Ok skinning...what's it all about eh? Well let's go to the very start : "What is a skin?"
The skin is the 2 dimensional image used to apply a colour scheme to a 3 dimensional shape. Too complex already?
Here's a skin :
It's got all the racing livery all drawn in and placed accordingly, but it's not actually the "shape" of a car is it? Unless you've seen a car that looks like a flattened out picture!
Now here's a 3 dimensional vehicle :
It's all lines making a the shape, but it's got no colour, it's just a 3 dimensional wireframe.
But if you place the flat 2D skin, over the 3D shape, you end up with this :
It's now the shape of the car, and with the colours of the skin. So are we all clear about this now? Onwards we march....
IMPORTANT : This is not a guide on how to use your own painter or graphics application! Each application and version is different from each other, and to highlight specifically how a job is done in just one immediately confuses anyone who's using something else and can't think very logically. I've tried using M$ Winblows Paint, Paint.net, Gimp, Macromedia Fireworks/Flash/Freehand, Xara Extreme, Paint shop Pro, and Photoshop, and you know what.....none of them have the same features, the same icons, the same layouts, or the same labelling. But they can all get the job done if you follow the guide that follows. So I'm not going to say "do it this way", because that only works if you use the same application yourself, and there are hundreds of different routes and methods that all lead to the same conclusion. So this is only a rough indicator of some techniques you can use to acheive some level of understanding of how to do the job of painting a skin for Trackmania use, but it's not a guide on how to use your own applications. I cannot emphasise this strongly enough. If you are planning on learning something new, use a simple application, and read it's own HELP file subjects as you use it. It's a step by step process of : need something? Search the HELP using keywords that indicate what you can't do, read help subjects that seem possible answers, and use that information to get the job done.
ATTENTION : So please do not post hundreds of messages asking me to detail exactly how to do each and every step in tiny exact detail in a 10 different applications and many MANY versions! I'll will not waste my time, read your own HELP (sadly within a week I'd gotten more than 30 just such e-mails from the truly stupid, which forced me to remove this guide before the flood gates opened!!) and use your own graphics software.
If you can't think latterally enough to understand that a piece of charcoal and a cave wall, a stick of chalk and a slate, a crayon and a card, a pencil or pen and paper, or a paint brush and a wall, are the same as a graphics application and a car skin, then go away, no one can help you here!
Now with that advice and abuse burning into your last working brain cell, onto some hopefully useful tips on how to get the job done, and why.
The first car I ever painted a skin for was a terrific Lancia Delta model imported / created by DooMinicK for the Trackmania Sunrise Island demo, as shown below :
This was crying out for some Martini Racing Integrale rally
liveries, but after a while waiting none appeared. Too hard a job possibly because the model
was painted completely black, and had no template, to show how the skin was
laid out. Here's how the car looked in the Trackmania Sunrise painter below
:
But as the 2D skin is completely black, it actually looks like
this :
Well that's not much use is it? What
is painted, and where? How can I paint racing liveries on, if I don't know how
the skin is laid out, and where? This is where a bit of sneaky thinking, and
the Trackmania painter comes in. It's quite simple, so read on...
The first thing to do is manually brush paint the whole car white, which will show the layout later. DO NOT flood fill the whole car a solid colour, as this creates nothing helpful. Now choose the circle tool as the paintbrush, and set it's size slider to the smallest possible, and choose a colour. As carefully as you can, draw around the edges of the car body. Up around the wheel arches, along panel lines and edging, around windows, grills and light openings etc. Don't worry if it's all shaky, and horrible looking, this is only a rough guide to the layout, nothing high end.....yet!
Depending on how many body parts you outline, you might also wish to use several
colour dots to aid you later. Put a red dot on the right hand side panels, and
green on the left, and you won't make the mistake of spending hours drawing
on the car to find all your text and graphics are back to front! Now save the
altered skin in the painter, using a new filename. It's always good practice
to save new files during each step, so if you make a mess of it at one stage,
you can go back one step, and not lose all your work.
Once this newly lined and highlighted car skin is saved, it needs to be opened in a real graphics application, that can do things that the Trackmania painter can't. But how to open the "diffuse.dds" skin file in the car zip? What you need is a brilliantly simple little application called "DXTBMP".
Let's detail this a little bit, but again it's really easy to use.
Open the car "zip" and drag and drop the "diffuse.dds"
into the main area of DXTBMP and do not
close the zip! Using the highlighted icons shown above, you can now browse and
choose your own graphics application, and use the "export" to send
the now opened 2D skin to it. In my case as the Martini rally car has lots of
smooth lines and swoops of colour, I'll use an application that can do does terrifically
sharp vertex lines very quickly, Macromedia Flash. This isn't even a graphics app, as it's really for web based animations, but it's bloody brilliant for doing smooth lines and swoops....so that's my choice on this occasion. but think about it, if this is not ideal, but itcan do the job litterally anything else can do just as well!
Now with the white painted, and outlined Lancia dds dropped into place, and Flash chosen as the editor, it now looks like this :
Now that's more like it! instead of just a black skin with no detail, you can
see how the body panels are all laid out, as well as extra panel edging and details I painted in. Disregard the wheel, as that was not mapped
onto the 3D vehicle by Doominick. So all that's left to do (the tricky time consuming graphics
work) is actually paint all the details into the areas shown in the outlined skin. Below, I've now used DXTBMP to send the layout image to my chosen editor (do not close DXTBMP while you are painting,
as it can update the changes later!) and I've also got some images of the rally
car open to help me in drawing the racing livery properly and realistically
:
Now this is the point at which we will all be different. Someone will be using
the Gimp, someone will be using Paint.net, another will be using Photoshop, or Freehand
or Paint Shop Pro etc....so use these examples to accomplish something similar in your own apps and methods. Screen grabs here will NOT look
like the apps you are using, and you'll not have anything even looking
like these features either, so don't trying to follow them closely. Flash is a very complicated application and I wouldn't recommend anyone to use it for this sort of work, unless you're already familiar with it.
In this image below I've zoomed into a picture of the rally car so I can see the logos and sizing, and have begun the first steps to re-creating these curved and angled fonts.
This is not as easy as say "typing", but if you've got a curving font that can type "Magneti Marelli" you're luckier than I was. I had to manually recreate all the fonts and logos, and it wasn't easy, or quick! So if you're learning and have no apparent artistic skills, or application experience, do not try a high end rally car that needs all logos manually recreated! Be warned.
There is one HUGE tip though : use a graphics app that works in layers. Layers allow you to place parts of the skin on their own layers and move them about individually (like parts on tracing paper) without moving the rest of the parts and their respective layers. In the image below you can see I've finished all the logos with Martini stripes, and I've shown as many of the layers as I needed to recreate them, to give you an idea of how many it required and it's complexity.
Overall using layers saves a huge amount of time, as you're only dealing with small parts, but it can be confusing labelling each layer so you know what it contains. However, as more drawing programs
are using layers now, it's a real skill worth learning. I've hidden the white body colour layer in this next screen grab below to show the original blue outline skin so you can see that all the logs and parts are aligned over the relevant panels that the game painter allowed me to find. AND THAT'S ALL THERE IS TO IT!
I now save the newly edited image, then swap to DXTBMP, which has been sitting waiting in the background (remember I advised you to NOT close it!) and I use the "refresh" to update the main coloured image with the new car. You can also export the image from your editor as a PNG, a BMP, a TGA, or a JPG and use DXTBMP's "open image" before saving the updates, but this will option will lose the alpha channel image which is used for the car shine. So if you do it this way export the small black and white alpha channel image first, import the new coloured image, then re-import the alpha channel. Here's how the updated image looks in DXTBMP below :
Now this part is vitally important in all cases. How to save!
It's import that you save the updated "diffuse.dds" file as a DXT5 file type, or you will create a car skin that won't appear, or will generate a "mipmapping" error.
Now swap to your still open zip (I use Winzip by the way, which seems the logical choice for handling zip files properly) which again has been sitting waiting in the background. If it's any good at all, it'll hopefully have detected that the "diffuse.dds" file has been altered, and will prompt you to update with the new file, which you should allow.
You've now seen how to highlight car panels on skins, how to open the dds file, how to export them to a graphics app, but how to actually paint and use your own software features is up to your own artistic skills. After that, you've imported the newly painted file, and updated the zip...and you're now ready to go!
And there it is, in all it's glory, although the TM painter visually lowers it's resolution quality to a measly 512 x 512, if you use an external painter you can use a much clearer and higher resolution. I actually used 1024 x 2048 and you can see this on the screen grab on the "history" page as well as if you happen to see OTMB TopTrog, he'll be racing about using it.
I'd now like to not thank the person who then quickly "stole" the Martini skin off TopTrog, and without my authoristation plonked it on the TM Skin Centre (only 600 downloads per week!) then took bows and awards for work they didn't even do, although someone did try to credit Top Trog with the work later I'm told! lol