Paint Guide

88mphTim

88mphTim

racesimcentral.net
Hi folks,

I threw this together tonight. Happy for any feedback, suggested screenshots which you think will help explain something from the text, or text adjustments you think I need to make/add to eplain something better...

http://rfactor.net/web/rf2/custom-car-skins/

Have the flu, so concentration isn't so good. Any mistakes please let me know also. ;)

Thanks,

Tim
 
Thank you , I was looking into making some skins for the Formula ISI cars, but never got around to it, always putting it off. I haven't made skins for a racing game, although I did some for first person shooters a while back. But now I'll use this to get started :cool:
 
Isn't it possible to use other programs for painting than Photoshop?

I remember asking this earlier and I was said that "Photoshop or equivalent, no matter what program you use you will need a DDS-plugin or a program that can handle DDS-files."
 
If you are going to use GIMP, be aware that there have been issues with the 64bit version of the DDS converter in the past. I am not sure if they have it fixed now, but you are welcome to give it a go. If you have questions about skinning in GIMP that you can't figure out, feel free to give me a shout and I will see about getting you through the issue.
 
Tried GIMP and managed to get my skin to the game. It was only a test to see if it can be done. Had no idea what I'm doing and the skin was of course plain ugly :D Tired to paint those templates and write text on them but nothing worked. Finally managed to put something on them by cropping an area of free choice and painting those :P If you are going to help me then you need to start from the basics :D (would be useful to know how to change the basic color of the car... or the prime color of each template).
 
Short but good tut - still one question for me: How to assigne skins to AI cars - only over new vmod or just "overwriting" original skinfile?
 
Paint.NET is also able to open and export DDS and it is free and lightweight. My only concern with this program is that text layer are not well supported. You can insert text but once you unselect it it is "pixelated" so you will not be able to modify it anymore. I know there is a plugin that make it better but it is still not efficient as in Photoshop.

http://www.getpaint.net/
 
Paint.net is a place to stay away from as a skinner unless you like being abused heheh. It is great for some things, but not for making skins.
 
The one thing that is lacking a little bit for the templates is a clearly defined edge area for each body panel. If you use GIMP, the wireframe doesn't show too well so it is still difficult to determine where each part ends. In Photoshop this is not an issue as the wireframe actually shows pretty well.

BTW, Since Adobe has ended support for Photoshop CS2, they have released the program free so there is really no reason not to use CS2 over GIMP or Paint.net.

If it is still a live link, you can get CS2 HERE: Never mind, link is finally dead :(
 
This might be more request than comment on the page, but having just painted my first car for rf2 I find the entire process more complicated than it needs to be.

As of build 146 I can only get skins to show up if they follow a strict naming convention of "VEH_NAME"ALT#.dds, where VEH_NAME is the name of the VEH file (sans extension). # can either be absent or some number (if multiple skins per car). I hope this is changed in the future as it limits the number of skins per car, and the potential for unintended overwrites is great (If I make a skin as 370z_07ALT, and my friend sends me his named the same thing: conflict!) Considering the file already resides in a folder to specify which VEH it belongs to, the naming requirement of the dds is redundant. The tutorial implies that any 10 characters will allow the skin to appear in the showroom, which isn't the case.

I'd also like to be able to use the old convention of a folder named "skins" where any skin can be applied to a car of certain make. As it is now people will have to hunt through each car # to find where a specific skin is.

I also miss the txt file that allowed me to sign my work. ;-;

Downloads for window templates would be a nice addition to the body templates.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Gearjammer said:
If it is still a live link, you can get CS2 HERE: Never mind, link is finally dead :(
Click to expand...


The link is still there but I'll remove it since I just read the red text on top. It's advised you only use it if you have purchase it before. lol. Anyways, cs2 runs just fine on windows 7 64:p



For those of you who want to learn the basics a good place to start is google "working with layers in photoshop".


Learn the difference between rasta and vector layers.
 
lordpantsington said:
This might be more request than comment on the page, but having just painted my first car for rf2 I find the entire process more complicated than it needs to be.

As of build 145 I can only get skins to show up if they follow a strict naming convention of "VEH_NAME"ALT#.dds, where VEH_NAME is the name of the VEH file (sans extension). # can either be absent or some number (if multiple skins per car). I hope this is changed in the future as it limits the number of skins per car, and the potential for unintended overwrites is great (If I make a skin as 370z_07ALT, and my friend sends me his named the same thing: conflict!) Considering the file already resides in a folder to specify which VEH it belongs to, the naming requirement of the dds is redundant. The tutorial implies that any 10 characters will allow the skin to appear in the showroom, which isn't the case.

I'd also like to be able to use the old convention of a folder named "skins" where any skin can be applied to a car of certain make. As it is now people will have to hunt through each car # to find where a specific skin is.

I also miss the txt file that allowed me to sign my work. ;-;

Downloads for window templates would be a nice addition to the body templates.
Click to expand...

As the vehicle name for each default car is now defined by a folder you should only have to have alt somewhere in the skin name in addition to whatever you name the skin for a total of 10 characters eg. pantsalt.dds

If you can't get it to work ,go to the post your skins thread and download mine, the path is set out to extract and create the needed folder if you don't have it. See if it works for you, the new naming structure seems to be working fine.
 
Yeah i just included it so you don't have to go do that if you don't already have the folder. Extract and place skins and it's done, 2 birds at the same time ya :)

Thanks for pointing it out though, it's easily missed and at some point someone will say 'what is dir???????' lol
 
The Renault Clio template contains, in addition to the skin template psd, 2 supplementary files, RenaultClioCup_WINDOW.psd and RenaultClioCup_EXTRA0.psd. I assume that once one modifies these they also should be saved as .dds files but what is the naming convention for these? I can get the custom skin to show up but the spinner shows the default window decals and wheel colour upon which the skin is based, in this particular case, CLIO_16 (Scott Juliano 16 with black wheels).
 
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