RD Rally Championship Season 9 - Rally World
- Thread starter Ole Marius Myrvold
- Start date
HAH! Part 1 of that thought has been completed!..Time permitting I should really learn how to make a skin and pretty screenshots. Maybe for next rally.
At the cost of quite a lot of sleep I managed to complete some crash courses in Paint.NET and in general File Wrestling this week.
So now, I am kind of proud to tell you that the VROOAAAM Rally Team will bring at least one freshly painted car to the start in Argentina.
I present to you: my first ever car skin for DiRT. It is not quite as intricate as some of the really goodlooking skins I see here, but I think it's OK for a first attempt.
A few of the guys in the crew said we should have spent all this time preparing for the rallye instead of painting, as this will also be my first ever attempt at rallying in Argentina.
But I'm not worried (yet), as I've ordered some extra paint and vinyl wrap, to quickly fix any minor paint stone chips should they occur
.
VROOAAAM indeed! I like that you needed crash courses, but did manage to get the windows working!
This also reminds me. When everything is set up and Argentina is good to go (like, magazine finished etc.) then I need to see if I can find me some cool sponsors from Argentina, if not I'll have to run the pink "your spot here" car again
Might have been a stroke of luck, but the windows worked just fine at the 1st try. That's something I never got right in GTL (Which is the only game I ever made a skin for before) Having a template with a wireframe layer (from the Dirt2.0 DL section) may have helped too
Biggest pain here was getting the asymmetric green-and-black stripe to align properly over all of the front bumper parts. That was a lot less straightforward.. I've learned a LOT about layers and stuff this week..
BTW: since Huski Chocolate -from Sweden- is already for sale over here in Holland, they may be inclined to venture even further south and try their hands on getting some market share in Argentina.
What better way to promote your brand than sticking it on a lovely little BMW that's swiftly wagging it's tail through the Argentinian countryside for all to see
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Biggest pain here was getting the asymmetric green-and-black stripe to align properly over all of the front bumper parts. That was a lot less straightforward.. I've learned a LOT about layers and stuff this week..
Hah. I know the feeling!
As you can see here, the left side of the car doesn't exactly line up perfectly on the BMW either. But it is at least quite straight forward how to do it. However, if you look at the "top" mountain, on the right side of the car. Then look at the bottom there, you see I have a red part under the "lightpod". Approx middle left of the picture. But where is the rest of the rear, right side of the car?
Well, that's placed under the left-rear side, because logic. Now making that line up with a part that's literally on the opposite side of the template. Hnngh.
BTW: since Huski Chocolate -from Sweden- is already for sale over here in Holland, they may be inclined to venture even further south and try their hands on getting some market share in Argentina.
What better way to promote your brand than sticking it on a lovely little BMW that's swiftly wagging it's tail through the Argentinian countryside for all to see
Hang on, can you actually buy Huski in shops? Or do you mean "for sale" as in "order from their website" ?
I have not yet seen a single Huski bottle for sale in any shops in Norway (but they do hand a lot of them out at ski resorts here!). I know there is quite a few ski resorts with the hot cocoa machine from Huski as well.
But ye, I had to order my Huski bottle online. 50% because I wanted to try it (and frustratingly enough, it was really tasty) and 50% because I wanted that picture as a teaser for my livery!
With that being said. I'll either make a livery for each rally based on some national company thing. Or I'll use my "your logo here" car. It just feels right!
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Wow.. the BMW template indeed looks like a properly messed up jigsaw puzzle... it's worse than the Delta's.
And Yes, our country's biggest supermarket chain (or 2nd biggest maybe
), JUMBO, sells Huski, both in their stores and their website. With this ongoing lockdown thing the two are more and more becoming one TBH. The man who owns the stores is a well known gentleman racer over here. He owns and drives in his own WEC LMP-2 car as a Bronze driver and is one of Max Verstappens personal sponsors. He's sort of living my dream Don't give up! I've done it using Paint.NET. it IS possible!
Follow the link Ole provided in post #91 to Rallygamer's page. It has excellent PDF manuals on the file handling part. In addition, I found THIS instructable useful too.
I hope I'm not straying OT too much now, but here's what I did in a nutshell: (OR.. what I would have done if I'd done it right the 1st time
)- Get the latest Paint.NET with DDS support ( I have v.4.2.15)
- Get the free Photoshop plugin for Paint.Net at psdplugin.com (I have v.2.5.0)
- Download the Gr.A templates from the RD Dirt2.0 download section and extract the "EscortCos_body_template.psd". Use 7-zip or WinRAR. Open the PSD file in Paint.NET.
- Don't change the WIRE and MISC layers. make a new layer UNDER those two and paint it in the main colour you want for your car using the Bucket Fill tool (F hotkey). Call it "BASE COAT" or whatever.
- Make new layers inbetween MISC and BASE COAT for every shape, decal etc. you add. The more layers the merrier, and the easier to adjust things afterwards. Remember, the order of the layers is important for what is visible and what is not.
- If you're happy with the skin so far, save the PSD in a place you can find it using a filename you'll remember. Save it AS PSD (or PDN, as long as the format supports layers)
- Now, turn off the WIRE layer (Don't delete it! just uncheck the box in the floating layer window) and save the file as "ers_main_d.tga.dds". ERS means Escort RS, I had to use LDI for Lancia Delta Integrale as per Rallygamer's car list.
Under Settings in the next window, use the "BC1(sRGB DX10+)" DDS format as per Rallygamer's list. Also make sure the "Generate Mipmaps" box is ticked. When you clik OK it will tell you it needs to flatten the file (= merge all layers), so just allow the program to do that.
From here on the file juggling gets a little complicated.. also I deviated a little from both the PDF and the instructable, so please bear with me..
- Using Rallygamer's PDF manual and the NEFS tool mentioned there, open ers.nerfs and extract five PSSG files from it.
(I ended up extracting the files from the livery_user subfolder rather than the livery_00 subfolder, and then renaming each of them from "..._high_user.pssg" to "..._high_00.pssg".
I went this extra step because upon using the livery_00 ones as shown in Rallygamer's PDF I ended up with shadows of decals from the original livery bleeding through on the Lancia. The livery_user ones have blank shadow textures so they won't have this issue. I have not tested this on the Escort obviously but I expect similar results)
- Then open "ers_tex_high_00.pssg" using the mentioned EGO PSSG editor (I used v.12.0). On the textures tab, scroll down to "ers_main_d.tga" and click it. It'll show a car template similar to yours, but white.
- With "ers_main_d.tga" still selected, go to Textures --> Import in the top function bar. A window opens; browse to YOUR "ers_main_d.tga.dds" that you saved earlier. This replaces the default car skin texture with yours. Also see step 6 of the instructable I mentioned.
-Then follow Step 7 of the instructable, save the PSSG file AS PSSG. It now has your car skin in it.
-Finally, as per step 8 of the instructable, browse to your Dirt Rally 2.0 Steam folder, create a folder cars with a subfolder ers and drop all 5 PSSG files in there.
Start Dirt Rally 2.0, go to freeroam and choose the FIRST Escort skin. This is important because your homemade skin will always replace the FIRST selectable default skin. If all has gone well, once in the service area you should see your skin on the car.
If you want to change some things on your car skin, open the multi-layered PSD you saved earlier, make the desired changes and follow the steps again.
Obviously you don't have to extract from the NEFS file again. And you only have to update the "ers_tex_high_00.pssg" with your new texture and copy that to the game folder. The 4 other PSSG files can just stay unchanged. They only come into play if you want to mod the wheels.
If you want to mod the windows on your car skin, the process is similar. Just use the "EscortCos_window_template.psd". from the template folder and save it as "ers_glass_d.tga.dds" with "BC3(sRGB DX10+)" DDS setting.
Hope this helps. Sorry for the huge wall of text.
This turned out to not quite be the nutshell I mentioned at the start.
If anyone finds a mistake, please correct me.
Probably there are a hundred different ways to achieve this, easier ones too.. But since @Camaro735 asked for it, these are my personal findings of the last few days.
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and now i know, why, even as someone who did art school back in the eighties, cannot be bothered enough to go through this process
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Come on and show us the stages for Argentina...
Saturday EU-time is when the rally-thread goes live
just like the first two events 
Straight out of the paint-booth, and ready to hit some scenery in Argentina
And as usual with "all" the renders, @Ole Marius Myrvold is the fixer!
And as usual with "all" the renders, @Ole Marius Myrvold is the fixer!
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Yellow!!
the rims, though ...
Yeah, when we got our hands on this car, the rims were really scruffy. The car itself was not that bad, but the rims needed some cleaning... So we naturally started to clean them using toothpaste. But surprise surprise - the toothpaste got stuck instead!
ah, ya, it's a sticky business and a dirty job, but some Roy's gotta do it
Jack Hintz
That Designer Guy?
Not that I've found sadly.. usually I run a stage without vr to get mine.
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