Question about Downtown Taxi

Blando Calrissian

I felt bad about reviving this old thread from 2021 so I thought I'd post anew.

The question of the moment back then was whether Downtown Taxi could be modified in Geometry Editor to make the head and tail lights emissive. The discussion ended on an ambiguous but hopeful note that such a thing was possible.

Well flash forward three years(!) and I've got the taxi on my screen. The mesh seems... daunting? I'm having a hard time selecting anything on this model using the Geometry Editor as the surfaces and face groups don't really seem to make very much sense. I suppose I could export to Blender and manually rework the material zones (maybe) before importing again, but then I'd have to re-rig the doors etc etc... would be nice to have a simpler and cleaner solution.

Anyway tl;dr has anyone had any success at making this taxi legal to drive after sundown? Would love to hear how you did it. Cheers!

crosswind

Well, there's no material zone defined for interior headlights / rearlights and you have no way to select the polygons as well as they're not dense enought... Actually they're shown by using a Normal Map. (ss1)

So either: you can easily locate the lights on Normal map and create a Mask map accordingly. Set the map into Emission Color slot to lit them. (ss2)

Or: insert primitive spheres / planes there with Emissions, or spotlights with Light Geometry... yada yada. You don't have to send the car to Blender ~~

Blando Calrissian

Yay! Thank you! That works for my needs, for sure!

NorthOf45

If you want realistic light spreads, check out Emission Profile Master