GP2 Forum

Hey guys.

Was wondering if it is possible to make a change to the generic touring car shape. Greayhead sent me some great bitmaps, but I'm just not as skilled as him in making them and what with my wife and baby it's very frustrating when I can only give so much time to this and then things still look naff!!

Here's my real issue: The front end part which I've highlighted in yellow is my problem. When in the game it ends up looking like this: This doesn't really look right, nowhere near as good as Greyhead's efforts!!!

Is it at all possible, to edit the shape so that the "nosecone" element of the bitmap, doesn't interfere with the yellow-highlighted area? At the moment, the green-highlighted "nose" shaped element in this next bitmap interferes with the "front wing" element. Any chance we can edit this, or am I just being picky?

Greyhead is probably the best one to ask about this, but I'm sure you car editors know more about this than me.

Oh by the way, Greyhead. Thanks again for those bitmaps, but I was wondering if I could be really cheeky and ask if it is possible to send them again with the windscreens, lights, and bumpers all in place? Simply because I'm not the genius that you are, and all the programs I use to try to do it get me nowehere as I don't really know what I'm doing. As you can tell from my Hyundai bitmap, I like the front end to be spread across the wing quite easily, which is why I'm enquiring about the touring car shape changes!!!!

I understand this is probably quite lazy, but I do have good plans ahead for this forum if it can work if that helps at all.....

I would open the bitmap in Paint. Then take a complete white front and add the radiotors pixel by pixel with black colour and the lights with grey. Just look at a photo of the real car and try to copy it onto the bitmap via Paint on your own.

Then go into the game and check if proportions are right. If not go back to the bitmap and change what you think looks wrong. Then check again. It may be that you have to do this several times (sometimes maybe 30 times).

When you think everything has the right proportions and is on it's place, start refining it. That would mean take maybe three colours and smoothen the border between light and bodywork. Or resize parts of a photo and place them at it.

To add to what FK said, I would also put your headlights slightly higher.
The thing with it all is that it's mainly just trial and error. Even when you know the bitmap well, you still have to keep checking how it all looks in GP2. There's no real easy way to do it other than that. I've been painting these touring cars for a couple of years and have probably thirty different car templates (of varying quality, it has to be said) and over a hundred team bitmaps, even with all that practice I still have to check how they look while I'm painting them.

I asked a little question about this a while ago, because I was (and still am) toying around with some ideas in touring car land, and with feedback from Greyhead, I lowered some points in the middle of the "hood" of the shape, which helped ease off the effect visible in the screenshot here, too, that the headlights on the left and right outer side seem to angle downwards a bit. What I experimented with was setting the points 4, 5, 23 and 24 to -35 on the Z axis, that smoothed things out a little. (The thread is here)

Other than that, I have to support that getting somewhat authentic front and rear ends for touring cars involves a lot of trial and error.