Hello- I made a new skin and I can really appreciate the pro-kit mask tool after originally making it from the lfs default. Talk about time consumption! Anyways I am a little confused on what rendering actually is for? Is it to create just a picture of a car and post it on a forum/webpage? Or can the finished product be used as an actual car in the lfs game? Thanks for the help, Ken Kraft

Rendering is, for the most part, simply ray tracing. This means that in a rendering program, you can set up light sources, and the renderer will track each ray of light to it's end position, taking into account objects in the way, refractive and reflective surfaces, etc.

A rendered image of your car can be useful for a picture or a preview, but there isn't any way for a rendered image to be placed in-game (unless, if course, you rendered it from side and top views and then converted it to be your skin... but that's really quite pointless).

As far as LFS goes, the engine (like all game engines) effectively do their own rendering 'on-the-fly' and whilst this won't be as high quality as rendering a scene in rendering software, it is real-time So, basically... you don't need to render your skin unless you're trying to show it off, as the skin itself is rendered in LFS.

Thanks James, that cleared things up a bit. But I hear people talking about how they changed their headlights design or how they made different brakes on their LFS cars. Or even changing the look of the cones on the track. Is that a type of skin? How would that be done? Thanks, Ken Kraft

You can still do that. JamesF1 was talking about rendering the cars in a separate 3D modeling program such as 3DS Max or Blender where you can pretty much do anything. What you want, I think , is not rendering but just changing the in-game textures. Info on that here.

I think what they could have been talking about is modeling something in a 3D program and then "baking" shadows onto your final texture. Basically the 3D program is calculating all of the shadows and shading along with the original texture and it all ends up as one texture file, useful for stuff that doesn't have dynamic shadows. Taking the cone as an example, instead of a plain orange cone it would have all of the proper shading if the texture was baked in a 3D program, then you'd load the result as an in-game texture.

Thanks guys. This is all new to me. The info shared and in writeups could make a programmer out of anyone given the patience. I re did my skin and it was at least 8+ hrs please dont laugh!! Heheheh