I have been playing Forza since one, on this or other gamertags, I am an artist IRL and have been painting for awhile now. But because of this I have a few gripes and concerns with wishes for fixes.
Gripes and Concerns:
Car skins with broken or awkward break lines. The following cars plus a few more have seriously awkward graphical skins, for ease of reading I will only list the worst examples. Ford F100, VW Beatle, almost every indy car. The ones that bother me the most are the newest ones in the DLC’s as those should be the most quality controlled.
Serious lack of new brushes and vinyl colors and types. There were more shapes in Forza 4 than in 5 or 6. There were also more paint color options with the three color pearls. I would like to see metallic vinyls, holographic vinyls, prismatic vinyls. And the ability to determine if vinyls on a matte paint are matte as well or glossy.
The Forza community, and Turn Ten say they support the painting community and they do a good job promoting those epic artists and getting them into Turn Ten select, Even giving some jobs with TT. But the above issues continue to plague the job of creating good paints. Plus there are obvious favoritism when it comes to their pack cars with their multiple surface types. If you can give this ability to your designers then you can give them to the community.
If you’ve been painting for as long on Forza as you say you would know that you can fine tune colours to have anything in the spectrum.
Metallic logos = Masking
As for the the breaking lines, those things would be on the pain in the (you know what) side to work around them especially on things like the F1/Indy/LMP cars
Except that game devs and game artists know exactly how much of a performance hit various materials and surfaces will have. You can’t just slap 4 different materials on an object and call it a day. To get that buttery smooth 60 fps, you have to make sure that object is not too complex to render properly. This is also why the vinyls are still kind of pixelated. To reduce the pressure on the graphics engine, the vinyls are still relatively low resolution compared to the pre-made designs.
There’s certainly a lot more layers to play with on FM5/FM6, and you can make pretty much paint anything you can imagine with the current set of shapes - in numerous different ways.
Some cars are more awkward to paint than others, some do have glitches - thing is they had glitches on earlier forza’s - I’m afraid you’re looking at the previous titles with somewhat rose tinted spectacles. Rather than seeing any of the positive steps T10 have taken to improve the paint process.
I knwo for a fact that some of the fonts and shapes from FM3 and FM4 are missing. It made it a little bit more difficult to replicate my 2002 Esprit livery from FM3 because the letters and shapes were different.
They may be different but are there less of them? The Op specifically said there were more shapes in FM4 - that was the point I was addressing - shapes have come and gone - I believe there are more now than ever - there are certainly more fonts than we’ve ever had before.
There are indeed fewer shapes, the animal list is completely gone, there are 4 less fonts, though they have added 20 new gradients which could be replicated with what had been previously available. But the ability to have metallic vinyls would allow finer paints as the masking takes more layers than adding.
I do indeed know how to change the paint colors to a myriad of shades, including changing colors that “can’t” be changed. But there are limits such as the one I mentioned the three color pearls, you can come close with a fine tuned opposite color scheming, (green red, orang blue, etc)and a transparent color layer but not quite the same as or as bright as a true paint.
I am not overlooking the earlier skin glitches I am simply expressing how in this generation of game those should have been QC’ed out by now.
I have just lurked around here since leaving Turn 10 but as the person who made many of the decisions on what stayed and what went away in regards to shapes, what you are saying is totally untrue. Yes fonts were taking out for licensing reasons but those were replaced by even more fonts than either 3 or 4 had. Then shapes, yes, 40 animal shapes were taking out (being a painter myself only 2 or 3 of the animals were actually useful in designs the rest were used in negative manners) then 80 new shapes were added that I created myself. So saying less shapes is totally not true, count the shape blades in FM6 and then count the shape blades in FM4.
Ignoring typefaces, a lot of the race-theme painters only use the basic shapes for the majority of their work; I’ve made almost all of my logos with less than a dozen shape types for example. It’s nice that PH as posted in this thread though, good to get some insight “from the other side of the curtain”.
Texture-mapping on certain cars (usually prototypes and single-seaters) can be annoying, as can unpaintable areas. I think most of the top painters are able to work around those limitations however.
Outside of the game itself I’m a little disappointed that Weekly Livery Contest winners don’t get the same exposure and recognition that Weekly Photo Contest winners do. We don’t see any winning livery designs shared on Facebook, Twitter or Forza Hub, and were it not for the Paint Forum community coming together to document images of the winning cars, people wouldn’t know what cars won each week’s contest. I’ve already emailed Turn 10 about this, hopefully something changes in the future as unfortunately there’s less point in creating shareable designs now when less people can appreciate them.
As a fellow Forza painter I agree PJ. They should give the same exposure and recognition to both parties if you ask me. Painters spend alot of time on their designs, searching up reference pics, creating logos etc, and showing them the cold shoulder doesn’t help motivate painters.
I am now from the same side of the curtain as you are Tierney…lol. But I don’t believe you will ever see prototype or race cars be as easily painted as street cars, it is just the nature of those models and the livery masks generally have to be kind of magical for them to be painted on in the first place because of how those types of cars have to be made.
So weirdness where race cars and prototypes are is kind of going to stay but there are definitely livery issues that should be brought up to be fixed. The ones I am referring to are off center insert from other side glitches, reversed shape placements (usually happens on wings or bumpers) or unpaintable areas (usually a result of bad livery mask). If you bring these up there is a chance they get fixed if not for 6 but maybe the next game.
Yeah, knowing how game textures work I can see how the complicated shapes of race cars can be a pain to initially model.
The off-centering and mis-alignments are awkward too but fortunately in my experience cars are usually 0.50 off in a direction or two, which is manageable.
Koshiro: At times I question whether I should spend my evenings on a Forza paint, or work on some “real artwork” that I can use elsewhere, like this:
Back in 2011/2012 I was working from home and had the time to do both, but as I’m working a 9-to-5 now I have to choose. Recently I’ve chosen Forza but that may change in the near future.
