My Car Picture

My car picture

Status: experimental. Pictures: emulator-tested. Car problems in 3D: tested on the head unit (K706).

Use your own car instead of the drawn one in the Tyre map, Car outline, My car and Doors tiles, the door alert, the parking radar, the Reverse View and the Car problems card. With a 3D model, the Car problems card shows your car live in 3D.

Ways to make it

From	How	You get
3 photos on the phone (recommended)	Companion → Car → Make it from 3 photos: side, front, back. Optional 4th: from above, drawn by the Gemini app from your photos (Draw the view from above in Gemini). Optional 5th: doors open, so open doors, tailgate and bonnet light up exactly. Then Send to the car	Pictures
A 3D model on the phone	Companion → Car → Car picture → From a 3D model: pick your car as a .glb file (a free download of your model, or your own). The phone draws every view, finds the wheels and lamps, and sends a light copy of the model too. Nose the wrong way? Turn it around if it guessed wrong	Pictures + live 3D
Photos on a USB stick	Settings → Car → Car picture → 3 photos on the head unit	Pictures
A picture file	Pick a file: a PNG with transparency, or a cut-out on a flat background. Rear and Front add the ends one by one	Pictures
A 3D model in Blender (most control)	tools/mycar/bake_car.py renders a Blender model into a .dwcar pack (side, top, ¾, rear and front views, door / tailgate parts); --live model.glb adds the live 3D copy. Pick the pack on the head unit or send it from the phone	Pictures + live 3D with opening doors

Tip: cut the car out with the Gemini or Photos app first (flat background); Dashwheel keys the background out.

Car problems in 3D

With a 3D model in the pack, the Car problems card turns your car to the most serious problem, zooms in and makes the faulty part glow (a dead brake bulb lights its own lamp), with the problem's number pinned on it.

• Tap a problem in the list, or its chip on the car, and the car swings round to it. Engine faults open the bonnet, door faults the door, boot faults the tailgate. Whole car shows all of it.
• Parked, turn the car with a finger.
• The car is drawn only while it moves: nothing is spent while it sits still. Smaller tiles keep the pictures.
• Not on Android emulators (their graphics can't run it).

The design, how the card moves from one problem to the next (a mockup; in the app today the small tile keeps the pictures and the steering wheel's "next" isn't wired yet):

What lights up depends on the model. The phone names the lamps and wheels by itself: red lamps in the rear corners, the lamp material in the front corners, the tyres from where the car touches the ground. It also sees which end is the back from the red lamps. Heavy models are made lighter (at most 120,000 triangles) so the head unit turns them smoothly. A model that names its parts itself gets everything, doors included:

Part	Name in the model
Tail lamps, headlights	Lamp_tail_l, Lamp_tail_r, Lamp_head_l, Lamp_head_r
Wheels	Wheel_fl, Wheel_fr, Wheel_rl, Wheel_rr
Doors, tailgate	Door_fl … Door_rr, Tailgate
What they turn on (empties)	Hinge_door_fl … Hinge_door_rr (about the vertical), Hinge_tailgate, Hinge_bonnet (about the car's width)

Without names, a problem with no part of its own (a sensor, the gearbox…) is still pinned at its place on the car; only the glow and the opening are missing. A headlight behind an opaque lens can't show its glow.

Styles

Photo, Tinted (the theme's colour) or Outline. Drawn switches back to the built-in car.