Have you painted a 100% NEW paint in the last 6 months?

[COBRA_MUSTANG]

I am just curious if there are actually any active painters around anymore.

In the last year I have only done one 100% brand new paint job.
It is the Ford Performance paint scheme. From the Factory Ford.

Just curious if people actively paint anymore to try get credits.
I know some people will paint to make a car they want to race in, but I think painters have pretty much given up on this game.

Forza 2 I probably painted 6 wholly original replica cars. The Home Improvement Mustang, John Force Castrol Mustang, and Forza 2 Anniversary paints. Now days the amount of time compared to return is so insignificant that it is not worth it.

Does anyone else find brand new quality paints are non-existant?

[Operator1]

I wish we had more painters.
I’m not a painter, but it’d be nice to have more cool liveries to download.

@COBRA_MUSTANG

I think painters have pretty much given up on this game.

From what I recall, this installment’s livery editor apparently has some issues, and it hasn’t hardly evolved from prior installments.
I wonder if that’s why some might have given up on it.

@COBRA_MUSTANG

Just curious if people actively paint anymore to try get credits.

Since the game’s overall active population is so low, I wonder if painters feel like the “market” for their liveries is too small to bother with putting in all that work in the paint booth.

[AdmPatate]

I do feel there’s a lack of good, accurate replicas. It’s always a pain and a half to find one that’s even half decent, applying a dozen paint jobs, navigating through the menus back and forth between liveries and Forzavista, just to see that the lines at the back of the car don’t align at all, or that there’s a plug for a youtube channel on the back bumper.

Perhaps the relatively low player count doesn’t help, but I think more importantly there are two big limiting factors to making good liveries:

Firstly, you can’t share a livery that uses someone else’s decals. There are some really high quality decals out there that you can’t use if you want to share your liveries. If you want a logo on your livery, you have to make it.

There’s a name for that, it’s called reinventing the wheel. Every single person who wants to try their hand at making a replica livery must make their own version of every single brand logo on it. It’s stupid, and that’s how you end up with a lot of liveries very obviously using the default Forza typographies, for a bunch of very approximate decals.

But that’ll never change because there’s credits on the line. Fake money getting in the way of good collaborative works, in much the same way copyright law is actively harming creativity.

Secondly, and crucially, the editor is so incredibly dated to the core. I mean, I remember doing liveries on Trackmania Nation. You could import images with transparency. The car itself was just one paint zone, no weird seam between the left side and the top, and yet mirroring still worked perfectly. I’m pretty sure you could paint the rims. I’m pretty sure you could paint them individually too. And if you felt adventurous, you could just edit liveries in Photoshop or similar.

How is it possible that in 2024 this game has a worse livery editor than backflippin’ *Trackmania*? I don’t really see a point in suggesting improvements either. It’d be like putting makeup on a pig. I think there’s nothing to do but throw it all out and build something new from the ground up™.

[PJTierney]

I’ve not painted at all since launch, for a number of reasons:

• The livery editor is slow and cumbersome compared to Forza Horizon 5, and runs at 30fps on Xbox
• There’s no Creative Hub to catalogue designs and drive engagement
• There’s a long-standing issue where those with large quantities of Vinyl Groups take 3+ minutes to load up the saved groups menu every time (which you will do 20+ times on a single car)
• Players aren’t automatically taken to the Get Designs screen when buying a car, therefore download numbers are far lower

For context I’ve been painting since Forza Motorsport 4 and amassed close to 2 million downloads across all titles, with around 350,000 in Forza Horizon 5.

[CPSDIABLO]

I’ve done a few, but I don’t paint nearly as often as I did in previous games due to how slow it is loading decals. Did these in the last couple weeks:

Corrected the ‘85 Nissan-Lola

Höttinger M1

[Patrick_Moon500]

Yes, I painted a bunch of F1 cars and gave other cars Super Touring liveries whilst using decals created on FH5.

But that’s all stopped now because I can’t transfer vinyls over from horizon.

It’s so disheartening I’m really just dabbling with this game now.

[LMP_Arcturus]

I’ve contributed a fair number of cars to the game. All-in-all, the livery editor in FM is ok, as you can get great results…

However, note:

1. The library where vinyl groups are stored is completely broken… I wish it was only a 3-minute loading delay (5 here, every time). The devs know, and it’s a priority for them, but a fix remains elusive. Importing from FH5 is the only reason I can still paint (and some people can’t get that working through no fault of their own).

2. Without SVG imports or openly-shared vinyls, the barrier to entry is massive to new painters. It can literally take hundreds of hours to build up a solid library of major automotive and racing brands. Even then, almost any car you go to create will require new ones, perhaps several. Many of the top painters you see have accumulated resources over multiple Forza games.

3. The in-game logo collection provided by Forza is useless. Many of the logos are raster (which looks horrible) or have backgrounds for some reason. You’ll find yourself having to recreate almost all of them over time for simple reasons like needing a solid 1-color copy of a brand that actually works over other design elements.

4. It takes a lot of time to develop the skills and experience with the editor to get the best results. My recent work is much better executed than what I did in FM a year ago - that’s how it goes with any form of design.

Regarding some criticisms about what’s available:

1. No painter owes you a perfect replica. I’m not saying that anyone here said exactly this, but the sentiment is out there. It’s our time; we’re painting for us or friends, or teams we support, etc… deal with riffs off of familiar designs (cars intended really for only 1-2 people have to be shared with everybody to work, so it’s not like they can be kept private). If a car’s missing a few secondary/tertiary sponsors, recognize that those might be tiny businesses that may never be needed again but might take an hour or more each for that painter to recreate… or that the choice for that painter was to exclude a few sponsors or to not initiate the design at all.

2. There’s almost no way to accommodate for part variation. If you find a design that you like at the thumbnail stage and then notice a bunch of things are broken/misaligned, it could just be that you’re using different aero/body parts or kits than the painter. There are many street cars with like 5-6 front and 3-4 rear bumpers, and supporting even half of them can be hopeless if you’re doing something interesting.

Btw, if you look at my two Mustangs above and think, “Why aren’t there more replicas like these?!” consider that I already had 70% of the required logos, including the number boards, flags, numbers sets, etc… and it still took me about 26 hours to research, create, build, test and refine them. The only reason that they exist in FM this week is that having the exact models available in FH5 allowed me to start that work last week. If you rush to the design options on Day 1 of a new car, know that you’re guaranteed to find a lot better stuff if you mine fuller search results a week or two later. I’ve seen some crazy good work get buried with like 5-6 downloads in this game.

[COBRA_MUSTANG]

Beautiful job on that Second Stang. That is a paint I wanted to do,but just didn’t want to contribute the hours to do it.
I will give it a download later.

[effisjens]

I like to paint cars myself on both games but today, i’m much more busy on Motorsport with painting and idea crafting. While i don’t make liveries 24/7 (i also want to do other things in the game and outside of that), i do get statisfaction out of doing it the times i do it, and while my creations are neither top tier or perfectly accurate, i’m more than happy with the results. I don’t usually share my work but thx to someone on Twitter who asked for a sharecode, i had the idea of making an “open” version for the others to enjoy my honest attempts!

Essentially (as selfish as it may sound) i paint for myself. When there is a car, team or driver i support in real life racing (that’s where most of my liveries come from), i want to sort of represent their brand in races in the universe of me being a driver for that team as well. That’s my idea of having fun with making liveries!

The way i make them is that i make as much of the logos in Horizon, and it would be beneficial if the car was in it as well. I do that for mostly 2 reasons :
•Horizon’s livery editor is indeed much smoother to use and saves time.
•Making everything in Horizon allows me to use it in that game as well. Once i’m finished, i import it to Motorsport.

Like some haves shared, there a few things i’dd change with the livery editor but in the grand scheme of things (was that a pun?) I’m still very content with what i can do with the tools!
•Firstly, the mapping on some cars is very problematic. Either some cars have areas paintable that shouldn’t be (or reverse)(Ligier LMP3) or the mapping prevents me to make the livery i want to my standard. For the latter, i had to outright drop plans i had for the Saleen S7 LM.
•Load times should be improved a bit for the shape selection tab, just to save time.
•I’ve always had trouble putting stripes perfectly dead center on cars and that sometimes drives me up the wall. Everytime you press your D-pad, you only move it by 0,50. Maybe with the press of a button you can change it to 0,25 or 0,01 (like switching modes) to help us getting it perfect!

To end on a positive note, i’m genuinly happy some of my work is appreciated in FM by winning the livery contests (x3 winner at the time i’m writing this, hi future me!) but also by the teams and drivers! Nielsen Racing, arguably my #1 team in the world (races in ACO rules events), really seems to like my work despite it never been a full 100% recreation for differing reasons! That’s what i’m doing it for, to celebrate my faves and show my support!

And as a teaser, i can reveal i’m working on one more Nielsen Racing livery for a car i’m expecting to use during the Bathurst update if my guesses are right! Kudos if you can guess what and why! Other plans currently include 2 Racing Planet Bleekemolen liveries after my trip to euro NASCAR last sunday (#72 Marc Goossens, of wich we have had other cars he raced in Forza, and #11 Ryan Vargas)

Sorry for the long post but i appreciate you reading it all

[ACR_HardVibes]

I gave up trying to paint because the livery editor is sluggish and not intuitive.
GT7’s is way better.

[stuf4rt]

Much like the search functionality for finding and applying designs

[ACR_HardVibes]

Awful. Simply awful. I have no idea why they completely scrapped the storefront we had in FM4. We had everything.
Now not even the rating system works. For example, for the tuning setups, the first 1 or 2 on the list have 5 stars because it’s stuff uploaded the first week the game was released lol. The rest is just randomly put there. Mostly from people who don’t even understand how to tune.
For the liveries…I don’t even understand the logic behind the order of appearance.

Back on topic, IIRC the livery editor was better in FM6 and FM7 than what we have now.

[SpilkerE]

No. But then I never have in any game I’ve ever played. I am the furthest thing from an artist. Nobody would want anything I painted, and I don’t have anywhere near the patience for it anyway.

It is very unfortunate that good replicas are so hard to find. The search tool is trash and I’m sure I’m not finding the high quality work that is out there and deserves to be seen and downloaded.

To the people who put in the hours and make killer replicas: I don’t know how you do it, but major thanks and keep killing it. Hopefully I’ll find your stuff for my cars.

[Patrick_Moon500]

For example, lobbies ft. F1 cars have liveries that really just weak Sebastian Vettel liveries and poor Red Bull ones.

Now, I don’t want to jam anyone’s signal here; most people just want to race and are not unduly concerned with liveries. I won’t stand against that.

But in free play the grid looks like a mess too. I’d like the option to populate the AI cars with my own liveries. So I can have a grid that looks the part. I think that would be strong contribution to the game and may encourage people to build up their own collection of liveries.

[effisjens]

If i may recommend looking up the livery contests that the developers are doing every week, you’ll definatly find something you’d want to use for any of your cars!

And honestly, if you never have tried painting but also think you’re not good enough, try it anyway by starting small and simple (for example, a FALKEN tire or yokohama livery)! I don’t see myself as one of the best painters in Forza by miles and i can’t imagine anything out of thin air for originality but with every livery i made, i’m getting better at breaking down the real thing and how to (sort of) get it right virtually!

[Duff_790]

The franchise is almost 20 yrs old & we still have the same mapping issues plus new problems like mirroring which still hasn’t been fixed on many cars since launch leaving them unpaintable. Window banners blanked & wings unpaintable on race cars that are fine on the Horizon franchise in some cases, we should be able to paint on window surfaces by now & be able to create anything on any part of the bodywork to make realistic race/drift cars.
I’ll always appreciate whoever it was that came up with the idea for this bitd, been a long time, enjoyable hobby, but it could definitely do with a bit of updating to make it easier for others to create what they want rather than have to rely on others to do it for them. Maybe integrated AI will play a part in that in the nr future.

[IceMan_PJN]

I still make new liveries, but I won’t post any pictures because mine aren’t as good as top designers. I spend a fair amount of time making vinyl groups and liveries, time away from racing, but not as much time as some artists invest.

I’m afraid designers are under-appreciated. They can invest hours into liveries and have almost nothing to show for it. Some designers may get enough downloads, uses, and likes to get thousands of CR from it, but most users probably get little to nothing. If you spend a couple hours on a livery only to get a few-hundred CR from it, the only incentive is you enjoying doing it, which honestly is the only reason I do it.

[SpilkerE]

It’s just not something I have the patience for. I can’t even race for very long, much less spend hours editing livery going through all of those layers and whatnot and tweaking everything to get it just right. I would go insane.

Not to mention I’d never get anything done because my free time comes in short, intermittent spurts.

[SweedishThunder]

I have actually created a couple of completely new liveries in the last six months, and it was a nightmare due to the insane vinyl group loading. However, I couldn’t find any other 2024 Stanley Cup champion liveries, so I felt like I had to make one (even if I might be the only person using it).

I very rarely make liveries for anyone but myself. Since FM3, I’ve created less than a handful of requested liveries for other players (some requests just can’t be refused [for very different reasons]).

Since my latest livery, I found out that at least one other player had hacked and shared some of my logos (quite likely in the early days of the game when a glitch made it possible to download other players’ logos unlocked; several people reported this to T10 and they did nothing but claim that nothing malicious had been done).

I have now unshared all vinyl groups, and I won’t design again until the editor works properly.

Because of this, in FM, I actually race more than I paint, which is a first for me in many years. In previous games, my game time was probably 90% livery time and 10% racing time.

I’ve been painting since FM3, where I realized that the liveries I wanted didn’t exist, and neither did the logos. Nothing else to do but learn how to handle the editor.

I hope that painting in FM will one day be fun again, but I don’t expect it to happen anytime soon. I’ve learn by now not to waste optimism on this game.

[AdmPatate]

True dat, I’ve turned off AI liveries because of the anime girls and the sloppy energy drink liveries. It’d be nice to be able to filter which liveries can be applied to AI.

Then again, it’d be nice to just have useful filters.