Skinning Assetto Corsa Cars from Nothing using Mudbox and Photoshop

Russell Sobie · Feb 10, 2018

This Tutorial was originally posted over on the simracingsystem.com forums where I do all of my skinning. I was constructing it AS I was learning the process, so obviously some of this is going to be "not the best way" to do certain things. I was going to make a post just linking the original tutorial, but after asking permission to the folks here at RD, it was suggested that I just post the tutorial in its entirety here! That said, let's get started!

NOTE: I have added notices before or during the parts where it is SRS specific, like making sure your skin is under 10MB (a limitation of the SRS Skin Transfer App used to automatically share custom skins just before races start). Follow the red instructions so you aren't doing extra work where you don't need to!

Software Used

The Goal
Since it is almost the end of the current season and I don't know what cars are going to be used next season, I figured I'd learn on something that I figure will EVENTUALLY come up. So the McLaren 650 GT3 is what I'll be doing. The goal is to replicate my typical Red/Black two tone design, complete with a skull on the hood using the most efficient means... rather than just fumbling around with a wireframe texture in Photoshop like I have been doing.

Disclaimers

I'm not a professional artist. I have a background in graphic design and some 3d modeling but make no claims to know the best way to do any of this stuff. This is just what I've learned jumping in head first.
Also, Mudbox crashes. A lot. Save often!

Extracting 3D Model
I started by using a program called 3DSimED3. Unfortunately it only has a 20 day trial, and today it ran out. Normally in this situation I would just purchase a licence and call it a day, but I was curious if there was a better way to just get a 3D model out of the .kn5 files that Kunos includes in a normal installation of Assetto Corsa. My googling lead me to this youtube video: Assetto Corsa KN5 Converter & Download

I was unable to find the origin of kn5conv.exe, but I ran a few scans on it and it turned up nothing, so I gave it a try. Works great. Here's how _I_ would recommend extracting the model (as opposed to how the youtuber above does it):

Create a Workspace for your new skin outside of your Assetto Corsa file structure. Here's mine: S:\GameFiles\AssettoCorsaStuff\cars\ks_mclaren_650_gt3\workspace
Copy the mclaren_650_gt3.kn5 file from your Assetto Corsa installation into this folder (you can find it here: ...\Steam\steamapps\common\assettocorsa\content\cars\ks_mclaren_650_gt3.kn5)
Place an instance of kn5conv.exe in your workspace folder.
Drag the KN5 file onto kn5conv.exe and watch the magic happen.

The result is that in your workspace folder you will now have a number of file types that can be understood by a number of 3D software packages, such as Mudbox and Blender. I gave Blender my best shot, but couldn't figure it out and there was not a good tutorial I could find that would clue me into how it works. I did find one that was enough help so that I could get going in Mudbox, so that's what I'll be doing.

If interested, here's the youtube video I found that got me going:

Cleaning Model For Painting
Once you have an .FBX file for the car you want to paint, you can import it into Mudbox.

Open Mudbox.
File>Import...
Navigate to your workspace folder and import mclaren_650_gt3.fbx
Save the scene as a .mud file (mclaren_650_gt3.mud) in your workspace folder.

This is ALL of the geometry and a bunch of other nodes/objects that you will not need for the purposes of creating a livery. So we must now delete all of the stuff we don't care about. This will speed up performance within Mudbox, as well as avoid Mudbox wanting you to add additional materials every time you attempt to paint on a different mesh. In other words, we want to avoid painting on the windshield when what we want to do is paint on the car's body. Here's what I did to go through everything:

Change to the Object List.
Hide everything in the Object List
Show only Geometry
Switch to Object Selection, and turn on Mirror on the X axis.
Select geometry in the scene view that you know you will not be painting. Windows, tires, brake discs, windshield wipers, whatever. All that should be left are the panels of the car you want to put your design on.
Save your .mud file. You may want to save it as a different .mud file than the original, in case you realize later you deleted some part of the geometry you actually wanted!

The end result should look a bit like this:

...continued next post...

Russell Sobie · Feb 10, 2018

Scaling Up the Model
Once you have the extra bits deleted, you'll get better results if you scale up the model to like... 100x as big as it usually comes in as from the .fbx. To do this, follow these steps:

Switch to the Select/Move Tools tab and select the Selection tool.
Select all of the meshes from the Object list that you have left.
Deselect one of the meshes that is towards the center of the car, and then reselect that same mesh so that the manipulator is down the middle of the car on the X axis.
Select to the Scale tool.
Carefully click and drag to the right on the White Cube in the middle of the manipulator to scale up ALL of the meshes at once.
Continue doing this until the car's meshes are roughly big enough to fill the four grid squares around the center of the scene. Should look like this:

Painting Using Stencils
The best part about painting on a 3D model is the ability to span mulitple panels without having to line up vertices on a 2D wireframe texture in something like Photoshop. And in the past, my somewhat simple two-tone Black/Red design has been actually quite complex since from the wireframe it is sometimes difficult to tell what triangles are on the left side of the car and what are on the right. So one of my main reasons for learning this method of painting is to streamline this process. Hopefully it works out well!

Start with a stock image. In this case, I've created a fairly large texture that replicates the Black/Red with triangles motif I typically put on my cars. It looks like this:
Save your stock image in an easy to find place that you can get to within MudBox. I created the following path for such a purpose: S:\GameFiles\AssettoCorsaStuff\StockImages\
In Mudbox, switch to the Image Browser tab and navigate to your images folder.
Select your image, then set it to be used as a stencil.
Switch back to 3D View, go into Paint Tools, and select Projection.
Switch to Right camera view, and turn on Orthogonal (instead of Perspective).
Position the stencil where you want it (controls should be displayed on the bottom left, but they are S+MiddleButton to Move, S+Left Button to Rotate, S+Right Button to Scale, Q to Hide/Show).
Hold down space, click and drag on the Scale Brush tool, and resize your brush to match how fat you want to paint your stencil. Something quite large will do best.
Left click on an obvious part of the car's body to begin painting. You will be prompted to create a new Paint Layer. Make sure the image size is 2048 (bigger and you'll have a hard time keeping your skin under 10MB [Edit: this is a limitation of the SRS Skin Transfer App... if you are making your skins for a skin pack, you can make them as stupidly huge as you want!], smaller and it will look like garbage).
Name this layer something that makes sense, like BasePaint.
Continue to paint your projected stencil along the entire side of the car by left click dragging all along where you want to paint.
If you still have Mirroring set to the X axis, you'll probably notice that now the whole car (both sides) are red. But that's not what we want for a car in the SOB Racing Fleet! Disable mirroring, switch to Top view, and paint around using the stencil until you have most everything painted correctly. It doesn't have to be perfect since we are going to do finishing touches in Photoshop later anyway.
Clean up spots that have stretched texture painting with the regular Paint Brush tool as needed.

Notes: During this process I realized that painting the rims during this stage is a mistake, so I deleted the rim objects as well. Additionally, I think I am going to improve my stencil pattern so that I have a more spread out pattern of triangles. What I used here is going to require a bit of additional love in Photoshop that I think I can get done in Mudbox for future car projects.

The final result of using the 3D stencil to get my two tone going ended up looking like this. Not bad for a first go, I think!

...continued next post...

Russell Sobie · Feb 10, 2018

Exporting Texture Map to PSD
Once you have your BasePaint ready for 2D editing and other stuff, you need to export your work.

Switch to the UV View, Show Layers, right click on your texture and select Export Selected...
In Windows Explore, browse to where your "texture" folder that was extracted by kn5conv.exe.
Look for a .dds file that looks like it might be the external skin file. In the case of this car, this file is called "skin.dds".
Back in Mudbox, navigate your Export Paint Layer dialog to your workspace folder.
Type in the same file name as the .dds file you found in the texture folder (skin).
Change Save as Type to "Photoshop [16 bit Interger, RGBA] (*.psd) and save.

This will be used as one layer in your final PSD file, and CAN be used to get the wireframe. In the case of the McLaren, I think something went wrong... likely when I started trying to paint the rims, which caused the wireframe to glitch out. I have a plan to address that later on when we get to using Content Manager.

[Edit: The following section contains details on how to get your skin working for simracingsystem's skin transfer app. You'll still need to set up a skin directory, but you won't have to adhere to the rules such as total file size or folder naming!]

Setting Up Custom Livery Folder, and Folder Shortcuts
There are rules when it comes to having a valid skin for the SRS skin transfer app. Rules can be found here.
To easily adhere to those rules, it is important to keep working files out of your custom livery folder, mostly to stay below 10MB, but also just because it's more organized. Here's how I do things:

Find the folder in your Assetto Corsa installation for the car you want to make your livery for. In my case the path is this:
C:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common\assettocorsa\content\cars\ks_mclaren_650_gt3\skins\
Look through the other folders in this directory for a preview of a car that somewhat matches your color scheme (this will be for glove/crew/helmet selection later).
When you find one you think will work, select that folder, hit Ctrl+C (copy) and then Ctrl+P (paste) to create a copy of that skin in the same directory.
Rename that directory to your SRS name according to the rules. (for me, that's "russell_sobie" without the quotes, of course).
Select this new folder and hit Ctrl+C again.
Navigate back to where your workspace folder is in Windows Explorer.
Right click in that directory and select "Paste Shortcut".

What you've now done is 1) set up your skin directory and 2) created a really fast way to save stuff from your workspace folder to where it needs to go to see it in game! Trust me, you'll want this.

Quick Custom Livery Setup
Just to start seeing our livery in game quickly, follow these steps after you've done the previous section:

Open your skin folder (you can even use the shortcut you just created!).
Open the "livery.png" in Photoshop (or whatever).
Alter this image however you want to identify your skin in the list of liveries. This is the little square image that shows up in skin selection.
Open the "ui_skin.json" in a decent text editor (I like notepad++, it's free and good).
Type in your skin's name between the quotes after "skinname".
Type in your driver name as it appears in game for SRS races.
Populate the rest of this file as you feel appropriate. I put in USA for country, SOB Racing for team, and 73 for number. I don't know what priority does.

Using Existing Templates
For most Kunos cars, official developer templates have been provided. Not all of them, but most. It will save a bit of time for you if one is available. There happens to be one for the McLaren 650 GT3. You find official skin templates here:

...\Steam\steamapps\common\assettocorsa\sdk\dev\skin_templates\

And the official skin for the McLaren is here:

...\Steam\steamapps\common\assettocorsa\sdk\dev\skin_templates\template mclaren650s gt3

Copy these PSD files to your workspace directory.

Preparing Your Own Template
This is much easier than it seems if you have Content Manager installed. I highly recommend it. It's great for an improved front end for Assetto Corsa, works great with the SRS API, and allows you do to the following to create your own skin templates... even for cars that don't have official ones available for download! Grab it here: Content Manager for Assetto Corsa

Install Content Manager if you haven't already.
Navigate to your Assetto Corsa install where the car you wish to create a template for resides. In the case of the McLaren, we go here:
...\Steam\steamapps\common\assettocorsa\content\cars\ks_mclaren_650_gt3
Double click on the large .kn5 file. This should automatically open the model in Content Manager using their custom showroom feature.
Select the Skin pulldown and find your newly created livery. It'll still look like the skin you copied for now; that is expected.
Click on a major part of the body, which will make it glow and show the name of the geometry as well as the textures used for that part.
Click on the dot stack button to the right of the texture used for "txDiffuse". In this case it is "Skin.dds".
In the new dialog that appears, click the pulldown menu for View Mapping and select 2048x2048
Click the Floppy Disk icon in the lower right and save to your workspace directory as "skin_wireframe.png" or something else meaningful.
Click the X to close the wireframe.
Click the pulldown menu for Calculate AO and select 2048x2048 as well. Wait for it to finish rendering.
Click the Floppy Disk icon in the lower right and save to your workspace directory as "skin_AO.dds" or something else meaningful.
Click the X to close the AO preview. Click Close. Click the X to close the Content Manager application for now.

Creating Template From Wireframe and AO
Here's where we find out that the McLaren 650 GT3 has a UV mapping error! Open the following files in Photoshop from previous steps in the tutorial:

skin.psd (from Mudbox Export)
skin_AO.dds (from Content Manager AO render)
skin_wireframe.png (from Content Manager Wireframe extraction)

In the skin_AO.dds image, hit Ctrl+A, then Ctrl+C to copy everything to the clipboard.
In the skin.psd layout, hit Ctrl+P
In the skin_wireframe.png image, hit Ctrl+A, then Ctrl+C to copy everything to the clipboard.
In the skin.psd layout, hit Ctrl+P

Your Photoshop Layers panel should look a bit something like this:

The wireframe that I got from Content Manager is slightly different from the one obtained through mudbox, so I'm going to keep them both. Here's what I'm doing next (follow along if you want!):

Unlock "Mudbox Base Mesh" layer and rename it to "mbwire"
Rename Layer 2 to "cmwire"
Select mbwire and cmwire and drag them to the folder icon to group them.
Rename the group to "wire"
Rename Layer 1 to "AO" and set it's draw type (?) from Normal to Multiply.
Rename "Mudbox Texture Layer" to "basepaint"

You should now see much of the base paint being affected by the AO layer. It's time to see this thing in game!

...continued next post...

Russell Sobie · Feb 10, 2018

Exporting DDS and Previewing For the First Time!

Still in Photoshop, File>Save As...
Change Format to "D3D/DDS (*.DDS;*.DDS)"
If you set up your shortcut to your custom livery folder like above, you should see a shortcut folder right there with your name on it. Double click on that! Otherwise, navigate to your custom livery folder deep in the Assetto Corsa installation directory.
Assuming your file name is already correct (i.e. "skin.dds), Click Save. Confirm any questions about overwriting the existing file.
Set your NVIDIA dds Format settings to the following:
Click save and wait a short period of time for it to finish.
In Windows Explorer, navigate back to the folder with the original .kn5 file for this car and double click on it again.
Select your livery from the Skin pulldown.

Tada!

Next time? We put on some "simulated sponsor" logos!

Logo and Numbers Stencil
After thinking about it a very little bit, it becomes obvious that using Mudbox + Stencil Projection is going to be the easiest way to place logos and racing numbers on the car in good spots. At least initially. We can always tweak/redo them in Photoshop once we have everything laid out in Mudbox. In order to speed things along, I took all of the "simulated sponsors" (logos of companies or organizations that I like but are in no way affiliated with that I like to put on my liveries as a gag) that I normally put on my cars and put them nice and big into a single 2048x2048 texture with a transparent background. I also added my number, my "racing team name" my online nick name and that giant skull that I hand painted back when Simpit was racing BMWs. Looks like this:

Saved that off to my StockImages folder then went into Mudbox and opened up the .mud file for the McLaren again. And then...

Switch to Paint Tools, Projection, and turn off the Mirror setting.
Click on the view box to show the car from the Right side, and set it to Orthographic (instead of Perspective).
In the Image Browser, browse to your StockImages folder, select the correct image for the stencil, then Set Stencil.
Adjust the position of the car in the scene, as well as the Stencil to line up one of the items in the stencil. Remember to hit Q to toggle viewing the Stencil.
Adjust the size of your brush so it isn't so big it paints more of the stencil than you want, and then paint down the first item on the right side. I started with the number with the black outline for the right side.
Well that looks kinda dumb unless you happen to be on the side of the track JUST SO. Always check your work!
Repeat until you have all the stuff all over the car how you like.
Finally, export the Diffuse layer as you did the BasePaint before.
Open your skin.psd along side your exported .psd file, copy everything from the non-wireframe layer and paste it into your skin.psd.
Rename the layer "logos" or something else appropriate.

Notes and Tips:

If you need to erase something you've stenciled on (using the Paint Erase tool under Paint Tools), you have to hide the stencil for it to work (Q).
It is easier to line up stuff like text on both sides if you use Mirroring on a side you can really read well. In my case, putting the text on the RED side would have been the easiest. After that, we'll replace the backwards text with correctly placed text in Photoshop.
Display>Toggle Flat Lighting is helpful because it will remove the bright lights on some surface angles so you can see what you are doing easier.
Be sure you have your color set to WHITE when painting stencils.
BIG ONE: Be sure you are in the right layer when painting your stencil items. I painted all my logos onto my BasePaint layer on accident and had to start over!
ANOTHER BIG ONE: If you separate your different items into layers and use "Export Channel to PSD" you will get ALL of your layers, including the wireframe, in one PSD. This might actually be a better way to start off your PSD than constructing one like we did in a previous section!
FINAL BIG ONE: If you have Photoshop open when you do the above tip, it will automatically open it in Photoshop, and you can edit ON THE FLY. Edit: This turned out to be somewhat problematic. It is clear that there is a way to work like this back and forth cleanly, but I had a few mishaps and overwrote some data. At a certain point I had to say "Okay, no more editing in Mudbox... it's Photoshop only from here on out." Your results may vary!

...continued next post...

Russell Sobie · Feb 10, 2018

Miscellaneous Problem Solving
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:

Using 2D instead of 3D for base paint finalization

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.

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

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...

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

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:

Creating a Preview
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:

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.

You should end up with something like this:

Odds and Ends: Crew, Helmet, Gloves, Suit
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!

[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

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.

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.

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.

Conclusion
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.

HenkySA · Feb 10, 2018

many thanks for this tutorial Russell!

i'm always using the Photoshop's 3D feature just to preview and merge down the decals on the body parts which are hard to placed and adjust directly on 2D template due to nature of AO itself (like the 650s which have many things separated, then sometimes if i don't want to bother to draw on the 3D, i should do cut layer and move again and again on 2D until it's good, but sometimes (mostly) PS trick me). rest i do on 2D. minus thing if we use PS's 3D that we should make our 3D layers bigger twice or even thrice the 2D UV layer innit or if you merge some layer down with the 3D layer lesser than 4000px if the skin is 2048 for example, it'll result an odd distortions and crush the quality of the merged texture(s) we have drawn/positioned.

but with Mudbox, it seems everything will be easier especially if you want to place the image art on the car with no more annoying select-cut-and-move again and keep the quality!

AccAkut · Feb 10, 2018

probably a nice guide, but due to it starting with "how do I crack Kunos cars", I wouldn't be surprised if a mod deletes it.

Russell Sobie · Feb 10, 2018

AccAkut said:
probably a nice guide, but due to it starting with "how do I crack Kunos cars", I wouldn't be surprised if a mod deletes it.

I was in touch with a mod about posting it here. Perhaps he/she didn't read my tutorial before suggesting I put it up here. As far as cracking Kunos cars, I wasn't aware there was anything nefarious going on there. They are more than welcome to edit out the offending portions for kn5conv.exe or delete the thread. Fine by me!

Russell Sobie · Feb 17, 2018

Russell Sobie · Feb 18, 2018

Russell Sobie · Feb 18, 2018

Russell Sobie · Feb 21, 2018

Russell Sobie · Feb 28, 2018

Russell Sobie · Mar 3, 2018

Russell Sobie · Mar 5, 2018

Russell Sobie · Mar 9, 2018

Russell Sobie · Mar 31, 2018

I don't know if bumping this thread is kosher, but I haven't heard any complaints. I'm not going to post everything between Ep 8 and where I am now (Ep 22), but this is my latest, where I do quite a few nifty things to get the Martini Racing theme on the car... in a fashion.

Phil Etty · Apr 15, 2018

Great guide and thanks for sharing. I have spent many an hour trying to get paint to line up properly when overlapping panels in Photoshop, this will make it so much easier and quicker

I have a Mudbox related query which is probably me being stupid. It is to do with when I open the 3d model and the size of the circle selection cursor. I can only get mine to be really small which means I have to select each panel of my simplified model, paint it and get a layer for that part and so on. Hopefully the screen shots below explain what I mean. First one is what I see, note the very small square just above the front door handle, with no outer circle around it:

And then compare that to the initial You Tube Video below which I have tried to pause at a moment where you can see the outer circle around the square:

How do I activate the outer circle as whatever I fiddle with, I don't seem able to?

Thanks in advance

Russell Sobie · Apr 16, 2018

Brush size is controlled either by using brackets ( [ and ] ) or by holding down the B key and and moving the mouse either left/right or up/down. One trick with the B key however is that you need to have your mouse OVER some geometry. If you try to do it out in space, it wigs out for some reason. It's like it needs to know the scale of the thing you are about to paint on before it can adequately alter the brush size.

B also puts you in Brush mode... so you need to switch back to whatever tool you were using (like object selection). I find that learning existing or creating hotkeys to the following makes my life a lot simpler:

Brush, Stencil, Object Selection, Erase, Isolate (super useful for liveries), Focus View

Another tip I would add is that once you remove all the geometry you don't need to paint, select all of the remaining geometry, and then scale the entire car up so it fits better within the scene. I find that scaling the car up so that it fits just within 4 default grid squares like so makes it so that Focus View yields good results without having the geometry clip your camera poorly.

Phil Etty · Apr 16, 2018

Hi,

Thanks for your reply. I don't think I explained myself properly (or I am getting myself more confused!).

On the below image, I have managed to project a rectangle on to my model, move it and size it accordingly. When it came to painting the stencil on, I have had to paint each object the stencil goes over separately. In so doing, each object has an individual paint layer, rather than 1 paint layer over all of the (3 or so) objects painted. On the video you have linked (and others I have seen) the cursor is surrounded by a large circle, but all I get is a tiny, square. If you look just above the the door handle, you can just about spot this tiny square. I change the size of the brush, but my square doesn't get any bigger. I am able to paint a larger area after making my brush bigger, but only one object at a time. Is that how it is, or am I doing something wrong?