .pc file. The setups for all three color palettes are saved in the same format as basic paints, except they don’t have their own names.

"paints":[
  {
    "baseColor":[
      0.86,
      0.66,
      0.1,
      1.2
    ],
    "clearcoat":1,
    "clearcoatRoughness":0.04,
    "metallic":0,
    "roughness":1
  },
  {
    "baseColor":[
      0.86,
      0.66,
      0.1,
      1.2
    ],
    "clearcoat":1,
    "clearcoatRoughness":0.04,
    "metallic":0,
    "roughness":1
  },
  {
    "baseColor":[
      0.83,
      0.83,
      0.83,
      1.2
    ],
    "clearcoat":1,
    "clearcoatRoughness":0.04,
    "metallic":0.3,
    "roughness":0.6
  }
],

Paints setup in a user’s own configuration file.