 |
| Car Painting |
| This tutorial will be based on painting a car with Paint Shop Pro from JASC software. This Tutorial was done by dkustom, if you have any questions contact him by hitting "contact me" above. Index - Basic Nascar Layout - Creating a .car file in Nascar 3 - Exporting a .car file from Nascar 3 - Working with Templates - Preparing to paint your car - Keys of painting - Logos and Decals - Car Numbers And Text - Preparing your car to be imported +loading color pallete +loading mask selection +import.pcx +saving you work - Importing your car to Nascar 3 - A closing word BASIC NASCAR LAYOUT Try to follow basic Nascar layout when designing your car. It helps to match your color scheme with your sponsers logo. If your sponsers logo contains red, black and white, try to use those three colors for your paint scheme. Also, place your logos and numbers accordingly. Your main sponsers logo should be on the hood of the car and should also apear on the rear quarter panels or back of the car. Your numbers should appear on both doors, the roof, and possibly the right rear tail light area. And lastly, above all, be original and creative. Practice makes perfect. CREATING A .CAR FILE IN NASCAR 3 To create a .car file in Nascar 3, simply go into Nascar 3 and choose driver info from the main selection screen. From the driver info page, choose "new driver". Give the car a name that you will remember (preferably something that has to do with the driver, car#, or sponser). Choose what chassis you want to use (this can be changed later). And select OK. EXPORTING A .CAR FILE FROM NASCAR 3 To export a .car file from Nascar 3, go to the paintshop screen for that car and click on export. Pretty hard isn't it. The car will be exported to your Nascar 3 directory as "X???????.car". Where ????? is the last 7 letters of the cars file name. WORKING WITH TEMPLATES Nascar 3 comes with 4 templates. All four templates are green cars that have no logos, decals, or Numbers on them. They are located in your nascar 3 directory and are labeled: template.pcx, template1.pcx, template2.pcx, and template3.pcx. When working with these templates, always make sure that you save your car as a different file name when finished or you will lose the template. You can also download templates off the internet that are different colors and have different manufacturers such as: Ford, Chevy, and Pontiac. If the templates aren't available on this site as of the time this tutorial is posted, I hope to have them available for you soon afterward. PREPARING TO PAINT YOUR CAR First you need to open your template or exported car file with your paint program (in this case, Paint Shop Pro 6). Next, if the car file contains a color bar at the lower left, you will need to do the following: -choose your selection tool from your tool bar. -select the portion of the file that appears in the Nascar 3 paintshop (this area will start at 0,0 and end at 383,234.) -copy that selection (press the copy button above the file area). -choose edit from the pulldown menu, goto paste, and choose paste as new image. -this should paste only the portion of the car that you need to work with. After you have gotten this far, you will need to double the size of the car (to make it easier to work with). This can be done by choosing: image - resize, and resizing the image to 200%. Next you want to increase color depth to 16 million colors. This can be done by choosing colors, increase color depth, and 16 million colors. Now you're ready to start painting your car, but don't start until reading the next section on painting keys. It explains a few things to make it easier to fix mistakes and change your cars appearance later after it has been saved. KEYS OF PAINTING The golden rule to follow when painting a car, or at least as far as I'm concerned, is to never paint on the background. Always create new layers and do all of your painting and adding decals on these new layers. This makes it easier to correct mistakes and reposition logos and decals later. To do this, simply float your mouse pointer over the layers tool area and choose create new layer in the upper left when the menu pulls down. Create as many layers as you want. You can never have too many, but you might regret it later if you don't have enough. The next key to painting your car is to save your work often. Save it under a file name that you will associate with the car and save it as a .psp file. That way you won't have to merge the layers. Once the layers have been merged, it is extremely difficult to make changes to the car. One great feature of Paintshop Pro is that it gives you the option of Multiple undo. So you can undo things that you have done 10 minutes ago if you really need to. Believe me, you'll use this feature. LOGOS AND DECALS O.k., It's time to go get your logos and decals. Where you ask? Anywhere. You can get them off the internet (one of my favorite places on the web to find images are lycos richmedia). I will include a link for that site in my links section at the end of this tutorial. To get a picture off the internet, just find it, right click on it, and choose "save a picture". I save all my pics off the internet to a folder called "Logos and Decals" on my computer. You can also use pictures from your scanner, so as you can see, your resourses are endless. Once you've aquired your logo that you intend to use, you can apply it to your car. Here I'm going to teach you a great trick for applying a logos or decal to your car. I'm sure if you've tried this already, you've noticed that it's impossible, as far as I know, to only select the logo you want and not the background too. Well, there's a way around it. Make sure that your background color in your color selection box is set to the same color as the background behind the logo or decal that you want to use. Next use your selection tool to select the decal (don't worry if the background is in the selection area also, we'll make it disappear). Now hit the copy button. Done, good. Let's go back to the window that your car is in and see if we can't make that logo appear without that nasty background in the way. Choose edit from the pulldown menu, choose paste, and select "paste as transparent selection". Did it work. If not, go through the steps again. Maybe you missed something. If not, try another image, I've never had problems getting any image to work, but there's always the possibility. Once you have your logo ready to place on the car, move it to the area that you will to place it and click your right mouse button. This will place the image on the car as a floating selection. This means you can resize it, move it, or rotate it, without affecting any other part of the car. Once you get it to the right size, facing in the right direction, and in the place you want it at, hit CTRL-D. This will defloat the selection and voila. You're in business. CAR NUMBERS AND TEXT This is pretty simple so I'm not really going to go into it here but I will cover it in my next painting tutorial. PREPARING TO IMPORT YOU NEW CAR There are a few things that need to be done to your car file before you can import it to Nascar 3. You will need to resize your car back to it's original size, import the color palette from Nascar 3, then paste the paintable portion of your car onto the import.pcx file. To resize your car, simply press SHIFT-S, choose 50%, and click OK. Next click on the colors menu at the top, choose "load palette", then select the "car colors.pal" file from your Nascar 3 folder. Once you've imported the color pallete, click on File, Open, and choose "import.pcx" from your Nascar 3 folder. Now go back to the window that your car is in and click on selections, choose "load from disk", and choose "car mask.sel". This will select all the paintable portions of your car. Now click on copy and go back to the window that your import.pcx file is in. Click on edit, paste, as new selection (or you can just hit CTRL-E), and place the selection that you had copied from your car to the import.pcx file. Once you have done this, choose file, save as, and save the car as X???????.pcx. Where the ???????=the name of the car in nascar 3. IMPORTING YOUR CAR TO NASCAR 3 To import your car to Nascar 3, go into Nascar 3, go to driver info, find the car that you are painting ( if you haven't created it yet, choose new driver, and name it the same as the pcx file you just painted, only leave the X off the front of the file name), highlight the car, choose driver info, then choose paint shop. Now click on import and if you have done everything right, it should ask "do you want to import pit colors too?" Just click yes, and your new car should be there. A CLOSING WORD This tutorial in now way, covers all the details of what you can do when painting a car, but I hope that it covers the basics you need to paint a car and put it in your game. After that, you can learn the rest from experimenting. |
 |
|
| Back To Index |
| Back To Index |
| Back To Index |
| Back To Index |
| Back To Index |
| Back To Index |
| Back To Index |
| Back To Index |
| Back To Index |
| Back To Index |
| Back To Index |