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When you're not too busy trying to be faster on track, it can be just as rewarding to design and create your own custom skins. Especially when you can easily play around with the look and feel of a car's exterior 'in-game' and see the results in realtime. For this purpose, we've introduced a simple shader interface that gives you access to material presets, like Carbon Fiber, Chrome, Vinyl for decals and stickers, High Gloss paint, even with metallic flakes and where you can also tweak the the lacquer tint. You have up to six different "regions" for each livery, which means you have up to 6 different materials. Being able to immediately see your changes in real-time, gives you the ability to tweak the final outcome precisely, with maximum attention to detail.
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- How to setup and use 'templates',
- How to save and export files
- How to use the (new) 'material editor' (simply put, is a set of sliders and color pickers you'll access through your web browser)
- How to create a 'custom team' and set up your skin so you can share it via 'skin transfer'.
Part 1 : Painting the skin
First, you'll need a raster graphics editor (for example Photoshop or GIMP). In this tutorial we will use Photoshop....
You won't need any Ambient Occlusion or shadows baked in the Albedo/Diffuse map, for that reason we don't need that map to be available in skin file either. The Ambient Occlusion map it's now global, and you don't have to worry about it. We will now focus on creating the skin/livery elements, and then group them per material/region. This is a new requirement to generate the Region Map for the shader (each color region does represent a unique exterior material)
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Our skin is done, let's be sure we have a valid alpha channel, which does represent the Specular Map for the Shader. Most of the time, that alpha channel, stored in the Albedo/Diffuse map, should only contains the Carbon Fiber specular bits. If you edit / alter the orginal alpha channel you can get a new one from the Alpha channel group on top of the layer tab. Now we have to export the skin as .dds / DXT5 (Interpolated Alpha) file format.
Part 2 : Creating The 'Region Map'
For these new materials, you will have to add an additional .dds file to the team folder, called the Region map. This file will determine skin areas emulating different materials. Each one of these areas will be using a plain color (up to 6 channels : R,G,B,W,B,Alpha) and will be used inside the material editor to assign various settings to mimic actual materials. RGB values MUST respect those we do provide with the templates.
Region Colours
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- Merge all similar materials (as carbon here) In our template it is already flattened.
Region map
We will use one layer per color / material and name them from bottom to top starting with Region 01.In our skin Layers tab we already have all possible region layers ready (please, do not tweak the RGB values we've provided), we will just add masks for the ones we want to export. The process is simple :
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For this particular skin we want the base color blue to be regular reflective painting, the grey areas to be either matte or silver, the sponsors logos and numbers panels to be vinyl wraps. Only the Black region can trigger silver, gold, metallic paint effect. So for our example let's place it on top of the Blue region which will be the reflective painting. Red will be carbon parts, green will be parts, white will be vinyl wraps and stickers.
Filling the Region layers
- The Region 03 (blue) can stay as is, there is no cuts and shapes on the paint layer linked.
- ctrl+click on Grey paint vector mask. You get a selection from the grey shapes
- Select Region 01 layer. (black)
- Click the Add layer mask button .
- The Region 01 layer has now a mask defining black areas matching the grey paint shapes.
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Our Region texture is ready to be exported.
If you have 1 to 5 regions, you can save it as YourSkinName_Region.dds, DXT1 no alpha file format.
If you have 6 regions, you need to copy the Alpha region in the PSD Alpha Channel, and then you need to save as DXT5 (Interpolated Alpha). BE SURE you are saving that specific Alpha Channel, instead the main Spec Map containing the Carbon Fiber bits, as we've set above.
Part 3 : Loading a Livery in the Showroom and Assigning Materials
Now that you've created your livery and exported both alt_skinname.dds > alt_skinname_Region.dds, the next step is to assign materials to the regions.
Important:
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Important!
Make sure when you're all done to click on RELOAD once, that way you're sure it's all saved and ready to go!
Part 4: Sharing with Skin Transfer
Sharing you skin with anyone on a server doesn't require much if you've already followed the steps above. In theory, you don't need to do anything extra, just join the server and it will transfer.
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