How to make custom vehicle icons

Happy New Year gang. I am a new member. I found this site while searching for a Mach 5 vehicle and did I ever find a vehicle gold mine! With all the new cool vehicles to add, I needed to make some room on my GPS to house more of them.

I made a new folder on my computer, under the Garmin main folder and called it 'Original Device System Files' (you name whatever you want) and I made a folder in that called 'Voices' and copied all the voices on my computer to that folder. My Nuvi 350 had 50 voice files and used 329Mb.

Since I'm not multi-lingual (English is challenging enough) I removed the other language files, 42 in my case, from the unit. This freed up 239Mb extra to store vehicles, POIs, whatever.

This site is loaded with talented and generous people. Thanks for your contributions. I'm not as technical as many on this site but will try to contribute what I can.

A few vehicle ideas I haven't seen on this blog yet:
The Flintstone's car
The Jetson flying car
The Oscar Mayer weiner mobile
Red Baron helmet car
The Mystery Machine from Scooby Doo
Snoopy flying on his dog house
A drag racer

Hey aarrgghh,

Let me just first say your creations are amazing. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and efforts with everyone. My question is, how do you get the North-Up mode in 3-D view with your nuvi 350? I have a nuvi 750 and all I end up seeing is the back end of each vehicle and an occational side shot when in 3-D mode (default Track-Up mode). I looked at the users manual of the nuvi 350 and tried to see if there was some setting differences between the two units but they looked to be the same (Track-Up 2-D, North-Up 2-D, 3-D). This takes some of the fun out of the vehicle icons because you can not ever see the front views. Thanks again for all of your work.

does not exist as far as I know. The front shot is one of my favorites out of the 36 3D pics. Here is a pic of the 2D rendering from the front before it got shrunk down....
[IMG]http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh133/Custom_Pro/s2k18.png[/IMG]

The truth is that I will probably never get to see the front other than when I select it from the vehicle list as it rotates. If you guys want to skip a bunch of steps you realistically only need a few pics from the rear. If you wanted to see the front all the time you could paste the front image where the rear image goes, lol. I actually messed around with putting extreme angled shots where they would normally be 10-20 degree shots to give the effect of my car drifting (sliding sideways) on my nuvi screen. Anyway.. thanks again to everyone for making this possible. I am pretty happy with my first custom vehicle but I am planning on redoing it with actual photos of a 1:18 scale model of my car. I will do a complete how-to if there is enough interest. I will wrap this post up with a couple screen shots of my current setup. Vehicle is my '00 Honda S2000 roadster.
[IMG]http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh133/Custom_Pro/508.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh133/Custom_Pro/375.jpg[/IMG]

Hmmm.. after previewing this post I see that my image links don't work, is there a way to post images on this forum?

Ok, this makes me feel better about not finding any hidden setting to enable this function. The reason I posted this question is because of the image of aarrgghh's 1950 Batmobile toy model vehicle icon shown on his nuvi 350 in his Instructible article, shown here -

http://www.instructables.com/id/animated-gps-batmobile-icon/

It clearly shows the front of the vehicle and the path direction is not in Track-Up mode. I wonder if aarrgghh was lucky enough to take a screen capture at just the right moment before the screen oriented to Track-Up or is this a Photoshopped illustration highlighting how cool this hack is.

Again thanks to everyone making the nuvi the coolest GPS.

Hmmm... after seeing the link you posted it is making me second guess myself... maybe there is some other option I am unaware of. I mean, I could duplicate that photo by taking a screen shot of 3D mode with a blank vehicle loaded, then pasting that batmobile image on top, but I doubt that is the case here... interesting.

... and set off on my destination, then wait with a hair-trigger finger to capture screenshots of my turns. the icon only holds the turn angles fleetingly. i usually take about ten shots, which can yield a few beauties.

if i am interested only in 2D custom vehicle icon, do I leave the 3D picuturs out or do i have to create those too? Also when i open some already created custom vehicle file using the following site the picture that opens is kind of damaged but that vehicle works fine on my nuvi 255. http://techmods.net/nuvi

Not sure how i can post a picture here to show what I am talking about.
Thanks.

Thanks for posting those, they are awesome, I can't wait to try them out!

The new Nuvis (like the 265T) have animated vehicles, like the walking shoes or a flying eagle. Has anyone heard or now anything about making custom animated vehicles? They're more than just a vehicle that turns in different directions, they're actually animated as you drive straight! Really cool! Would be neat if you could make customized vehicles like this... anyone know? What programs/software/utility do you need to do it?

thanks for all the customs!

until someone deciphers the new png layout and comes up with a new converter, we won't be able to make these.

Thanks for the great icons. I am currently using the Star Wars Tie Fighter icon which is just awesome.

I own models of the General Lee and the DeLorean from Back to the Future.

If I were to Photograph them, could someone, would someone make icons out of them?

Let me know!

ben HAT bengarbe.com (replace HAT with @)

I can't wait to get a Garmin. My magellan 4050 won't let me use custom icons.

I can't wait to get a Garmin. My magellan 4050 won't let me use custom icons.

...anyone figured this out yet???

Overly Patient

I dig the batmobile ones (I'm using it now, thanks!). Anybody done a Prius?

Any one find a way to add vehicles to garmin mobile Xt

Can anyone craft me a Nuvi vehicle for the following.

2007 Silver Toyota Tacoma TRD Off-Road version

I'm not very good at this kind of stuff, so if someone could hook me up, I'd appreciate it.

Anyone figure anymore out on this yet?

I don't suppose anyone has got the POIs from the http://www.alice-dsl.net/fahrzeuge/html/fahrzeuge_1.html site they could send me?

Alternatively, I'm after SUV type vehicles - LandRovers, Range Rovers, Hummers that kind of thing - has anyone got some they could ping me??

Thanks in advance - great site incidentally!

I have been trying to make a custom vehicle, but keep getting a white frame around the image. Is there a way in Paint.net to cut the image out without the frame around it or to make the frame transparent? Its driving me crazy

in paint.net u cant change a lot
u have to play with it a little bit to figure it out. There are some presettings u can use to change the colors but they work really good

getting rid the antialiasing is no picnic

http://www.instructables.com/id/animated-gps-batmobile-icon/

see step 9 in particular. photophop is preferred, but you'll still need paint.net to convert it to a proper png.

I would really like to get a copy of your modified blue arrow vehicle too.

Thanks,

Did you ever post your 2D arrow which has the point at the Gps location?

Does anyone still have a valid (working) link to this vehicle, seems the website is down for this one. I would like to download this vehicle.

Great work on all the cars aarrgghh! I just
picked up the Tumbler and Mach5 and can't wait to try them out! Thanx so much!

Vehicles (arrow type) with tip at he gps location:

http://sites.google.com/site/lschwabe/Home/srf

Thanks, that is a great help.

Kudos to you aarrgghh.. It is a VERY time consuming process making these vehicle icons. I finally sat down and read your Instructable and made my own custom vehicle. If anyone wants it, it's here:

Shelby Cobra
http://sites.google.com/site/raptorbase/

It's not perfect, but for my first attempt, I think it's repectable

Looking for feedback on my first vehicle. This is a yellow bulldozer with decent shadows. It's available as a .zip for download from this page:

http://sites.google.com/site/snednarb/garmin

The password to extract the .srf is snednarb.

I just loaded the 'Walkin Scooter" animated icon to my 760, and it doesn't appear to work properly. He holds one position in forward motion, then changes position as her turns. Does this file work properly on the 265Ts and other new Garmins? If it will work on my 760, I'll try to crack the file format.

Mike

I may be wrong, but I don't think animated "vehicles" are supported on the 760 - I was to believe that animated vehicles were a xx5 only feature.

That is a pretty sweet bulldozer judging from the pictures. Nice work.

Is it generic or modeled off of a particular brand?

I figured out the new file format yesterday and I'm kinda surprised it works at all on my 760. I was able to read in one of the animated SRFs and view it and it looks like they might have had backward compatibility in mind with them. The file has 36 3D and 36 2D pics from 0deg to 350deg in steps of 10deg similar to the older format. But then it also
has another alpha and RGB group that has the pics to be sequenced for animation only when the character is in forward motion. If the character is facing any way but forward, there is no animation.

I am going to make up a quick SRF/PNG and PNG/SRF converter but I won't know how well it works because I don't have a compatible GPS model.

Mike

I just uploaded the new version of SRFBldr to my site with a menu item to convert the animated SRFs to a PNG.

If you have already installed the software, just get the file called GarminSRFBldr_exe.zip. unzip and replace the EXE file in your installation.

-or-

If not, run the install program

Hopefully later I'll have a conversion the other way...

Mike

quite the time suck, idnit?

which is why i'm unofficially retired -- i haven't had any time for this in months.

i did download your srf builder. i knew someone would come through with one eventually.

unfortunately my xp emulator is a little dated and won't complete the install (i'm on a mac). oh well, another project for another day ...

Yeah.. wihtout the SRF builder it took me anywhere from 2-4 hours depending on how much time was needed to get the model just how i wanted it. The SRF builder shaved probably 45 mins or so.

Great work figuring this all out!

BTW: I think I'm officially retired from this for a while too!

Mike

look great .nice to see people in the know helping others.

Is there any way to get the blue improved arrow from a download to my computer then to my 250w garmin . I have no idea how to convert or modify files .

can anyone make a kyle busch #18 car? I have tried a couple times but I keep messing up

So does he.

I tried your link and it returned a nice headshot of Alice and the message:

"Die Webseite ist zurzeit nicht eireschbar.", whatever that means.

Sorry.

Yuck

Thanks!!

Mike, I downloaded your tools from your site, but I did not have time to try them yet. Care to explain a bit what each of them do?

Bummer. And I was going to ask you if by any chance you'd think that your code could be tweaked to create a SRF viewer...

Simon

I have an idea for a couple of vehicles I want to do. They are a simple circle with a pointer, set in flag mode with a changing direction call out in the center, N,NE,W....... The second would have the actual 10` incremented heading in the circle.

I am sitting here at a CAD tube and could generate the PNG images easily.

So all I have to do is generate all the images in a 70 x 70 pixel format and then use the srf converter to insert all my images for the images in a current vehicle file?

Thanks in advance.

It means "The site is currently unavailable"

EDIT:
...assume you mean the site
       http://www.alice-dsl.net/fahrzeuge/index.html

It appears the page has "gone dark" as Jack Bauer would say.

Sure....

The SRF builder will:
-convert SRF files to Portable Network Graphic (PNG) files and vice-versa.
-Take 36 3D shots and 36 2D overhead shots and stitch them together as needed by the SRF format.
-add the Alpha transparency layer and you can adjust the amount of tolerance allowed.
-Resize the whole image to the required size for the GPS
-do some unsharp masking in case the resize made the image a little too blurred
-Output the result to SRF format.
-I Included the new Animated SRF in there, but unsure if/how well it works because I have the Garmin 760 which doesn't support animated SRFs

Switchminer will go through Switchboard.com for a query and pull the Lat, Lon, Addy, City, State for the returns. So if you want to find all the CVS Pharmacies in the country, you enter CVS as the query and the program will put together a CSV file
with all of the above data that it can find. This data can then be used to make POIs. Miss POI has requested that this NOT be used for POI files to be uploaded to the site.. She prefers data be compiled from the company (wal-mart, mcDonalds, etc.) website, or from personal experience.

GEGrab will open Google Earth and allow you to pull Lats/Lons into its grid by pressing F6 in Google Earth. You can then add two other fields (name, comment) and save the whole thing as a CSV which is compatible with the GPS. I used this to make the Ohio University POI file. I assume this probably falls under the same disclaimer as SwitchMiner.

Mike