Hello,

I am back to LFS after 10 years of absence. I have been creating several skins back in the days. Now I consider picking up some of my "dead" projects to get into skinning a little again.

So now I am wondering if technology has improved over the last decade probably making the skinning job easier?! If You look at the attachment, You will find a lot of tedious intersection work for skinning such a skin, aspecially transition from sides to the top of the doors. Is there any software that could make this easy nowadays?

Thank You for reading
paceman

Sadly no, things like that are done old style - approximate, test, repeat

Oh dear.... Okay thanks. To know it still has to be this way, is some sort of insight too. At least I know I am not wasting my time then...

Fastest way I figured out is saving with diffrent filenames and using CMX viewer

apparently there is a photoshop version available that supports real-time 3d preview, but everything i found on google didn't seem to be what i remember reading about it. i could find info about adding .objs as layers but i never really used photoshop so cant tell anything about this subject really

other than that, i'm still going with gimp and cmx viewer, it isn't that bad once you get used to it and the skins of LFS are really simple compared to the skinfiles of AC or iRacing.

Thank You Niko for Your answer. I will have an eye on this because i have PS although I rarely use it.

Photoshop Extended is the version with the 3D painting capabilities - I've had quite a bit of fun with it.

That is brilliant! Is there a tutorial to learn how to do that?

I never found one, but it's pretty intuitive.

From the 'layer' menu, select 'add 3D layer', choose a model* and start painting.

There's a tool hidden away under the eyedropper tool (click and hold to see the sub-items). The 3D Tool allows manipulation of the camera and the object while painting, as well as different lighting and rendering solutions (redundant, but interesting).

The standard flat-view bitmap can be accessed by double clicking the sub-maps of the layer, you can also add layers and artwork directly to this file, save it, and the results update on the 3d model in the other file. This is also the file you save-as-jpg from for your final skin file.

Freehand is a lot of fun (I drew that top skin with the mouse) and you can use multi-point marquee-selections across entire sections. eg, the lightning bolts - similar to your proposed spirals.

By far the best use for it is with transferring complex existing artwork to intersecting panels with perfect alignment. You can use the clone tool to transfer stickers and logos, etc. by placing them on a new layer and cloning them to the car/helmet model layer.



It has a few failings, especially in the older versions, but things like angular tearing, normal glitches and the like don't happen so often in the latest version. The intersections between the faces is a lot smoother now too, but some, as you can see from the side panels of the helmet, still need a bit of manual correction.

* this is a whole other thing... objs are more stable, but models and converter apps are impossible to find, 3ds files are achievable, but need a bit of tidying up to be usable - either way, it will pay to know a little bit about 3D modelling.

@Shirtkicker Thank You very much for Your time and explanation. Highly appreciated!

Next question: where can I extract a car model from LFS? F.e. if I want to paint in photoshop on the FZR, I need to import the 3D model of it like a 3ds or iges file. Must be somewhere inside the installation...

I have some of those kits with 3d models but not for all cars. All links seem dead but found a tutorial

https://youtu.be/7NraC32EAVw

Although it seems like 95% of the community has melt away the last decade, this still feels like it was back in the days. Awesome! Thx Lakyn!

@Shirtkicker: I have PS with 3D functionality. I have the FZR files thanks to @Lakyn and also watched the short tutorial. What I dont understand atm is, how to place a grafic (f.e. my yellow rose) on the 3D model. Is this possible? That would be awesome. For now I can just edit the 2D skin and after ctrl+s see the changes almost instantly. That helps skipping the preview process with the car viewer but it is still tedious work for every single connection point...

Quote from paceman :

@Shirtkicker: I have PS with 3D functionality. I have the FZR files thanks to @Lakyn and also watched the short tutorial. What I dont understand atm is, how to place a grafic (f.e. my yellow rose) on the 3D model. Is this possible? That would be awesome. For now I can just edit the 2D skin and after ctrl+s see the changes almost instantly. That helps skipping the preview process with the car viewer but it is still tedious work for every single connection point...

I know its a little bit late now, but you can put a 2d layer on top of the 3d layer and then press merge down

Quote from paceman :

@Shirtkicker: I have PS with 3D functionality. I have the FZR files thanks to @Lakyn and also watched the short tutorial. What I dont understand atm is, how to place a grafic (f.e. my yellow rose) on the 3D model. Is this possible? That would be awesome. For now I can just edit the 2D skin and after ctrl+s see the changes almost instantly. That helps skipping the preview process with the car viewer but it is still tedious work for every single connection point...

Hi Paceman,

Sorry this took so long to reply to - I haven't been watching the forums very closely for a while...

To answer your question; yes!

• Copy your graphic and paste it into a new layer above the layer with the 3D model in it.
  
• Scale it (ctrl T) to the size it will appear on the panel. Make sure it's sitting clear of any other elements, otherwise the clone brush will pick up anything near it as well (You might need to add some extra canvas space).
  
• Select the 3D model layer, and with the clone brush selected, Alt click on your graphic on a point that you want to align to on the panel (eg, top left corner) and then move your mouse to the relative point on your model and start painting.
  

A couple of things to watch for: The tool options in the menu bar - there's a setting for 'all layers', 'current layer', 'all layers below' - make sure this is set to 'all layers'. Try to do the cloning in one hit - going back over it may cause alignment issues and fuzzy pixels. If it doesn't seem to be working, try moving the decal layer below the 3D model layer, and set the aforementioned option to 'layers below'.

It can be a bit finnicky at times and you may need to play with the layer order and tool settings to get an optimal result, but I hope this helps

I been debating on making some more car skins. I want to try various pantone swatches and see how they do in game. I know there won't be a complete color match between the pms# and whatever the color it gets translated to in the game, but I'm more interested in the effect of PMS metallic colors and how they'll translate over. Now to figure out what car model to attack. Thinking about an FXO and going lowrider style. IF the metallic swatches do OK, then that would help.