You Shouldn''t Have to Guess What 35% Tint Looks Like

If you''ve ever walked into a tint shop and asked "what does 35% look like?" — and the answer was a curled-up sample card or a Google image search — you already know the problem. Window-tint and paint-protection-film (PPF) are visual decisions, but the way they''re sold is mostly verbal. You squint at a sample under fluorescent lights and try to imagine it on your car at 6pm with the sun behind a building.

That''s why we built the 3D Tint & PPF Simulator — a free, browser-based configurator that lets you preview window tint darkness, paint color, and PPF coverage on a real BMW M4 in real time. No signup, no app, no paywall. And if you run a tint shop or detail-spa website, you can embed it on your own site with a single line of code.

What the Simulator Actually Shows You

This isn''t a sample-card photo or a flat overlay. It''s a real 3D scene running in your browser using WebGL2 — the same kind of rendering pipeline behind the Tesla, Porsche, and BMW configurators. Every panel of the car is a separate piece, every material reacts to light correctly, and every change you make updates the model immediately.

VLT (Visible Light Transmission) from 5% (limo dark) to 70% (nearly clear), with a perceptual curve tuned to match what real tint film looks like — 25% and 35% read as visibly tinted but you can still see the cabin, instead of looking like solid black.
Tint colors: Charcoal, Carbon Black, Ceramic Blue, and Mirrored.
Paint color: 7 presets (Black, White, Silver, Red, Blue, Yellow, NWG Tan) plus a custom hex picker for any shade you want.
PPF coverage zones: Body, Front Bumper, Doors, Trim, or Full Body. Covered areas glow a subtle blue so you can see exactly what''s protected — because real PPF is invisible by design.
PPF finish: Gloss, Satin, or Matte — the actual film surface look.
Camera presets: Tint Focus zooms into the windows, PPF Focus frames the body, Auto-Rotate spins the car for a video-style view, and Reset takes you back to the hero angle.

Why VLT Numbers Are Confusing — and Why We Tuned Ours

Window-tint film is sold by VLT (Visible Light Transmission). 5% is "limo." 50% is barely tinted. The numbers sound straightforward, but most online previews show 35% tint as nearly opaque — which doesn''t match real life. Real 35% tint is visibly darker than clear glass, but you can absolutely see the driver and the dashboard through it on a sunny day.

We retuned our simulator''s VLT curves to match perception, not raw physics. At 35%, the windows in the simulator look like real-world 35% film: clearly tinted, but the cabin is readable. Slide it down to 5% and the windows go limo-dark. Slide it up to 70% and you see straight through to the seats. That makes the simulator useful as a buying decision, not just a marketing demo.

The PPF Question Most Customers Don''t Know How to Ask

Paint Protection Film is the other half of the simulator. PPF is a clear, self-healing layer that sits on top of the paint to absorb rock chips, scratches, and bug etching. The catch: it''s invisible, so it''s genuinely hard to picture what you''re paying for.

Most shops sell PPF in tiers — Full Front, Track Pack, Full Body — and customers nod along without really knowing where the lines are drawn. The simulator solves that by lighting up each coverage zone with a blue indicator overlay. Want to see what Full Body costs you visually? Click Full Body. Want to know if just the front bumper is enough? Click Front Bumper. Each zone is a real surface on the car, not a generic icon — so you''re seeing the exact area that gets covered.

Embed It on Your Tint Shop or Detail Website

If you run a tint, detail, or PPF business, customer hesitation is your biggest closer. Most websites in this category are photo galleries — beautiful work, but no interaction. A configurator turns a passive visit into an engaged one. The visitor spends 30–60 seconds on your site instead of 5, picks a color and tint level, and now has a vocabulary to talk to your team.

To embed the simulator on your own site, open the simulator at neighborhoodwebsiteguy.com/tools/tint-simulator and click the Embed button in the bottom-right corner. You''ll get a one-line iframe you can paste into any HTML page, Squarespace block, Wix embed, Shopify section, or WordPress shortcode:

<iframe src="https://www.neighborhoodwebsiteguy.com/tools/tint-simulator" width="100%" height="700" style="border:0;border-radius:16px" allowfullscreen></iframe>

It''s 100% free to embed. There''s no NWG watermark beyond a small "Engineered by Neighborhood Website Guy" credit at the bottom of the embedded panel — not a banner, not a popup, just a courtesy link.

Built in the Browser, Not on a Server

We get asked sometimes whether tools like this collect data, lock features behind a sign-in, or get slow under traffic. None of that applies here:

Runs entirely in your browser — the 3D scene is rendered by your device''s GPU, not our server.
No signup, no email capture, no tracking pixels. If you don''t accept cookies, the simulator still works.
Loads under 7 MB for the full BMW model, textures, and HDR lighting — fast enough to embed without dragging down your site''s page-speed score.
Mobile-responsive — collapsible cards on desktop, a draggable bottom drawer on phones, post-processing tuned per device.

Why This Is Free

Most "free" tools online aren''t free — they''re lead-magnet front-ends for an upsell. Ours actually is free. We''re a Houston web shop that builds custom websites and software for small businesses, and our paying clients are local owner-operators on a $89/month management plan. Tools like this simulator and the free QR generator are how we say thank you to the small-business community we serve. If you need something more — a full website, ongoing SEO, custom software — that''s what we do for our clients. The free tools stay free.

Try the Simulator

The Tint & PPF Simulator is live at neighborhoodwebsiteguy.com/tools/tint-simulator. Open it on your phone, drag the VLT slider, swap the paint color, and see for yourself how 35% looks vs 20%. Then if you want it on your own tint shop or detailer site, grab the embed code from the corner and you''re live in 30 seconds.

Need a custom website to embed it into? See our pricing or get in touch.