Hey, I was checking out the new Endurance Pack templates and somewhere at the top they have a layer group called "Clamp" or "Clamp copy". When opening the template though GIMP the layers in that group don't load: the layer group remains empty. How do I fix that? Or how can I work around it without damaging the work?
Hey Yoeri, The clamp layer just reduces the brightness and contrast some in order for the car colors to work correctly with the rF2 dynamic lighting. It's possible GIMP doesn't support that type of a layer the way PSP does. To get around it you could just reduce the brightness and contrast yourself after you export the skin to a .dds. I think -10 on both should do the trick, at least from what i remember. TK
Thanks for the reply. Would adjusting these values by -10 on the final ("New From Visible") layer also be a proper way to do this? Also, what is the layer type that doesn't want to load (inside the Clamp fodler)? I might be able to snatch a plugin from somewhere.
I'll double check the exact naming when i get home but it's basically a blank layer with a clamp mask applied. It limits the color range to get rid of extreme RGB values. If I remember correctly it stops at like 235 and then squeezes everything else down proportionately. TK
I can confirm that Gimp does not support what's in that clamp group. What I do and what I suggest you to do too is as follows: finish your skin and don't care about colors and stuff (keep black 0,0,0 and white 255,255,255) keep all your layers and groups select the very top layer create a new layer from visible (right click on any layer or chose that option from the layer menu) make sure to select that new layer chose from the menu: Colours > Levels in section "Output Levels" set the right triangle slider to 220 (or just enter that value) in the same section set the left triangle slider to 20 (or just enter that value) your layer is now "albedo-finished" and can be pasted into your skin's DDS (that's what I do) or saved to any format you like and converted to dds (I know some do it that way) EDIT: I should've add that I use GIMP 2.10.2. Older versions may have slightly different labels for the same options. EDIT2: I'm sorry, I forgot the lower level! This should now really be in compliance with the guidelines
I do a cheap and easy thing and I wonder if I'm creating problems for myself in the long run. I am only changing the overall color of the car and the number. So I open the file in the Gimp, use the paint bucket to splash paint on the car (the Earl Scheib method), type a new number over the old ones and save the whole thing as a DDS. It seems to generally work okay. Is my method really bad, though?
Depends if you do that with the template or with a dds file. But I guess you are using the template, so if you save that with it's default alpha channel (i.e. the reflection map) everything should be OK. Of course all your cars will have the same basic reflection then, but it's not really important for simple skins. However, be aware that some default alphas (especially for official templates) do have a non-default alpha channel which often includes special reflections for logos and stuff. This could look wrong on a basic livery from some viewpoints because the logos will be visible because of different reflections. Does this make sense!?
