First of all, a happy new year to everyone here and over at the office. For a few weeks I've thrown myself into the wonderful world of painting one's own car and it's been a creative blast. I highly appreciate the fact that there are templates available with layered effects and wireframes, all of which make it relatively easy to start working, even for someone with no graphics design background like me. Really, I've been chain-painting livery after livery (of questionable standard, no doubt) and feel like doing more. As a total noob, I've run into several issues related to the logitics and availability of templates, which I will outline below. Hopefully you can point me in the right direction or perhaps no such thing is possible, in which case I hope the issue will be considered at Studio 397. Availability (of older templates) Quite a few in-house and 3PA templates can be found in the 'Templates' folder within the rFactor 2 root folder. Very nice! However, a lot of the in-house ISI era templates cannot be found there, which is a bit of a pity. The ISI download page has gone offline as well, cutting the main source to find them on the web, though some communities still have some of them available, such as SimRacingPro. Here too, however, some templates are lacking. I've been looking for the StockCar 2015 templates, but they are nowhere to be found, which is silly considering that Studio 397 actually updated the game to suit that specific mod better in their first months. Similarly, the Historic Driver and Helmet templates cannot be found, even though modern drivers and helmets are not accepted by the Howstons, Eves, Sparks and Brabhams. A template for the Brabham BT44 is lacking altogether, by the way. I did find Historic Driver and Helmet templates in the Howston G4 MAS-file, but then they come in .DDS, which means there are no layer to separates stitches, shadows, folds, etc, from the coloring layers, compromizing the quality of the final skin. It just seems weird that some templates are provided in the Template folder, some can only be extracted from MAS in inconvenient format, some are only available from obscure web locations and some are not available at all... Inconsistency (with newer templates) It's not just older content that raises my eyebrows a little. The GT3 Power Pack comes with some strange inconsistencies as well. To be sure, the base templates for all cars from the pack are available from the Template folder again and they are quadrupple the size (and therefore detail), which is credible. These templates feel reasonably convenient and I like them for that. They do, however lack several element of the car. Fopr example: I understand it's a habit to separate windows from regular templates, which I will not object to here (or anywhere), but the templates for the windows seem to be absent altogether. In my search for them I opened the MAS-files with the rF2 gMotor2 MAS File Utlity and stumbled upon some more surprises. From the Mercedes MAS I could extract the interior and exterior windows, albeit in DDS-format, along with some other parts of the car ("EXTRA's"). From the Bentley I could get the same, but not the interior window. From the Callaway I could not get any windows and one EXTRA (the diffuser). From the McLaren and Radical I could get nothing at all. Apart from it being highly inconvenient to mess around in DDS-files trying to find the exact location of paintable parts, the different degrees to which these cars can be modified (window, no window, grill, no grill, diffuser, no diffuser) leaves one to wonder what is going. Why can I not paint the grill on the Callaway, while it's no issue on the Bentley and why can the interior of the windows be edited only on the Mercedes? Finally, why are no proper templates available for these? It all feels terribly discombobulated... So... Does anyone have a clue as to where the missing templates can be found or why the GT3 Pack has a varying availability of parts?
