As with every Forza title since Forza Motorsport 2, Forza Motorsport 7 will feature a livery editor, allowing players to paint their car in a near infinite number of ways and share their creations with the community.
At the time of writing very little is known about the Forza Motorsport 7 livery editor, other than the following which has been confirmed in interviews and articles:
Players can import their work from Forza Motorsport 5, Forza Motorsport 6, Forza Horizon 2 and Forza Horizon 3.
Glass surfaces and windshield banners will not be paintable in Forza Motorsport 7.
This thread is mainly going to be a place for discussion about the livery editor, what we can and cannot expect it to do, and to also take a look at livery editors in other racing games to see if some things may get implemented in the future. This is not a wishlist thread; if you’re listing off various features you’d like to see go here.
As a Forza painter I spotted some things in the screenshots and videos that would be nice “quality of life improvements” if they were to be added to a future Forza title.
[Choose Background] would presumably let you change the background behind your car when you’re painting it. In Forza titles we are currently limited to our Homespaces but we can see here that a neutral background is being used. One could also presume that you could place the car on a track in order to see how it would look “in situ”.
[Racing Item] most likely refers to numberboards, driver names etc… In Forza games we have to create those manually, where in theory this will allow you to set a racing number/name independent of the livery design. Gran Turismo 6 also had this feature in a more limited fashion as you could customise your numberboard independent of the car’s default livery.
Here we see the [Manufacturer decal] section, similar to what we have in Forza. One thing to note right away is that there are far more suported decals than any Forza game, so many in fact they’re split into 3 alphabetical categories.
Another thing to note is that multiple variants of each Manufacturer decal are available, such as a single colour alternative, or versions with and without slogans. In Forza you get 1 decal for each manufacturer, and if you don’t want to use it in its native form you have to create an all-new Vinyl group from scratch.
Here we see RGB colour values for the selected paint colour. It is unclear if this is the only way to select a paint colour or if there are sliders available also. Forza uses a HSB slider system which is more understandable for the common user, but an alternative slider would also be useful for graphic designers who spend most of their days working with RGB values (CMYK is print-based, and not worth bringing up here).
Side mirrors can be painted. This is currently not a selectable option in Forza.
The layer cap is 300, whereas in Forza it’s 3,000. However, that may still be manageable due to the wide array of Manufacturer Decals available. A typical replica of one of those in Forza can be anywhere between 50 and 200 layers.
(1) Not sure if you’re referring specifically to painting side mirrors like you’d paint the car or maybe referring to placing vinyls on side mirrors. But there are many cars in the Forza games where you can paint the side mirrors.
(2) 300 layers is not near enough for me in any scenario. No matter how many more included manufacturer decals there may be. There are some times that I have to struggle to get a single side or top done in under 3000 layers.
One thing I forgot to mention when bringing up the Gran Turismo Sport editor: you also have the option of editing your racing helmet and race suit.
I haven’t seen any footage of this in action but it is a different approach to Forza Motorsport 7 which instead lets you choose from one of 300 pre-defined race suits.
It will be interesting to see how the livery editor will work since PC players will have a mouse and keyboard. Painters may have an advantage on PC that console painters don’t.
As long as the functionality remains the same across platforms … same shapes, color palette, and options for move, size, spin, skew and transparency … I can’t see how one input device could have an advantage over the other (keyboard vs. controller). No matter how you get there, the end result will still be the same.
And as for the state of the vinyl editor in general and any hopes of enhancements in FM7 … I would like to be optimistic … but years of playing recent Horizon and Motorsport games have left me with a feeling that once again we will see basically the same paint booth and vinyl editor as we have for the last however many games. Even though the community has repeatedly made many requests and many good suggestions for lots of new features or improvements over the years.
I think turn 10 have been quite lazy in overhauling the paint editor. We still can’t put vinyls on windows, headlights and wing mirrors. We can’t have custom tire lettering, can’t pain the hub caps, lug nuts or brake callipers and this is just a very small amount of features we don’t have yet after having 7 iterations of the same paint editor spanning 8 years. I’m not hopeful FM7 will improve unfortunately.
For a franchise that’s kind of always had their livery editor as a cornerstone feature, it has been pitifully under-nourished.
Seems the case here is the same as with the so far quite tame car list and glacial rate at which weather and night effects made it to the game: as long as people continue to buy, T10 will take their sweet sweet time bringing much needed and oft-requested features to the series.
300 layers is enough if most of the logos are already available in game and only count as 1 layer each. Fantasy paints would be a good challenge but your basic race paint wouldn’t be too hard.
FM2 had paintable brake calipers so I’m not sure why that changed but I would welcome it back. For me the main problems are the mapping and inconsistency of paintable areas. Some cars you can paint the sides of the wing as well as the top of the wing, but others you cant. Some cars you have to paint the top of the car in order for the logo/paint to show up on the side of the car. Some times when you put a logo on the hood it bleeds over to the bottom of the front bumper and so on. I’m sure its hard work to fix but it really make some of the cars un-paintable or less desirable to attempt a decent livery.
it is worse: T10 can paint any surface, even windows, apparently without any problems and we can not. they can reach “unreachable” areas but we can not. bleeding is somehow corrected in original paintings, while users have to find (mostley unsuccessfully) their way to paint some surfaces. unfair game, i would call it…
I had really hoped for improvements to the painting and livery editing system, and painting isn’t even my thing! Shame that it’ll just be the same cookie cutter system we’ve had for the past 7 games.
Not being able to apply decals to windows, even if the windsscreen is excluded for obvious reasons (or even just a portion of it at the top), choosing different colours for spokes/centres of wheels, or even just choosing different colours for each part of the car (fenders, bonnet, front bumper, side skirts, rear bumper, spoiler, trunk, roof, rear quarters, doors etc etc) disappoints me.
Something like this worries me that we’ll have the extremely barebones storefront that was in FH3. While it was an improvement over the system in FM5, FH2 and FM6, its still nowhere near what we had in FM4/FH1.
I’ve never understood the problem here tbh. Would it be a rendering issue preventing Turn 10 from doing this? Of course putting a vinyl covering the windscreen would be a stupid idea for racing but would anyone do that? Like really? Though I’d love to do it for hide and seek and just have a small slit of the windscreen to see out off
I’ve never been so dissapointed with a game decision before. Not being able to have vinyls on windscreens and glass is a cutting blow for painters who love to do replica builds. Forza also, as stated above, has horrible clipping and double painting when applying vinyls which makes some cars horrible to paint and it just takes away any motivation to complete the paint for car sometimes.
Also rant incoming, FORZA HOW HARD IS IT TO BE ABLE TO PAINT FRONT AND REAR RIMS DIFFERENT COLOURS??? Like SERIOUSLY?!? Come on you can’t just give us that? The painting editor has been neglected for 8 years and a simple feature like that hasn’t been implemented? You can paint the rims practically any colour you want so how difficult is it to make front and rear rims separate colours? YOU ARE HALF WAY FREAKING THERE TURN 10 UUUUUUGGGGGHHHH mind explodes
I love Forza to pieces but deer geebus it’s so saddening to feel like the developers are either too ignorant to even aknowledge painting features people have been asking for years or to lazy to implement them or both!!!
Agreed. I also find it annoying that you cannot paint brake calipers. Some of my paint & photos lose their appeal (in my eyes) because of the distracting red paint behind the wheels.
Also, first time posting in, like, 4 or 5 years. Maybe more. Had a different name back then.
Technically there’s nothing stopping them from giving us these things. They already do it on the pure-bred race car default liveries in the game. Those have vinyls on windows, mirrors, wings, etc. And people play with those cars every day. So there’s no technical or rendering reason that they couldn’t let us do it as well.
