Make Your Own Livery! - Getting Started

You know that you've always wanted to put a sweet livery on your car, but the thing is, where do you start? Well that, my friends, is what I'm going to show you how to do. This'll include the basics of making your livery, and some tips that you'll need in making them.

Part 1: Making the Design

Firstly, you'll need a photo editor. I mainly use Photoshop, but GIMP will work just as well. paint.net will work on body templates, but not on window templates because it does not support alpha channels (in other words, your windows will appear completely opaque, with no transparency).

Now you'll need templates. Templates are useful for determining what goes where on the car. Here are links to download templates for the current mods being used:

Australian GT (GTE-Am)
Enduracers (genstring values are in the READ ME) (GTE-Am, GTE-Pro, Prototype)
WES and ES Addon (GTE-Pro, Prototype)

Now that you've downloaded the templates, open the file. They may be in a .zip or .rar file. Windows already has a built-in .zip program, but you'll need to download WinRAR in order to open .rar files. If you don't have a .zip feature, then 7zip will do the job.

As you'll see, whatever car file you chose will have a few files. The regular file, which is the body; the WINDOW file, being the windows of the car; and maybe an EXTRA file where other bits of the car are. Usually EXTRA files have parts on the car that can be interchangeable via the Genstring, but I'll cover that later.

When you open your regular file, you should have something that looks like this:



The next thing to do would be to go to a "paint here" layer. That's where you always want to be if you're designing a livery. You can still create new layers above that one, but never any higher or else the result will come out very weird. I'll show in example:

Good!



No good! Bail out!



Once you've made sure about that, you can now start painting away! Remember, whatever you do on the body will translate into the game. Keep in mind also to visualize what it would look like on the car. The car won't be flat and boxy like the livery is!

Once you're done, make sure to save your file, but also save another copy of it as a .dds. nVidia's .dds plugin is able to save .psd files as a .dds. When saving window files, make sure to save them as DXT5, not DXT1. You'll find this option at the top where there should be a drop-down menu.