Hi! I wanted to state that if it would be possible if the devs could change the skinning system in LFS. As you all know, when you place a logo on the skin, it can look fine in the editor you're using but when you view it in LFS or CMX Viewer, its stretched. So, I was wondering if the default skin size could be changed or something done to fix this problem.

The aspect ratio is correct when you stretch the skin to 1280x1024, apply the decal to and compress it to 1024^2 again.
In other words: Decrease the width of your decal by 20% and you're fine. (No need to stretch/squash the rest of the skin then.)

Vain

I find on the sides of the car, to get a circle completely round again, I need to squash the horizontal around 60%.

Master Skinnerz has a template up somewhere that shows all the stretching on each surface I believe.

Surely it varies from car to car, since all car skins are square and all of the cars far from it?

Quote from Vain :

The aspect ratio is correct when you stretch the skin to 1280x1024, apply the decal to and compress it to 1024^2 again.
In other words: Decrease the width of your decal by 20% and you're fine. (No need to stretch/squash the rest of the skin then.)

Vain

Squashing the width by 20% would be ok, but actually on almost all of the skins, you need to squash logos/shapes by 30-35% (65-70% width). I always draw a square on the side of the car and check it in the viewer, and then see how much width needs to be squashed until it looks to be an almost perfect square.

1280 stretch horizontally is an approximation and the accurate amount varies from one model to the next. For most of the cars it produces good results. Bunta's skin templates & wireframes also help this process a lot.
It would, of course, be far easier to skin if the aspect ratios were unchanged when the texture maps were laid over the 3d mesh.

Quote from Tweaker :

Squashing the width by 20% would be ok, but actually on almost all of the skins, you need to squash logos/shapes by 30-35% (65-70% width). I always draw a square on the side of the car and check it in the viewer, and then see how much width needs to be squashed until it looks to be an almost perfect square.

This is the way I do it too, as different areas of the same car can use different amounts of stretching. I draw a square on the part of the car I want to measure, then take a screenshot of it in the viewer and use Paint to measure the dimensions of the resulting rectangle. That gives me a very precise scaling factor to apply to my decals. It takes some time, but once you've done the numbers for one car you don't have to re-do them.

There is no perfect solution in any 3D game to the issue of texture stretching. Textures also need to be a power of 2 to be displayed properly in 3D. There will always be some part of your 3D texture that suffers from stretching when mapped to the model. Using multiple textures can help, but then the overhead is increased too.

In LFS, the parts of most skins that suffer from more extreme stretching include areas near the nose and tail, around bumpers for example, and there can be vertical stretching as well; side skirts being a prime example. The 1280 x 1024 formula works well for the overall skin, and individual areas need special attention after that.
You may also notice some blurring where a straight line or block of colour spans several polygons, the windscreen strip is an example of this where you can see blurring even after "curving" the decal or artwork to match the basic form of the area it covers. If you place a straight decal on the windshield strip (GTR cars) and look at it from several angles it isn't hard to see the effect that the polygons have on the artwork.