Hello,
can please someone help me. I try to design my own vinyls. Is it possible to make sections of my vinyl transparent. If I use the mask-tool, the shapes become trnasparent, but the background is falling back to the base color of the car. How can I fix that so that the transparent part shows the layer below the vinyl and not the base color of the the car? Every answer can be helpful.
thank a lot
You can’t make a mask show the layer below. You can use transparency with the shapes that are there.
Masks always go to the paint at this point. You would have to create a vinyl that matches what you want to show where your mask is placed, to use in place of the mask.
When I have made vinyls and used a mask to cut through, occasionally I want to change the “under layer” to something other than the car color. If you click on the mask layer, you can select to turn the mask into a shape. This actually keeps the mask layer but puts another layer right on top of it that is a the same size and shape as the mask. So essentially, it is now a colored layer. You can now change the color to be whatever color matches the layer you want it to be. You can then also delete the mask layer if it is no longer needed. (By the way, you can also do the opposite, change a shape into a mask) If, however, part of that mask layer is cutting through a section you don’t want it to…add a shape overtop of that section of the mask to cover it up.
So as an example: let’s say the car was a color not available in vinyl - gold. But the hood you wanted in black, so you have a large black square covering the hood, making it now black. You also want a dark blue letter D on the hood. You choose the letter D (or the hollow semi-circle) and place it on the hood, coloring it blue. Hmm, the dark blue against the black doesn’t stand out so well. You decide to make the letter D a mask instead, and now the letter D is gold colored from the actual paint color of the car. But you really wanted blue in there somehow. You click the mask layer, choose Make Shape From Mask and choose the dark blue color. The dark blue D now completely covers the mask D so no gold is shown, the same as before. But if you now slightly reduce the size of the dark blue D, the mask from underneath now serves as an outline. You now decide that outline will look better in white, so you click the mask D layer, and select Make Shape From Mask and change the color to white. You now have a shape overtop of a shape overtop of a mask. You can proceed to alternate how you do this layer by layer to get some pretty creative results.
Hope that helps, it takes a little getting used to.
Source: still getting used to it. lol
That’s the long way of doing it. You could skip a lot of those steps by cut/paste the colour layer above the mask layer. When you make a mask it keeps the colour layer, but it is under the mask layer which is a waste of a layer. Move it above the mask as a colour layer… there is a shortcut button press for cut/paste, on the Xbox One it is X (Cut) Y (Paste). Then you can make that a transparent colour, but you can’t show a layer under a mask.
Thanks for your reply, your answer helps a lot, but not solves my problem. I try to explain what I’m trying to do. I got a logo it’s a blue circle with a “s” in its center, the “S” should be transparent so that the whole logo can be placed onto a car. The background of the “S” should appear in the same color like the vinyl it is placed on. Right now the mask cuts through all layers, but I just want to set it transparent in the circle of my logo. Maybe I misunderstood your explanation, and I can’t find the failure I’m making. I hope you understand what I’m trying to do and give me advice how to solve my problem.
True, Aquapainter, absolutely true. Was just trying to come up with an example to highlight the mask vs colored layer bit.
Okay, I think I know what you are saying. So let’s say the hood of your car (or whatever location you are trying to put your logo) has a flame job going over it (or gradient or whatever). If you use a mask, it cuts through all that down to the paint, which is not what you want. You want the flame job to show through part of the logo.
My suggestion (free to be improved upon by the people who are considerably better painters than I) is to use negative space. If the ‘S’ in question is an actual letter…or if it is a design you made (like Superman’s ‘S’ is a stylized S) then make a new vinyl. Put that S or image in the center. Surround the S with a hollow circle. And use shapes around it to fill the space around the S. When you remove the ‘S’ layer, what should be left is a negative space S. So now, anything that logo is put overtop of, will show through the space on the S. And if your logo involves other parts to it, they can be now layered on top of it.
Does that help?
The livery creator in FM6 did not have a mask. But I used this technique on the back of a Ford F100 so I could blackout, or change the tailgate color, but keep the FORD lettering to whatever color I wanted. Did the same thing on a Nissan Skyline so the “Skyline” part stood out from the design that went over it.