Yeah I exclusively skin in 2D with vectors and smart objects. Some people can paint in 3D in PS, but I just don't 'get' it. I understand how it's done but I can't get the accuracy, find the camera placement fiddly, and also vectors and shapes are much more easily changed if you make a mistake.
I still haven't learned 3D skinning. I must
really suck at Googling, because I can't find any tutorials on how to actually do it. I see stuff on how to set up a 3D PSD file and the like, but I haven't actually found anything that says 'this is how to put crap on a model.' Not to mention the fact that painting in raster is just bloody terrible imho. There's so many things that are just worse with raster images that it just isn't worth it to me. Any car with UVs that massively distort a logo when placed in 2D is just a car I don't bother with, simply put.
@Ryno917 I've seen the alpha done in the way you say - in the tires for RSS FH2018 which I used the base dev PSD made by CC and learned a few things from that. I've only been skinning since the beginning of this year, and it was quite fun figuring out how to do stuff.
There's a million ways to skin a cat, they say.
I also figured out I could finish one side of a car at once - sponsors and all, and then take a copy of everything and also that part of the uv, flip/mirror it all together and move it to the other side of the car, using the uv to line it up exactly, then re-flip the sponsors (in most cases) so they are the correct way around (sometimes have to create new smart object via copy and edit it to flip it if it's at an angle).
I usually manually place all logos on both sides of the car; but that's probably more out of habit than it is actually dissecting my workflow. As for placing new smart objects, that isn't necessary - you'll have to 'un mirror' the duplicates (Ctrl+T, right click object and mirror in the same direction you mirrored it originally), but then while in free transform mode (Ctrl+T) on a single smart object you can input a direct angle of rotation. On skins that are oriented vertically (so the sides of the car run vertically, with the graphics perpendicular to normal viewing) the angle on each side will be exactly opposite. By which I mean if you have a logo at 10 degrees rotation on the right side, on the left side you can just make it -10 degrees and it will be correct. I think the same is true for skins where both sides are shown in the correct orientation (bottom edge down, parallel to the bottom of the texture). On skins where the car is flattened out so the sides run parallel to the bottom but one side is upside down you just have to do a little mental arithmetic to get the correct angle on the upside down side, subtracting the angle of the logo from 180 degrees. So if a logo on the side that's right side up is 15 degrees, the one on the upside down side of the car would be 180-15=165 degrees.
The reason I like vector smart objects for this is that they save the rotation. After you've rotated it, the free transform box doesn't get reset the next time you press Ctrl+T like it does with raster graphics.
None of the above probably makes any sense, but I'm terrible at explaining things. lol
