[MM2] Repainting

[Bobster35]

Hi there,

Does anybody have a step-by-step guide to repainting vehicles on Midtown Madness 2? Did some hunting through the forums myself and only found as much as the GIMP software being the best for making/editing the paintjobs.

[Diatosta]

It's a very easy thing to do my friend
First of all you should have the textures for the car you want to paint, and in that situation, you have 3 solutions:
-if it's a default car (the one's that come with the game) you gotta get DeAR2 to extract the files from mm2tex.ar.
-if it's a custom vehicle you got from mm2x or another site, you have to rename it's file extension from .ar to .zip. Then, you just gotta open the file by double clicking it if you have WinRAR or a similar software installed in your PC. However, two things can happen now.
--If it throws you an error, saying it's corrupted, it's most likely locked, and as far as I know, there's no way to open them, so no dice there.
--However, if it opens as it should, you should be presented with some folders.

Now, create a folder and name it whatever you want, and inside that folder create another one called "texture". This is where you'll put your custom paintjobs.

This is is the same for default and custom cars, in which you have to search in the "texture" folder, and inside you should have some files, them normally being either .BMP, .JPG, .TGA or some others, MM2 supports some file formats. Anyway, you gotta pick the one you want to modify, and copy it to the folder you previously created.

Then, you just gotta open it with the image editing software you want! I mean, I think even Paint would do, but you better use some more professional solutions, such as Photoshop, GIMP or Paint.Net.

Now, I'm not gonna teach you how to modify the textures, you can find those tutorials in Google

Finally, after the modifications have been done, save the texture as the same file format it was originally, and save it to the "texture" folder you created, with the same name as the original one.

Finally, you gotta go back to the root folder where your "texture" folder is located, and zip it, preferably without any compression, and name it "! ! ! somethinghere.ar".

Finally place it in the MM2 folder, and you're done!
It might look like a difficult process, but once you've done it once or twice, you'll realize it's really easy

[KingAndy]

Hey Bobster, welcome to the forums. If you're referring to the default cars, it's not something very hard to do. First of, you'll need 2 different programs: deAR2, which allows you to unpack the files from the game (including the textures that we need) from here; and TEXmanager, that allows you to convert .tex image files (used as textures on MM2) to .tga (compatible wih multiple image editing software) and vice versa, from here (link on the end of the first post).

Using deAR2 you can open and extract the textures inside mm2tex.ar, and then preview them using TEXmanager. Car textures use the prefix "vp", making them easier to find. Once you find the textures of your desired car, you can convert the files to .tga. Since you want to recolor them, I suggest you to extract white or another light color if avaliable, to make the process easier.

You can edit the textures using an image editor, I use Paint.NET which as all the features I need and .tga files compatibility, but you can use the one you prefer, since it's able to open and save .tga files. At this part, I think the recoloring process itself can be learnt from tutorials all over the internet, just google about the subject.

Once you have your edited textures, open them with TEXmanager and convert them back to .tex file format. Don't forget to keep the same original name of the original textures you used. move them to a new folder called "texture", and then using either 7zip, WinRar or Windows default .zip file creator, pack the folder into a .zip file. Choose change name and change the file type from ".zip" to ".ar" (as simple as that, e.g.: "new_file.zip" -> "new_file.ar"). For this you need to have the option "show file types of known formats" activated (click here to learn how). Finally, just move your .ar file to your Midtown Madness 2 game directory. Turn on the game and your new textures should be replacing the original ones you used.

You might be thinking if there is a way to create a new car color, instead of replacing an existing one, and the answer is yes, but for that you'll need some extra work that I don't think you might want to have if you don't have any experience with modding this game. Give it a try and if you have any more questions, feel free to ask.

[Bobster35]

Hi Diatosta and King Andy.

Thank you very much for the help guys, much appreciated. I have been wanting to make repaints for vehicles for a while now, hopefully I can get good at it pretty quickly

[e-cobra]

If you want to just change the colour of a car, then open the textures that make up the car's exterior and edit hue/saturation properties in a program like Paint.NET; you can change a default colour like red to almost any colour in the spectrum by adjusting hue.