Painting the Cars of Série Internationale Du Mans

Introduction

This guide was specifically created for the Série Internationale Du Mans (ILMS) mod for rFactor. The techniques and processes described in the mod are based on Photoshop. Even so, a lot of the fundamental concepts presented are applicable to other programs such as Paint Shop Pro. We've also included a lot of technical information about the rFactor material names and how they are used within the Série Internationale Du Mans mod. Even though the specific material names discussed in this guide may not apply directly to other rFactor mods the basic principals are the same.

Customizing Your Car

One of the more prominent features of the Série Internationale Du Mans mod is a built-in flexibility to create and customize your car. Each car has a number of options available in the showroom that you can choose from to personalize your ride. Wheels, Brake Calipers and Steering Wheels (GT cars only) are just some of the options you can select to give your car that special “It's all about me” look. Of course the single most important part of creating a personalized car is creating your own customized car skin and for this we've added a number of ‘wild card' (wc) textures to help you create your customized car skin.

Understandably not everyone has the artistic talent, time or even the software to be able to paint his or her own car. For that reason however we've gone ahead and included a number of fantasy cars and teams along with a number of ‘plain wrapper' versions of the cars. These cars and teams, which all begin with the letters ‘ILMS' are yours for the choosing and come complete with customized driver suits and helmets as well as a few other ‘extra' textures to finish the look and feel of the car. However they can also serve as a guide that can help you to better understand how and where the wild card textures are used.

For the ILMS mod we've tried to create templates that are easy to use and understand. There are a number of layer groups within each template that have been specifically set up to help facilitate an easy change to a standard object or a standard process. Plus we've added wire frame layers to all of the templates to help you align your graphics.

Wild Card Materials and Textures

Before we get into the specifics of painting a customized car skin, let's start by going over the ISI standard naming convention that is used for wild card textures. Basically whenever a modder creates a car and wants to give the end-user the ability to apply a customized texture, he or she will utilize one of several encoded wild card material names;

As an example of the use of material names; The use of separate and unique material names for different parts of the cars is the only way to incorporate different specular and shading properties to any object or group of objects. In this particular example the application of separate and unique material names make a wheel assembly look realistic with the rim metallic and reflective and the rubber of the tire flat and non-reflective but with just enough specular shading to accentuate the curve of the sidewall.

It's important to note that the Série Internationale Du Mans mod does not utilize all of the wild card textures that you see in the list above. The list above represents the complete list of available wild card material names for rFactor. The Série Internationale Du Mans mod only utilizes the following wild card material names;

Pennzoil66_M3GTR.dds
Pennzoil66_M3GTRDRIVER.dds
Pennzoil66_M3GTREXTRA2.dds
Pennzoil66_M3GTREXTRA4.dds
Pennzoil66_M3GTRHELMET.dds
Pennzoil66_M3GTRWINDOW.dds

As you can see the texture name incorporates a brief description of the team, or for most teams a three or four letter acronym for the name of the team, the car's number followed by an underscore, then the car type and finally the wild card material extension. You'll also notice that the actual car skin itself, 'Pennzoil66_M3GTR.dds' is slightly different in that it does not directly incorporate the CARBODY wild card extension.

This is because ISI has already gone ahead and encoded the CARBODY wildcard extension so that whenever you add the name of your primary car skin as the default livery within the coding of your veh file the CARBODY extension is automatically added to it and recognized as the texture to apply to the body of your car.

Some of these textures will require the use of an alpha channel. An alpha channel is incorporated with a texture whenever a material or model needs to be transparent, such as a customized window texture. We'll discuss the specific of painting alpha channels in more detail later in this document.

Understanding the Interplay between Light and Shadow

As you start painting your car it's also important to remember that the shading and reflective properties of the surface of the cars have been encoded directly into the models. Therefore if you're hoping to dull or create a ‘flat' or non-reflective surface on your car you're most-likely going to be ‘SOL' because unless we specifically programmed that surface to be that way as we were creating and or retooling the model in 3dsMax it's not going to happen. An example of a dull or ‘flat' surface would be the tire treads. Even though the tread surface of the tires has a modest specular quality to it, in order to delineate and accent the depth and curve of the object, they're not reflective.

There are lots of different surfaces and hence different surface properties embedded in each model. The wheels for example have between 5 and 8 different surfaces depending on the wheel style and each surface has it's own unique shading, specular and in some cases reflective properties. Together they create the visual impression that the tires are rubber, with relatively new sidewalls and scuffed treads and shiny, metallic rims. The subtleties of the shading attributes are applied to help separate the out lip of the rim from the inside of the rims and/or the spokes. The next time you get a chance stop and take a good close look at a real wheel rim and tire combination and you'll see that there are a lots of subtle and not so subtle shading variances. Yet combined into a familiar shape on a familiar object we see the object and recognize it as something real and physical.

Now the reason why we've talked about the lighting and shading properties of the models is that anyone can create a car skin, but making that car skin look realistic requires at least a basic understanding of lighting and shading. For example, what is it that makes an orange highlighter pen look real? Drawn as a two dimensional object it's just a basic cylinder with the same bright orange molded into the plastic casing. But what makes it standout in 3 dimensions is the way the light falls on and reflects off of the surface. In most cases there's at least one bright spot of light that indicates a slightly reflective surface yet the subtle shading the comes up from where the pen is making contact with the table gives us the visual clues that register the pen as having depth.

Choosing the ‘Right' Colors

Color is another important aspect of creating a car skin. Colors that we see in the real world are very seldom highly or overly saturated. Where we typically see overly saturated colors the most is in colored lights. The lights of a Christmas tree, or the red, yellow and green of the stop light or the pure luminescent white of a light bulb that's been turned on are examples things we easily recognize when we see overly saturated colors. Do we recognize the red light at a stop light as being on simply because it's red or is it on because it's such a bright unnatural red that it must be a source of illumination? In fact the only time when you see overly saturated colors in the real world are in objects that are specifically designed to get our attention such as school zone crossing signs or roadside emergency cones. When we thing of these things we tend to think of and refer to them as ‘dayglo' colors.

Overly saturated paint schemes can make a car look 'cartoonish' and unnatural. Reducing the saturation will help your car look better and more realistic.

When it comes to cars, you will rarely ever see a car that is so bright that it looks like a giant light bulb. However when it comes to painting a car for a racing simulation it easy to get overly excited by the intensity of the colors you can create with even a modest paint program and wind up with an overly saturated car. Cartoon cars are generally brightly colored, real cars aren't. So when you make your decision about the colors you want to use for your car make sure that you pick a color that isn't overly saturated. The same basic though is also true for the color white.

White, of course, is a color without saturation. White is basically nothing more than another shade of gray, although technically it is a perfectly balance blend of the three primary colors of the light, red, green and blue. Therefore the color white's basic character is primarily determined by the luminance value that's applied to it.

Yeah, it's all a bit technical and this reads like the high school physics version for explaining how to paint a car skin for rFactor, but what separates a good car skin from a mediocre car skin is the artist's understanding how and when to use and apply colors. And even though white is a very basic color painting your car a pure white, with a RGB value of 255/255/255, is just as bad as using any other overly saturated color. The color will bloom and for intents and purposes come out looking like a giant four-wheeled light bulb.You'll also loose all of the subtle shading and environment reflections necessary to give the car the dimensional qualities it needs to look more realistic.

White used as a base or primary color should not be more than about 215/215/215, which will still makes the car look white, but leaves plenty of room for lighting effects and environment reflections as well as room for the white in any decals that you might add to the livery. So the first and most important aspect of painting a car is picking the right colors and remembering that more is definitely not better.

The Use of Sponsorship Stickers

Following along this “More is Not Better” train of thought is the idea that this isn't a NASCAR mod. And by that I mean your car doesn't need 25 sponsor stickers behind the front wheel well to make it look real.

This is a sports car mod and if you look up pictures of any one of the cars that are presented in this mod you will generally find that except for a few exceptions, such as the Racing for Holland Dome, most of the real-life counterparts of the ILMS cars do not have tons and tons stickers plastered on every surface. So keep the sticker use to a minimum and when you add them to your skin think of them as objects to enhance the look of your car and not as objects to fill the space.

This elf sponsored Dome S101M by Claro Palma is an excellent example of how a minimal use of sponsorship stickers combined with a creative color scheme will often make a much nicer and clean-looking paint scheme.

Matching Colors and Graphics Between Layers and Templates

Whenever you paint a skin for a car that uses two or more textures to complete the exterior, such as the Viper Competition Coupe it's important to know how to copy the color from one template to another. That's why in most of the templates you'll find a “Color Overlay” attribute applied to the basic layers. Using ‘Color Overlay' is the fastest and easiest way to transfer a color from one template to another. Simply right click on the layer with the source color and select “Copy Layer Style” and then go to the next template and right-click on the destinations layer style select “Paste Layer Style.”

Lining up graphics that may be split over two different areas of a template or even on two different templates can be on of the most difficult and challenging things you can do. When it works it looks great, but you're stuck with the graphic in that particular configuration if you need to make changes later on. Unfortunately there are no easy shortcuts to get around this problem except changing your design. If it's something you really, REALLY want then make sure you have a copy of the car viewer installed so you can tweak to your heart's content and before you get started make yourself a pot of coffee to get ready for a long haul.

Helmets & Driving Suits

Helmets and driver suits are painted in a manner that is very similar to the cars and you should use the same basic standards for selecting your color and luminance values. The only difference is that both the helmet ad driver suit templates include a number of pre-built layers that will allow you to more easily customize your helmet and driver suit. For example you can change the color of the belts by adjusting the color overlay or even the belt buckles by selecting the optional layer. There are optional driver faces, belaclavas, visors, vents, hose you name it. There's pretty much nothing that you can't change. In fact there are even optional manufacturer stickers for some items. For the most part you can create a customized driver suit and helmet in less than 10-minutes.

In order for a custom or personalized helmet to be seen online by the other drivers it must be included in the team folder as one of the associated wildcard texture files for the car, wherein the 'wc' in wcHELMET is replaced with the name of the livery texture for the car.

Looking at the sample image at the right for the Team Modena DBR9 we know that the texture name of the primary skin is MDNA59_DBR9.dds, therefore the helmet for the car is named, MDNA59_DBR9HELMET.dds and the drivers suit must be named MDNA59_DBR9DRIVER.dds. The second car in the team is MDNA60_DBR9.dds, therefore the helmet for the second car is named, MDNA60_DBR9HELMET.dds and the driver's suit, MDNA60_DBR9DRIVER.dds.

Adding the helmet texture as a wildcard texture associated with a particular car is the only way to ensure that the customized helmets that were created for these cars will be seen online by the server and the other players. However to see the helmet offline, a copy of the helmet texture must also be included in the …GameData\Helmets folder and then selected by the player via the player menu in the showroom.

Therefore to help correlate the broad variety of fantasy team helmet textures included in the mod, we have created a naming convention that uses the following standard, ILMSTEAM_<team name>.dds. This helps separate the generic team helmets from the individual personalized driver helmets (ILMSDRIVER_*.dds), the national helmets, (ILMSNATION_*.dds) and the generic helmets (ILMS_*.dds).

A driver who wants to use a personalized helmet or one of the helmets included with the mod must include a copy of their helmet texture along with their car and utilize the afore mentioned naming convention, wcHELMET.dds wherein the letters 'wc' are replaced by the name of the car-skin texture.

Sorry, but these limitations are due to the limitations of rFactor and have nothing to due with the mod itself. We contacted ISI a while back to get clarification on the matter and this is the way it has to be done. You can use any helmet texture listed in the Player\Helmet menu and see it offline, but the only way to see it online is to include a copy of that helmet texture as a wildcard texture associated with the car you're driving. Otherwise the helmet you will see online will be the generic white ILMS helmet.

Using Alpha Channels

Some of the wild card textures used in the ILMS mod require the use of an alpha channel. Unlike the alpha channels in GPL where the alpha channel controls the shading of different areas of the car, in this mod alpha channels will not have any affect on the reflective properties of the vehicle's car body. As a result you CANNOT add an alpha channel to your car skin in the hope of making the car appear more or less reflective. The reflective properties of the cars have all been 'factory set' by the mod team and are based on the specular and environment maps associated with the car as well as the material shading values programmed into the DXT9, DXT8 and DXT7 shading levels that have been assigned to each of the 3D models.

In this mod alpha channels are only used to set and determine the transparency level of certain textures on the cars. However you cannot make an object transparent if it wasn't been setup to be transparent by the people who created the model (That would be Carpen Noctem of course). The objects or GMT models that have been setup to utilize a transparent texture will look at the alpha channel included with the source texture and will create a transparent surface based on the 'shade of gray' that is used in the alpha channel.

For example, the external view of a car's windows use a source texture typically named, '*WINDOW.dds' which includes an an alpha channel. The wheel rims of most of the cars also use alpha channels and the headlight lenses all use alpha channels. These objects were all programmed in 3dsMax to look for an apply an alpha channel in order to create either a see though-object like the windows or the headlight lenses or create a very specific gap as you'll find between the spokes of a wheel. Another texture that utilizes an alpha channel, as it applies to the ILMS mod, is the ‘wcEXTRA2' texture. These wcEXTRA2.dds textures are the windshield banners that are seen in driver's cockpit view of the GT cars – FYI the DBR9 is the only GT car that does not utilize a ‘wcEXTRA2' texture.

Whenever you create a customized texture using one of the ILMS mod templates that include an alpha, channel it's important to remember to update the alpha channel along with the text and/or graphics that you are adding to the template for your car. The first step to updating the alpha channel is to clean up the existing alpha channel so that any previous logos or images have been erased. This is easily done by switching over to the alpha channel and using the color picker to sample the gray color around the logo or text then switching to paint and simply painting over the text or logo.

In the specific case of the 'wcEXTRA2' and 'wcWINDOW' textures the white area of the alpha channel is completely opaque and the black area of the alpha channel will be completely transparent. The various shades of gray in between these two extremes will determine the level and amount of transparency that the object will have. When painting a 'wcEXTRA2' texture however it's important to remember that most sun shades are not fully opaque nor are they fully transparent. They generally have a moderate transparency to them so as not to restrict the driver's view, but is still tinted dark enough to shade the driver's view. Therefore a light gray area is typically used as the base for the area surrounding the text or logo you intend to apply. Just how light or how dark you want your sun shade to be is up to you. If you want your texture to be less transparent and appear darker in game you can apply a lighter shade of gray and if you want the texture to be more transparent you can use a darker shade of gray. Again, how light or how dark the texture will be in your driving view is up to you.

Once you've finished cleaning up the alpha channel switch back over to "Layers" and go to the layer that has the logo or text that you want displayed at the top of your windshield. – BTW don't forget that when you're in the cockpit you're actually looking through the banner to the back of the logo, therefore the logo on your 'wcEXTRA2' texture should be reversed.

With the logo configured as you want it hold the control button and click on the layer to select the outline path of your logo. (Different versions of Photoshop, such as CS3 may use slightly different keystrokes.) With the logo outline patch selected switch back to the Channels layer and select the alpha layer and press, shift+F5 . This will bring up the ‘Fill' window. Next with either the foreground or the back ground set to a *full 255 white select either the foreground or the background from the ‘Use' pull-down menu and click on ‘Okay.' This will apply the white area on your alpha channel that is needed to match your logo. Now using the appropriate naming convention save your customized texture as a DXT5 level *.dds file.

As stated earlier, just how transparent you want your 'wcEXTRA2' texture to be is up to you. You can make the logo and the surrounding area of the windshield banner fully opaque or you can go to the other extreme and make the banner entire fully transparent. Plus you can also apply different colors to your windshield banners. And example of a color windshield banner can be viewed by driving one of the Ferraris or one of the Pennzoil BMWs included with the mod.

For 'wcWINDOW' textures you should NOT alter the shade of gray that is used for the window. If you use a different shade of gray for the window you could end up making your car appear to have completely opaque windows or no windows at all. The only alterations you should make to 'wcWINDOW' textures is to add the corresponding white mattes for any added text or logos that you intend to place on your car.

//-------------------------------------------------------------------

HDVehicle=Corvette.hdv
Graphics=Corvette.gen
Spinner=Corvette_spinner.gen
Upgrades=CNRacing_upgrades.ini
GenString= // Used to generate GMT names in *.gen file
Cameras=Corvette_cams.cam // Defaults to cams.cfg in UserData directory
Sounds=Corvette.sfx
HeadPhysics=Corvette_headphysics.ini // Affects driver eyepoint only
Cockpit=Corvette_cockpitinfo.ini

//-------------------------------------------------------------------

Number=3
Team="Carpe Noctem Racing C6-R"
PitGroup=""
Driver="Tim Collier"
Description="Carpe Noctem Racing Corvette C6-R #3"
Engine="Chevrolet 7.0L V8"
Manufacturer="Chevrolet"
Classes="LM-GT1 C6R"

FullTeamName="Carpe Noctem Racing C6-R"
TeamFounded="2008"
TeamHeadquarters="Maumelle, Arkansas USA"
TeamStarts=0
TeamPoles=0
TeamWins=0
TeamWorldChampionships=0

Category="LM-GT1"

Templates & Resource Links

Please note that the templates below have all been formatted to work specifically with the cars of the Série Internationale Du Mans mod.