Miscellaneous Problem Solving

Using 2D instead of 3D for base paint finalization

Logo Placement in Mudbox using Mirror, Reverse and Polish in Photoshop

Export to PSD so you get your logos in a separate layer.

Select the pixels of the logo that reads correct, copy, and paste, creating a new layer with the same image of the logo.

Drag it to the other side of the car where you see the backwards version of the same logo and transform (Ctrl+T) it into place to taste.

Then back on the original logo layer, erase the pixels making up the logo that is backwards.

Repeat for every logo (or number plate, or whatever!)

Isolating the Rear Wing and Window Graphics

Creating a Preview

Have Content Manager installed.

Have Greenshot installed.

Navigate to the .kn5 file for your car. This one is here: ...\Steam\steamapps\common\assettocorsa\content\cars\ks_mclaren_650_gt3

Double click on that file to open the car in Content Manager.

Select your skin from the pulldown menu.

Position the camera (left click drag, right click drag, middle click drag) so that your car is surrounded by lots of white.

Open Greenshot (typically Printscreen is the shortcut if you have it running) and grab a nice hunk of screen to your clipboard.

In your custom skin folder, find "preview.jpg" (if you don't have one, grab one from another skin in this car's subfolders).

Open the existing "preview.jpg" in Photoshop.

Paste your screengrab into a layer on top of the existing preview car.

Ctrl+T to transform the image to your liking and hit Enter.

Odds and Ends: Crew, Helmet, Gloves, Suit

[Edit: The last section here again is only relevant if you are skinning for simracingsystem where there are folder name and file size restrictions. If you aren't skinning for that, you can skip the next section!]

Finishing Up: Folder Contents and Size Requirements

In Windows Explorer, navigate to your skin's folder.

Show Details and select all the files (Ctrl+A, or marquee select everything in there).

Note the total file size of all selected files.



Conclusion

Spoilers... I've completed the skin! Much of what is in the above tutorial was used so I am not going to go through the details step by step on what I did to push it to the finish line. However, a brief summary of what I had to problem solve follows:I realized that the stippled triangle pattern simply was too much of a mess doing it in Mudbox. I used the initial paintover for the base paint to clue me in to what portions of the skin needed to be red and what needed to be black, and then I went through in Photoshop and panel by panel just repainted the whole thing. I then used my custom triangle brush to do a clean set of triangles on all the surfaces in varying degrees of density depending on how close to the center of the car I was. Gives that "gradient" look while still being stippled.This worked out really well! In Mudbox, pick one side of the car, enable Mirror, and then put all your logos on where you think they should go (in a special paint layer, of course). The other side of the car will have them backwards. Then...Turns out the rear wing and the rear view mirrors and a bunch of other stuff is actually textured in a second file called "CARBON_occlusiont.dds". I had to use the Content Manager method from earlier in the tutorial to create a new PSD to edit the texture for those sections. I then exported the Diffuse for the Wing paint from MudBox as before, and plopped them into my new PSD. Once there, I was able to figure out what needed to be painted red/black, what needed to be left alone to look like carbon fiber, and where my "SOB Racing" needed to go to show up on the wing, as well as my name plate on the back.I had to repeat the process for the windshield graphics, which are in a file called "Glass_Windows_D.dds".Most cars are not like this. Most cars I've done so far have 90% of what you'd want to paint a single texture file. In the past, I'd paint the body, figure out how to paint the rims white, and call it a day. Turns out I picked a fairly complex car for this tutorial! Here's the final product:You should already have a livery.png in your skin folder. If not, head back up to the section called "Quick Custom Livery Setup". Now you need a nice Preview! You can always use Assetto Corsa's showroom to grab a pose of your car, which is what I did early on. But once I found the Content Manager showroom, it just made things easier. Follow these steps for an easy preview image:You should end up with something like this:I'll be honest. I skimp on this stuff because frankly I don't show gloves in game, and I can't see my own helmet. What I usually do is find an existing skin for the car I'm working on that has a color scheme close to mine, and then steal the "ac_crew.dds" and "skin.ini" files out of their directory and put it into my own. In fact, that is USUALLY what I copy when I first make my directory in the AC hierarchy so I don't have to think about it after that.For this skin I grabbed the "ac_crew.dds" and "skin.ini" out of the "racing_57" folder. The crew texture is a nice deep red, and the skin.ini dictates which of the premade suit, gloves, and helmet your driver will wear.If you want to go nuts and make your own helmet and gloves and driver suit and crew, you can probably use what you've learned above to get it done. Good luck!Remember the SRS Skin App Transfer Rules ? Those are still a thing! You need to makes sure you are under 10MB. It's actually a little less than that, I've read somewhere on these forums, so you should probably try to keep it under 9.5MB.If that number is over 9.5MB or so, you will need to be sure that there are no extraneous files in the directory. If there aren't, look at your biggest files and see if you can't re-export them with cheaper compression from Photoshop. If you've followed this guide you are already using DXT1 with simple alpha which is just about as small as it gets. Other things that may have happened is that you've been working with texture sizes that are bigger than they need to be. Your Skin.dds will benefit very little in game at 4048x4048. Scale that back to 2048x and you should be fine.The other thing you can do is simply not use portions that you've created. The last car I made (the dallara_f312) ended up going WAY over because I had copied someone's custom Hanook tyres from another skin. I just deleted that file so the tyres default to Michelin and all was well. This is yet another reason I don't bother creating my own Helmet/Gloves/Suit.Well, that was a fun couple of days! I hope this has helped at least one of you figure some of this out. At the very least I learned something, and now I have a record of how I did all of it for next time!If you have any questions about anything in this guide (or outside of it), feel free to reply to this thread and I'll do my best to help.And by all means, share screenshots of your work in here! I'd love to see it.