The first thing we will need is a list of materials on the car.
If you have made a car yourself, you will know these already since you set them yourself. If you are confused on how many materials to make, it is a good rule of thumb to make a new material for anything that needs unique visual properties, such as specularity.
Since I did not make the Xsara, I open each DOF into Racer's Modeler.exe (in the main Racer folder).
Start with body.dof, and you will see the following:
Click on the radio button next to "material" in the top right corner. Now when you hit PageUp or PageDown you can cycle through all of the material names the model has. These are displayed in the top left corner, and the first one is called "body". Scroll through all of them and write them down somewhere, as we will need them. Do the same for all of the other DOF files you find in the folder, with the exception of front_glow.dof, since that doesn't have a texture in the folder that I could see.
NOTE: This next bit may not be needed on the car you are updating. If you don't need this, skip to the next page.
Here are the materials you should have found:
body, xsara_windows, rear_glow, oz_leggera.
There is a problem with this, because body and oz_leggera were both listed a few times. This was a problem with Racer's old version of modeler.exe, which would join materials based on the texture they used. We can fix this, however, since the DOFs are available.
If you have Zmodeler available (download here), and Ryan T's DOF export plugin (which is better than the standard one) import the Xsara's Body.dof.
Now open the Material Editor and you will see several of them called "body.tga::standard"
Change the color of each of those materials to something unique and apply the changes. Now in the 3d view, disable textures and look at the model, noting what colors are covering what. Here's what my results look like.
What I noticed is that only 3 different "body.tga" materials are actually used. One for reflective things, one for non-reflecting things, and one for the interior. Open the material editor again and rename them appropriately. I'm naming them "body_ref", "body_matte", and "interior". I noticed in pictures that the rear wing is reflective, so select those faces and assign them the "body_ref" material. Be sure to assign these materials the body.tga texture, since when I did this they were not assigned to a texture. This is not necessary for .5.2 betas, but it will make it easeir for us to see stuff later.
I'm also going to rename the window material to "windows". Delete the unused materials, set all of the material colors back to white, then export the model as a DOF, overwriting the old one (a backup is automatically made). Don't close Zmod yet, since we'll need it again. Import the dof into Modeler.exe to make sure the export didn't delete materials.
BE WARNED: Re-importing the mesh into zmod will probably delete materials. if you import again to Zmod, do not export it again unless you check materials first.
If you want to, you can open the tire_l.dof and tire_r.dof and make the tires a separate material from the rim & brakes, but I'm not very concerned about it.
NEXT WE EXAMINE THE TEXTURES