Getting a skin ingame is very similar to the method we deployed in F1-2005.
You start by taking one of our templates for the mod and paint your sweet little skin.
Base textures
Once you are satisfied with the car or you want to see a preview ingame, you have to save the textures. This is not too easy, and you can easily make mistakes, but to fight the most common problems, I’m writing this now.
At first let me explain you how our car textures work. Every car has roughly 4 major textures and several minors. The minors being carbon, the windshield and the cockpit. The majors are these:
- Base-Texture (left side of the car)
- LSide-Texture (right side of the car) (in F1-2005 the base was the right side, we were sloppy in this mod)
- Wing-Texture (Wings, shared parts and anything that didn’t fit)
- Tech-Texture (Suspension, floorboard, cooler …)
- Helmet-Texture (Both driver helmets of the team)
- Driver-Texture (Driver body, some teams have one for each driver)
- (Honda has an additional texture for the ears on the cockpit)
The Tech-texture you can completely disregard, the one we use is fine for skinning, don’t bother.
So you are left with the Base, LSide and Wing to paint. Base and LSide have the very same mapping and are created from the same template-file. This textures contain all the elements which are the same for the left and the right side of the car. All areas, which contain logos. When you paint the car, you paint your design once in this texture for the Base and you create the LSide by mirroring all the logos horizontally.
So you get two textures: Skinname and SkinnameLSide, the latter is the same as the former, except with mirrored logos.
Wing texture
The second template is for the third texture, the Wing. This contains elements which are shared by the left and the right sight, all the wings and additional elements, that didn’t fit on the other texture. This textures is straightforward, no mirroring, just paint and save it at the end.
Reflection map
All textures better get an unique reflection map. This defines how reflective the surface is. The templates contain 2 layers, the alpha-folder and an alpha-strength layer. The former inverts colors and creates a greymap, the strength-layer darkens it, so the car is not overly reflective. Copy the result into the alpha-layer before saving the DDS.
Other textures
Other textures can be added to round up the look by using own driver body and helmets.
Saving DirectDrawSurfaces
All three textures are saved to the DirectDrawSurfaces(DDS)-format. This is quite a nice format, because it supports different compressions for various purposes. We use DXT5 with an 8bit alpha. To add it to your rFactor, you have to export the Base-texture here:
rfactor/Gamedata/Vehicles/CTDP/CTDP/CTDPF1_2006/<Teamname>/skins/
- <Skinname>.dds – The left side of the car.
- <Skinname>.txt -small info file for description, skin name and author name
The other files come into
rfactor/Gamedata/Vehicles/CTDP/CTDP/CTDPF1_2006/<Teamname>/skins/misc/
- <Skinname>LSide.dds – the LSide-texture, right car side.
- <Skinname>LSide.dds – the Wing-texture with front and rearwing and share elements
- <Skinname>Helmet.dds – both helmets of the team
- <Skinname>Driver.dds – driversuit
Once they are saved, it’s done. You can go ingame and check the result.
Midland and Super Aguri
Midland and Super Aguri are special, because they both have basically two cars for one team. Super Aguri uses the SA-06 as a later upgrade, Midland uses the Spyker. Therefore both don’t work like described above.
Name scheme for Super Aguri:
- <Skinname>.dds – blank file 16*16 white file
- <Skinname>LSide.dds – left side texture
- <Skinname>RSide.dds – right side texture
- <Skinname>Wing.dds – wing texture
- <Skinname>Driver.dds – driversuit
- <Skinname>Helmet.dds – team helmets
- <Skinname>06LSide.dds – SA-06 left side texture
- <Skinname>06RSide.dds – SA-06 right side texture
- <Skinname>06Wing.dds – SA-06 wing texture
Name scheme for Midland/Spyker:
- <Skinname>.dds – blank file 16*16 white file
- <Skinname>LSide.dds – left side texture
- <Skinname>RSide.dds – right side texture
- <Skinname>Wing.dds – wing texture
- <Skinname>Driver.dds – driversuit
- <Skinname>Helmet.dds – team helmets
- <Skinname>SLSide.dds – Spyker left side texture
- <Skinname>SRSide.dds – Spyker right side texture
- <Skinname>SWing.dds – Spyker wing texture
Midland and Spyker use the same template. Super Aguri SA-05 and SA-06 don’t share the same template and can not be exchanged.