Watch a video tutorial here: I made myself a template for making Universal Skins and thought I would share. The template file is set up to quickly get your image added to every vanilla vehicle. Of course the vehicle UV unwraps are different for each vehicle so something on a door for one vehicle won't be on the door for every vehicle, but it works well if you are doing repeating patterns, or just want something custom and don't care about the specifics. Here are the steps to use the template (also found in the ReadMe file): 1. Unpack the mod within beamng 2. Use PowerRename on the folder and rename all template with your skin name (no spaces or special characters besides - or _) PowerRename is part of MS PowerToys and is available here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/ 3. Use visual studio code and open the unpacked mod folder. Free download here: https://code.visualstudio.com/ 4. Use the search (magnifying glass on left side below the folder tree) to find all instances of the following within the folder and replace them (press the button to the right of the replace box to do the replacing): template - rename this to your skin name with no spaces or special characters (aside from - or _) Skin Name - rename this to what you want your skin name to be displayed as in the config menu. This can have spaces. YourName - rename this to your name so that you are included in the "author" section 5. Save your base color map to vehicles>common folder. It should replace the skinname_b.color.png (using your new skin name you did a replace-all on above) and anything you want colorable should be white. If you only want colorable, this should be all white. The template is already all white if you want everything to be colorable. 6. Save your color pallete map to vehicles>common folder. It should replace the skinname_cp.color.png (using your new skin name you did a replace-all on above). Anything solid red (255,0,0) will be Paint 1, green (0,255,0) will be Paint 2, and blue (0,0,255) will be Paint 3. Anything you want the base color to show through should be transparent. If you don't want any colorable areas, this should all be transparent. There is a template of all transparent that you can use. Delete the skinname_cp.color.png and then rename the transparent one to that name. It's that simple to get started. Of course you can always use the rename-all to try to change things like metallic factors, emissive factors, etc., but if you are getting into that, you should know what you are doing already a bit and be able to figure it out.
Thanks for the super easy method of creating universal skins. This definitely beats my last attempt of a few hours. I was able to do it in about 15 minutes, and would have managed 12 if I could have spelled correctly and avoided a few minutes of searching for my error!
