Getting started to … Texture

Number two in our series of Tutorials to get you started into Modding. Today our topic is textures.

How do I start?

Compared to modeling, creating textures is rather simple and all good modding teams provide templates to get you started painting car designs. This is a rather autodidact approach, but a valuable nonetheless.

Turns out there are very few dedicated tutorials for car painting. They all require some basic understanding of Photoshop.

What’s next?

Get cracking and get experienced.
Be flexible in your approach to painting.
Before I repeat more platitudes, let’s get to some special skills that have a lot of potential and aren’t used very widely so far.

Using vectors

Textures are pixel-based with discrete width and heights, however Photoshop offers neat vector functionality. Instead of drawing lines, you can set up vector paths, that describe the areas and lines of the car design. Those lines are as smooth as can be and it’s very easy to change lines. With painted pixels scaling and distortion becomes very tedious and you lose a lot of quality. Instead, you can change the path and the affected area updates automatically.

One of the difficulties of painting are the edges between mapping surfaces. These seems can become tedious, especially if you have a logo that goes right across such a seam. This seperates the skilled painter from the lazy one. The latter tries to work around those bits and rather puts the logo someplace else instead of positioning it correctly. The same can be applied on design lines. Using vectors helps tremendously as you can work more exact – and again, change lines without quality loss.

Working with Vectors can be a bit messy in Photoshop and it takes some time to get used to it, admittedly. However, the benefits outweigh this by far.

Scripting

Imagine the situation the 2D artists had with the 2006 mod. Each car had 3 textures, each had roughly 50 layers with all designs and logos for 10 track variants on average. The effort of saving each texture variant, each shader maps was quite large and it quickly becomes a boring, repetitious and error-prone process. For the 1994 mod, we will do it differently using a method we should have looked into a long time ago.

Photoshop supports scripting. You can use Javascript to write linear workflows to create a build script for your texture.
This script switches defined layers on and off and specified states to files. The script is rather simple, the execution is still slow, but it far beets the manual work.
In case of our Ligier, the result are 16 texture files in TGA format. Saving right to DDS does not work, as the nvidia plugins can not be used in the script. To convert all TGA files to DDS you can use Dropps, part of my DDS-Utils. This will convert all files in one batch based on the predefined settings.

Scripting has been one major improvement of our workflow at CTDP.

No-Gos

At last, some no-gos we suggest you never do.

A difficult part about skinning a car is finding the right logos. And even more difficult: finding them in a suitable size and format. We have this problem very often working on F1 1994, especially with the smaller teams like Larrousse or Pacific. They had many sponsors, for which it is impossible to find proper logos on the internet. However, you should never ever resize a small logo to make it bigger. It will hurt the quality and leave you to ridicule.

Something else to be concerned about are the alpha channels. Alpha layers determine the amount of reflection on a certain part of the texture. Generally, the alpha layer has the same mapping as the texture. Alpha channels are greyscale only and do not support colors. The general rule is: the darker an area on the alpha layer is, the less light does it reflect. So, black will cause no reflection at all; white will mean the biggest possible reflection and is in most cases completely useless. The more reflection you have, the less you will see ingame of your actual car livery. See also this tutorial teaching what’s up with alpha channels in rFactor.

We take questions! If you are stuck with a problem or have questions related to modeling or textures ask them and we will adress them in a future post here on the blog.

 

WIP Ferrari 1994 part 4

Work on Ferrari is continueing. This is one of the last cars. It was originally painted by Mike Seymour and his work was recently picked up by James ‘Juluka’ Bendy.

Actually there is a story. When we were reassigning the car both Juluka and Raül ‘Raülongo’ wanted to paint the car. Juluka described the tough negotiations this way:

After a hard bargain and exchange of goods, Raül has graceously allowed me to continue with he upscale of the red car …

I get his friend’s black and white cat, … he gets my Blackberry, I get his iPhone, … he gets my 1995 Jeep Wrangler (he has to get it across the Atlantic though) … and he gets My Chicago Blackhawks Hockey Jersey … I could not get his guitar from him …

Cheers Raül … thanks

Now for the car 🙂

WIP Footwork 1994 Part 3

James ‘Juluka’ Bendy has been busy on the Footwork. He is identifying the trackversions for the first couple of GPs and is doing everything he can to get the squares right. James in his own words:

Here is the Monaco Livery. Note the changes in the matrix designs on the upper side pods of the car … those guys must have had alot of time on their hands to change squares all the time. I am beginning to refer to this car as my son calls it, the confetti car… 🙂

So here is a shot of the Monaco version:

Once the car is ready on James’ part, it’ll go the usual process of getting into my hands for review and Andy’s hands for going ingame.

WIP Jordan 1994 part 1

Yesterday we hit a small wall, as Pacific was ingame and we had to decide which car was to go ingame next. As I’m busy with my semester end I needed to do some catching up on my work reviewing the cars we got finished. Finished most often means Marco did his work on the model and somebody painted a set of textures. This may look ready, but it proved to be good practice to have an eye on it before sending it ingame. This is the last chance to remove the biggest issues and so we try to catch them. Now yesterday, we didn’t have a car readily reviewed and so I spent my day working on Ligier, identifiying some issues and tweaking some stuff on the textures. Today I spent half my day doing the same on Jordan.

Jordan was modeled by Marco Büttner and he also painted the initial textures in 1024×1024. The textures were upscaled by Daniel ‘Codan’ Fredrich.The textures aren’t finished yet, as some logos need improving and the colors stand for debate.

While Ligier had some proportion issues, which Andy will address when putting the car ingame, Jordan was a clean shape without issues. Great work on this one. Marco!

Here is a comparison between the very first and the very latest texture version.

WIP Footwork 1994 Part 2

James ‘Juluka’ Bendy continued working on the Footwork, you can see some preview below. I in return gave my comments about the Lotus and James already fixed many of my noted issues. Andy spent last weekend on the pacific. Stefan aka Erale began work on a new helmet model. We have been missing a good one, which is why there are no helmets for the mod yet. Hopefully this branch of work can beginn soon.

WIP Footwork 1994 Part 1

Few weeks ago, on a rare boring weekend, Daniel Senff, uh me, started redoing the yet missing highres texture of Footwork. I didn’t come that far. I requested some changes on the mapping and so the work was on hold, until Marco Büttner could add his changes. Now James Bendy has finished Lotus for the moment and we switched tasks. He is continuing my Footwork and I’ll review his Lotus and add my magic dust.

Juluka had some more to say about Footwork:

Here are some more WIP screens of the FA15. The Brazil Livery is about 95% completed. I have to do the driver names and make some minor adjustments to the matrix design squares to get the design on the car correct. In the mean time I am searching for per race photos so I can proceed with the other liveries. Canada, Monaco and San Marino have limited photos, but I think I am close to having those figured out. The Spain Livery may be an issue of correctness as I have yet to find any good photos of this race and video does not cut it…

Happy Holidays everyone!

WIP Lotus 1994 Part 5

Much like today, 1994 motor racing saw the involvement of many up and coming technology companies. Blended with long established brands and the traditional sponsors of the past, Formula One cars were “dressed” with logos that test the fact that Formula One was then and is still a worldwide sport.

Team Lotus is but one example. In 1994, Team Lotus was beginning a season that would end with the Team eventually with drawing from the sport. With this situation at hand, however, Team Lotus was able to draw some of the most prevalent sponsorships of the time in the sport.

Many Formula One cars showed livery changes over the course of the race season to incorporate sponsorships with the targeting of various marketing areas the race schedule provided. Continue reading WIP Lotus 1994 Part 5

WIP Lotus 1994 Part 4

Juluka continued his work on the car texture and delivered his first version.
Next step is, that I get the texture for review and make my comments and remarks for improvement. In the meantime he already continued work on the first special livery, driven by Johnny Herbert in Brazil. Upon further picture analysis we found, that a variation of this livery was driven at the Pacific GP as well. James theorized, that Lotus planed to run more special liveries throughout the following GPs, but as both cars didn’t finish in Aida the plan got scrapped and the rather decided on a constant livery change in France. Lots of livery history here. 🙂

The last one is a picture of the WIP of the Brazil-Johnny-Herbert-livery. Everybody enjoy your thanksgiving, if you life in the US like James does. 🙂