How To Add Skins and Helmets To rFactor 2

James Sadler · Mar 5, 2014

We at GhostSpeed are delighted to announce that we have created a GhostSpeed Racing account for RD. This will enable you to keep up to date with all the latest news and announcements GhostSpeed has to offer.

GhostSpeed wants to help the FSR community and we hope we can do that.

For people who need help on painting their skins for their cars, look at the 2014 Painting Instructions. You need Photoshop to edit the templates and make them into .dds.

FSR 2014 Helmet Template:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/90mdmcog9mmkffn/HELMET.psd

FSR 2014 Driver Suit Template:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/jdb35ekkv232ydt/DRIVER.psd

FSR 2014 Mod Template:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/bbrl9cljgjy7qj3/FISI_2012.psd

To begin you need to have all of your designs for your skins completed and in a .dds format for the game to recognise.

If you are at the stage where you have completed all your skins and are in a .dds format then you can begin adding them to rFactor 2.

First Step: Load rFactor 2 in single player mode.

Second Step: Once your at the main rFactor 2 screen, click on vehicle and select the Formula ISI 2012 #11 1.47.

Third Step: Click tuning and then you must select the arrow keys to alt otherwise the fourth step will not work.

Fourth Step: Click the create button and then add your Driver Name and Team Name. Next click accept.

Fifth Step: Click back and scroll all the way to the end of the list of cars. You should see your Driver Name and Team Name.

Sixth Step: Close rFactor 2 and then go to Documents\rFactor2\UserData\player\Settings\FISIR2012_car. Once you are in the FISIR2012_car folder you should see your Driver Name that you selected in rFactor 2. Click on the folder you created in rFactor 2 and then you should be able to add all your .dds to the folder.

Seventh Step: Once you have added all the .dds files into the folder you can then close it. Load up rFactor 2 again to the main screen.

Eighth Step: Go back onto vehicles and then click on tuning again. From there use the arrows to find your car livery. (you may find your helmet design while scrolling through so make sure you know which livery, helmet etc is).

Ninth Step: Make sure you have selected the correct Vehicle, which you designed, then load up a track and you should find your livery, helmet and driver suit all in the game.

A big shout out has to go to Mark Aalberts for all the hard work he has done to figure out how to do this. If it wasn't for him this wouldn't be possible. We hope this can help current and new teams add their liveries, helmets and driver suits to the game.

Good luck to everyone for next year and we hope to see you on the track.

GhostSpeed Racing

Chris Knight · Mar 5, 2014

cars dont show up on server tho. unless just add as a at skin to a default car

James Sadler · Mar 5, 2014

Chris, this only for single player. We are working on trying to get it working for rFactor 2 online but ISI needs to fix the online issues in the next build of rFactor 2. Hopefully when the online issues have been resolved, we will be able to add the skins etc in online. We will post the information on this thread.

GhostSpeed Racing

John-Eric Saxén · Mar 5, 2014

Chris Knight said:
cars dont show up on server tho. unless just add as a at skin to a default car

"Virtual" teams will not show online, I haven't managed to get that working either. So for now they are just for offline testing of carpaints. As Chris said, you can include the skin to one of the default teams. This will work online as long as the server has skin transfers enabled (currently disabled because of buggy build).

The full carmod will include all the real team names as part of the mod, so there is no need for virtual teams then.

James Sadler · Mar 5, 2014

John you are absolutely right. We wanted to show teams how they can add their liveries and designs in rFactor 2. Teams can check their designs before they release them to FSR for the official mod.

GhostSpeed Racing

Sergio Lorente · Mar 6, 2014

How can I use the alpha channel in helmet .psd to edit the brightness in-game? Cause the deafult alpha channel only edits the transparency.

Tamas Vargyasi · Mar 6, 2014

So here I will try to explain how to make the Alpha Channels on the finished helmet design. This is not an rF2 helmet template, but the workflow is the same.

Important Note: in this tutorial I used the DDS plugin for Photoshop, which is provided by Nvidia, which is stands for permitting Photoshop to export the file to .dds format. This plugin works only with Nvidia video cards. Here you can download according to your OS, and of course if you use Nvidia video cards.

Photoshop DDS Plugin

Step 1:

When you finished your design, than you go to the Channels tab (next to the Layers tab) pointed with the red arrow.

Step 2:

Then on the Channels panel, you will need to add a new channel. For this you go down to the right bottom part of the panel and you will find the icon for new channel.

Step 3:

After adding a new channel, you will get a full black field, which is your new Alpha Channel.

Step 4:

To reveal your layout you should activate the eye icon in the front of the RGB channel. After that your layout will reappear with a red layer on top of your layout. This red layer is actually your Alpha channel, but it is acts like a mask.

Step 5:

Now it is time to make a selection for your visor, which you make alongside visors edge.

Step 6:

With the selection achieved, you need to fill the selection with white. Therefore you go to menu to the top and hit Edit, then select Fill.

Immediately the Fill window will appear, where you select what content to use to fill your selection. In this case I selected the Foreground Color, because my foreground color is set to white, as you can see in the left side. It can happen, that your background color is white, than you will select as Fill content Background Color.

Step 7:

After you filled the selection with white, your selection area should be visible normally, without any red overlaying color.

Step 8:

Right now we are almost at the finish line. *Don`t forget to save your file from time to time, to avoid of loosing anything in case of unwanted events.
So if we saved our file, preferable .psd, than we can save now as .dds too. Therefore we going to select Save As... from File menu, and choose the D3D/DDS file format. Very important to check the Alpha Channel if it`s unchecked. Then hit Save.

Step 9:

In the next dialog were we have the dds saving option, make sure you have selected DXT5 ARGB 8 bpp | interpolated alpha. For the rest set as you see in my capture. And hit Save.

Now your file is made and saved with Alpha Channels activated. You can now copy your file to the game directory or maybe you already worked there.

*Note: you have to have some knowledge of photoshop.

*Note2: For those who use ATI video cards, sorry but I don`t know what are the options to save as .dds from Photoshop.

Hope it helps you guys!
For any other graphical stuff you can ask me.

Cheers.
Tamas

Tamas Vargyasi · Mar 6, 2014

I forget to mention that the above tutorial is for get rid of the shiny helmet. Therefore you will get a visually more better results on helmet, only the visor part will get the shiny effect.

Martin Hodás · Mar 6, 2014

If I remember, I used ATI cards for years and the same nVidia plugin for PS also without any problems... (now I have nV card)

Tamas Vargyasi · Mar 6, 2014

Yes, but only a few of them are working, but have no info which.

James Sadler · Mar 6, 2014

Thank you Tamas for adding your information to this post. It was written very well and hopefully it will help people design their helmets for FSR in 2014. Thank you.

GhostSpeed Racing

Sergio Lorente · Mar 8, 2014

Thats the result of following the Tamas tutorial.

Carlos Hernandez · Mar 8, 2014

Tamas Vargyasi · Mar 8, 2014

Feel sorry for your result.

Here is the result of the above tutorial.

I`ll download the rF2 helmet template to check if something is different. But I almost sure that everything is same, because the file type is the same and the structure of the game.

Tamas Vargyasi · Mar 8, 2014

Sergio Lorente said:
How can I use the alpha channel in helmet .psd to edit the brightness in-game? Cause the deafult alpha channel only edits the transparency.

BTW, the brightness has nothing to do with alpha channels.

My tutorial is pointing to the reflecting problems that occur ingame, if the alpha channels isn`t used properly. Also my way is showing the very basics, for those who has very minor PS skills. Those who can handle it, they wont`t need this tutorial at all, and they can refine their project in more detailed way.

So again, my tutorial is only to not get all shiny helmet results, because it is visually unpleasant to have all that reflections. It is hard to distinct the elements on is.

Sergio Lorente · Mar 8, 2014

Please, tell me the result of your test with the rF2 helmet template to confirm if i really do something wrong.
I'll keep trying, thanks for your help.

Mira1604NL · Mar 15, 2014

Hi All, Trying to paint a helmet. Does anyone know if there is a 3ds photoshop file available for this new helmet template? Or are there other ways to paint it better and more efficiently? Thanks in advance!

Tamas Vargyasi · Mar 15, 2014

Read the first post, how come that you didn`t noticed?

Mark Aalberts · Mar 15, 2014

Take note that the HDR is kinda messed up with the latest build. There is an easy way to fix the shininess/reflections temporally and that is to adjust the 4th alpha channel. The one that comes default with the template has the opacity set on 60% , but that causes heaps off reflections well actually the update did or well not here was already a lot but now even worse.

What I did was this. Channel tab, Left double click on the 4th alpha channel. A tab will open where you see "Color indicates" and "Color". Select the square with the color and put in a color with this RGB 2B2B2B after that put the opacity higher. I have it on 90% and this gives a nice results when taking screenshots.

Take note that this is only a temporary fix which can be used for screenshot taking etc, I have no idea what the effect will be when they fix the HDR and these skins with these settings are in the mod package, the cars will most likely look much more math after the update. So it is for yourself to decide what settings is best.

Tamas already explained it which is working

, and it also counts for the normal skins. I just give you my tips and settings as well.

ps:

2 other tips. If you are painting and you have a complicated skin with many layers you might want to flatten the image before you are going to save it as a .DDS After you saved do a step back to undo it so the layers become available again. If you have to much layers (my style of working) then you might run into the problem that PS comes with a error and crashes. So if you forgot to save you're work you will loose it.

And before you save the .DDS make sure that all alpha channels are ticked as well.

Happy painting chaps.

James Sadler · Mar 16, 2014

Concerning rFactor 2 online. Earlier it was discovered that 'virtual driver' would not appear in rFactor 2 online. Although you can add the livery to the ISI designed cars you can not add the helmets to the cars in rFactor 2 online. We have attempted to get this working on many occasions but it simply wouldn't work for us. It is yet to be discovered whether you can add the driver suits to the ISI designed cars for rFactor 2 online but we will find out shortly. We will continue to try and fix this issue so teams can start trying their completed cars online.

GhostSpeed Racing