Using Your Custom Skin In LFS

How to apply your skin and see it in-game:
- Launch LFS, choose your car type and enter the garage.
- Create a new colour profile or select your existing one if not already selected. Name your profile, after you have created a profile it will appear in the list

- Click on the Colours button in the menu at the bottom of the garage screen.
- Using the colour sliders, set the body colour to white if using a custom skin, otherwise your skin will not look the way you meant it to. Body colours applied here will shine through your skin but only a white body will not effect your skin's colours.
- Choose your skin by clicking on the button next to the title Texture name, a list of all the skins for the car type selected will appear. These are the skins in your LFS/data/skins folder.

You can select a different skin for your profile whenever you like, just click on the Texture name button to bring up the list of available skins and choose one from there.

AI Skins

You can also make a colour profile for your AI drivers. Name the profile exactly the same as the AI driver's name and choose a skin. Whenever that AI driver uses that car type he will use the skin you selected for his profile. This is a great time-saver. Make sure that "AI use player colours" is selected in your Options/ Misc menu. With this selected, if you have not made a special AI colour profile, the AI will use whatever profile you are using.

Cut 'n' paste from "A beginner's guide to skin making" tutorial by Bunta of masterskinnerz.com

http://skinnerz.proboards26.co ... lay&thread=1139970414

[You might have to register to read that]

Well since this seems to be the "live" version I'll give it a go.

Been driving nearly 18 years now, had a few scrapes and scratches in that time, not all of which were my fault.

First car was a '78 2 door Mark 2 Escort 1600. It had a Kent high lift cam, a Peco cherry bomb, and a 3 litre Capri carb [I was too young and stupid to realise that made it drink like a thirsty alcoholic without making it go any faster]. Had an argument with the girl I was seeing at the time, threw teddy and stormed off home in a huff, came out of a junction when I should really have waited for a bigger gap, stamped on the throttle and ragged the nuts of it up to the top of second when the transmission destroyed itself, and spat bits all over the road for the car behind me to run over before it ploughed into the back of me. Wasn't ever so serious, because he wasn't doing more than 15 mph or so when he did hit me. Escort went for scrap, I went back to the Mark 1 foot.

Second car was an Orion 16i Ghia, rolled that one night street racing, to this day I'm not sure why it rolled, it all happened too fast, but I think I'd hit a sudden and quite adverse camber change that dug the passenger side front wheel in, certainly that's the side that got crushed almost down to the top of the door panel. I walked away from that, and learned a sharp lesson.

Went through various crappy Astras and Escorts, and other than blowing a couple up and having some dips**t reverse into one in a car park that part is pretty boring.

At 27, I bought a Sierra Cosworth 4x4 Lux, which was already modified with 2 stage T3/T4 hybrid & bigger injectors etc. It pushed out close on 380bhp and I was a hooligan in it, usually although not always on the track, but on the odd occasion I did rag it on the road there would have to be nothing about. Melted the solenoid for the twin aftermarket fans blowing a Scooby away when I was in Wales for the rally about 4 years back, it overheated bigtime, and drank literally 40 litres of water getting back to Derby [most of it was coming back out as steam]. Sorted the fans out, but it was never quite the same again, obviously damaged the block somewhere pretty untraceable, so I sold it.

Grew up and bought a Golf Tdi, quite a come down, but nice car nevertheless. Decided to go to uni 3 years ago and also decided to pay for as much of it as I could myself, so I sold the car and am still using buses/pushbike/feet to get around now.

Well I suppose I can make do with it

No seriously I am delighted by it and very grateful to you for spending so much of your time on this work for me.

I am strictly 2dSMax, there's no way I could have pulled that off by myself.

It'll be interesting to see the look on my programme leader's face when I tell her that texture design for video games is a perfectly relevant area of graphic design, and it doesn't all have to be about semiotics, and the looks on my coursemate's faces when they see it 'cos they're all a bunch of petrol heads. I'm tempted to see just how big I can print it...A1 poster size might look quite nice I think.

THANK YOU TRISTAN, now all I have to do is "brand" it for my portfolio, I take it your name is actually Tristan Cliffe? [for credit purposes... stupid question I know ]

Playing it and loving it, primarily since I'm old enough to have had most of the 70's cars as metal toys when I was a kid, and have always wanted a Mk 1 Escort, but never got closer than a Mark 2.

Most impressed by its sound, most unimpressed by trying to make skins for it and finding out that it's a) difficult thanks to the developer withdrawing all the files and b) when I do manage it they look like crap anyway...

Lol....now thanks to Hyperactive both topics point to each other

Dood....lay off the pro plus...


I think what Tristan is trying to say is check stuff like the quality slider in whatever image software you're using, jpg compression is a bitch for killing the quality of an image. If you didn't get the decal from somewhere like brandsoftheworld.com and it isn't at least 400pixels square to start with then find one that is and resize it to fit, or make it yourself, otherwise it will look crappy.

Try skinning at 2048 resolution and shrinking your skin down to 1024 when you're done, this won't actually improve the quality, but it will create the illusion that it has.

Avoid pinstripe thin lines if possible, the current version of the game renderer will brutalise them and ruin the appearance of your skin from close up, even though it'll look fine in the cmx viewer.

Finally the compression in the game is more severe that in the CMX viewer, and if you really want to know what your skin's gonna look like, get an ingame shot, and don't rely on the viewer alone.

I smoke more than a factory, drink more than a brewery, and am the reason so much of the Amazonian rain forest has given way to coffee plantations... I am the cause of global warming, binge drinking and chav culture all by myself and should be put down before I become nothing more than an embarrasment to the miserable f****d up selfish brats that I have spawned to replace myself.

Too much caffeine in your diet son illepall

If you can go to twice that size [which is presumably 2048x1536?] without making your machine decide to reboot halfway through then hell let's have it twice as big

Yes, I am more than happy with the scene as is, The matte background will be well suited to paper, the contrast on the car is just about right, well maybe you could pump it up a tiny amount say a coupla % or so but only if you like
Any other alterations can be done by me and my photoshop.

Thank you for spending so much of your time on this, and a particular well done on the tyres, they've come out much better than I ever expected them to, and your sidewall texture compliments the tread pattern very nicely

Now that I like Tyres look great!

I can always get all photshop on it if I ever want it to look really shiny anyway.

That tyre texture actually looks better than I thought it would.

My only complaint is that the car itself is looking a little too shiny for a matte background, I know your personal preference is for quite shiny cars, but I must admit I would prefer if you wound it down but only by a little.

Thanks for taking the time over this, I understand the uni thing, I finish in 8 weeks myself.... so obviously don't spend too much of your time on it, unless you fancy treating it as a learning experience /chance to play with "stuff"

Tristan you have PM...

Yes it is, although the front rim is probably a little overdone, given the length of the car, and the distance that it would be from the photographer.

Nice edit

Got it....don't have time now, but I'll rattle your cage when I've done something with it

post me a link to this Kegety fella's site and tell me the name of the files you're using and I'll go hook em

http://img58.imageshack.us/img58/5299/scccfzr23rk.jpg

To get a picture like that you'd really need to be using a technique known as 2nd curtain flash sync, meaning that the flash would fire at the end of the [relatively slow] exposure as the photographer panned through the shot. Therefore if you added some reflective highlights to the car and brightened the foreground a little it would look more realistic.

Here's a couple of examples that I took at a "bash" last summer and although I took them on a bright sunny afternoon it's still quite plain that the flash has fired. I have resized/cropped these but other than that, they are exactly as they came off the camera.

Last edited by Smax, Sat 29 Jul 2006, 16:50.

I can make .dds files no problem at all, if you can be a bit more specific about what you want I'll give it a bash, although probably not today since I'm off to watch Derby County get beaten as usual and if I don't take the missus out tonight I shall get a kicking.

The angle and the aspect of the car are just what I wanted, and since you said "preview" I'm going to presume that you will apply more lightsourcing to the wheels. The only thing I'm not keen in is the tyre texture, looks far too like the photoshop "sandstone" texture for my taste.
I suppose treaded "wets" is too much to ask for?

The only other comment I have to make is because there's a fair amount of white on the car could you darken the background a touch?

I like it mate, thanks!!

Tristan any time before June is fine mate, go out and have a beer it's Friday

Car pointing to the left sort of opposite of the picture is exactly what's wanted... and as for size and previews well yes I'd love 1600*1200 and if posting previews means you waste less time then let's do it that way....

if you can get me a decent shot of an plain coloured Stratos since I dont' have Gran Turismo 4 [pretty much anything except black] I'll give you your orange stratos @ min eau rouge by way of return

I wasn't going to let this one out of the bag, because if you view it real close up in the game [but not the viewer] the more severe compression that the game uses absolutely brutalises it. Then somebody pointed out to me that if you're playing online then all you'll see is a low quality 512sq anyway, and if I released the 2048 at the same time, then people would have a version good enough for screenshotting [should anyone actually want to do that].

After I thought about it I decided that person was right, and after a little persuasion here it is...

This is obviously a public skin. You may change the numbers on the car, but please do not edit my work any further.

I'd be very grateful if somebody would do the honours for me, and if I can do something reasonably quick and photoshoppy in return then of course I will

Now for the fun part where I'm going to be a nuisance and be a bit specific about what I'd like.... I'm aiming to print the resulting render at A3 size and include it my portolio of random artstuff, so I'd need a decent quality image. To get up to that size I really need the render to be 1024x768 as a minimum and larger would be nice, but don't bust a hard disk to do it... Please please please DO NOT interpolate your rendered image to increase the resolution,72pixels per inch will do just fine. I have quite a neat plug in for photoshop that does that much better than photoshop does.

I'd like the render to be on a plain lightcoloured background, since I might want to cut the car out of the background and include it in some other project. Since my portfolio has a standard title format for all of the pages please don't stick any text onto the render but please DO give me your full real name so that I can credit you for the render. One last thing, I'd like the render to show the right hand side of the car since that has some decals that the left hand side does not, and preferably from roughly the same angle as the car in the "showing off" pic at the bottom of this post.
However please don't spend lots of time setting up a scene on my account, just use whatever preset doesn't waste too much of your time.

Hmmm quite an essay....oh well here's hoping....and thanks to anyone who feels like taking this on for me.

Last edited by Smax, Sun 30 Jul 2006, 12:47.

If you can get what you want from MS Paint then there's no reason why you have to use something else, but if you ever get the chance to have a play with photoshop then take it, you'll soon realise that by comparison Paint is a toy which actually does very little and doesn't even manage to do that very well.

Not so much an edited screen as several.

A montage of bits and pieces some that were ripped out of photos and some that were not.... Knocked together with Photoshop CS2 as something for uni, since my portfolio could always use something extra. Oh yeah I made the skin too...

Dialup users beware, that's not a small picture...

Last edited by Smax, Sat 29 Jul 2006, 16:50.

You need to check the adobe media encoder settings, to get a decent quality export for dr divx to compress I'd suggest you select export as DVavi and set it up for PAL 720x576...even though you're in the states.... NTSCC is something you ought to use if you're pulling footage of a camcorder.

If your PC is fsat enough to cap the Fraps clip at 1024x768 then do it, Premiere will resize it on import, and since re-sizing it shrinks it down it looks as though you've gained a little quality...you haven't but it's a convincing illusion

March 2003 was when I bought the game in order to write a review of it for a now defunct gaming news website. After I'd bought it we were offered a coupla free S1 licences so that we could do the review...not that I regret spending the money or coming back in late 2005 to buy S2. I don't actually drive that much, I spend far more time spamming the forums or playing at making skins.

Prior to buying it, I played the demo for a few months with the staff from the website I was working on.