First of all some declaration of my mod level might give a hint. Totally new to rFactor 2. Used only one Race Sim before Gran Prix Legends (GPL). Am a professional image editor. The kind of racer who pick a few cars and allways, more or less, explicit drive those. Can't say I'm a modder at all but have some programming beside the graphic skills. That's why I got in to mod the cars I used in GPL and learned how to do that in that specific environment. Personalized them with name, flag some decorations as well as helmets. I was curious about rFactor 2 and one reason I bought it last week was that ther was a Mazda MX5 mod. It's my IRL car and be able to race that was tempting enough. Did some laps with the native cars but it was time to mod one into my own car so with some web-search I got info from here and there and with trial and error I now managed to establish a nice version of my car in race shape. Attach a couple of pics to my own satisfaction . It took some time to get the chain. To edit a template in Photoshop was a piece of cake. To get it through all the way was a bit tricky as you have to understand the logic and structures in a new game. At first I just dropped my .dds files in the standard car folder and somehow it seemed to work. But the next edit that way messed all up. Trashed it and learned to use the 3rd party tool in rFactors launch interface to embedd the 'dds's in a .mas. I'd downloaded some 'addon' templates beside the car. Made it possible to set colour to the cage and rims. Some mod guy had a short readme that connected some declaration of 'Materials mapped' (didn't mention any source file) but it seemed to declare names used to .dds files and those, I learned after some mistakes, should be embedded in the very same .mas as the car and then copied to my created drivers folder in rFactor 2. It all worked well and I could exchange the ugly yellow cage and rims with colours of my own (Hope you agree those are better than bright yellow ). Anyway, the same guy added that I might do my own versions of the windshield as well. Two templates called WCWINDSHIELDIN.psd and WCWINDSHIELDOUT.psd was edited with my fictiv 'Race team' (named after the reg num of my IRL car DMZ 540). All the other 'material' .dds files was named in connection with the car name DMZ540MX5_alt. So both DMZ540MX5_altCage.dds and DMZ540MX5_altRims.dds did the trick embedded in the .mas file. However, my DMZ540MX5_altWCWINDSHIELDIN.dds and DMZ540MX5_altWCWINDSHIELDOUT.dds was totally ignored. Still the standard winshield and I don't have a clue to that. Is it perhaps unique declarations of 'Material' to different cars? I've seen some guy on YT creating a name_altWINDOWS.dds that worked. But I can't test that as I have two files of windows to handle. The MX5 don't use side windows at all, but obviously one version to look out from and vice versa. Quest 1: Any trick to get my edited window-files included? Not a big deal as I'm satisfied with the car, but interesting to know. Another car I picked up and really like to drive is the Gulf Porsche 917 from 1971. Downloaded it and drive it at Le Mans Sarthe, just like Steve McQueen did in that old movie. It is a really monster to drive and very fun car. Now, I hoped to find a template with that car inside, just to be able to add some nametag, a flag and some fun decoration. But the Template of the Porsche 917 do not, as the MX5 Template did, have Photoshop layers with all cars of that model (the ones the AI's drive). In that case I didn't use them at all as I created my IRL from scratch but with the Porsch it would be different. I would like to start with that Gulf painting and just add a few things. But the template just holds the layers you need to paint it from scratch. Quest 2: Perhaps it's up to the creator of that specific car (I downloaded it and racing with AI's is all with Porsches 917's, but in different coulours just like the MX5's. Can't see how this can be done without another template and perhaps someone don't intend to release it. Or is there another way? The structure of rFactor files is totally different from GPL, where all graphic source files are stored in car folders as .mip's and .dat's. In that environment you could figure out what bodies to edit. The on-line approach of rFactor makes it probably more 'hidden. But as said I only have had a couple of days to do my DMZ 504 and that was the main task solved. A personalized Gulf Porsche woiuld be fun but I can live without it. Cheers and thank's in advance if someone had the patience to read my beginners conclusions and perhaps can guide me a bit on this. My best.
Hi, welcome to RF2 modding, I'm a long time GPL player as well. First, the naming for wildcard, do not add WC characters for skins, WC is only defined in material name to enable custom skins. For your case, change DMZ540MX5_altWCWINDSHIELDIN.dds to DMZ540MX5_altWINDSHIELDIN.dds will fix the issue (assume this WCWINDSHIELDIN material name is already defined in mod file, if not, open gmt and check or change it to a wildcard name). Same with WCDRIVER, WCHELMET, WCEXTRA1, WCEXTRA2, etc. Next, in case you plan to mod car, this official guide explains all the basic things like file formats for car mod and folder structure, you can also find reference from "rFactor 2\ModDev\Vehicles\SkipBarber". Some of the other car modding guide can be found from: https://www.studio-397.com/modding-resources/ https://docs.studio-397.com/developers-guide/car-development
