Idea for improved Masking Tool: Select which layers to cut

[LuculentPigeon8]

I think it would be nice to improve the masking tool a bit. Right now it’s pretty basic as you are only able to cut through all layers below the mask.

It would be good to allow which layers should be cut. Of course this would mean that only layers right below the mask can be cut. For example:

Let’s say we have 100 layers. The mask is at layer 50.

Current situation: All layers between 1 and 50 will be cut, revealing the base paint of the car.

New update: allow the player to select if 50 to x are cut. So you can cut 50-40 for example, revealing a vinyl colour.

This would allow us to create more designs and to apply certain techniques more easily.

[PlageBLN]

We had a discussion about this already. @PlumCrazy010 wrote the following in that relation.

@PlumCrazy010

I’m pretty sure the scalable outline layers are all rendered to an internal bitmap before they are wrapped onto the car. This is likely a normal 32-bit RGBA bitmap with color and transparency information. If they wanted to allow mix-and-match textures, they would need another parallel bitmap to serve as the texture lookup table for each individual pixel in the bitmap. By making the setting global, they do not need to add a lookup table bitmap, since the texture is a constant. Doing it this way makes it quite a bit less work.

That’s the best explaination for why we don’t already have that feature.

One problem I see with implementing this feature now besides the extra work and bigger save size is that it could ruin all existing liveries. I don’t want to rework all of my 500+ liveries.

But the idea itself is good of course.

[PlumCrazy010]

Mask constraints and per-primitive textures are different desirable features, that should be possible to implement without affecting legacy designs. Not necessarily saying it would be easy, but it should be possible.

For mask constraints, I think the easiest approach would be to add a flag to the vinyl group object to let the renderer know to encapsulate all masks contained within the group. SInce legacy designs would never define this flag, they would be unaffected, and if proper nesting rules were applied, new groups utilizing the flag could be added to a legacy design without affecting the overall design.

For per-primitive textures, they would just need to set everything to use a “default” texture that uses traditional texture rules. Non-default textures would need to be applied explicitly to each layer or group. The NFS Heat editor has a limited implementation of this, where each shape can have one of two different texture types, a solid color and a reflective foil texture. You can set the glossiness of the texture on a slider, so the solid color can be scaled from a shiny, glossy color surface to a matte surface, and anywhere in between. The reflective texture scales from a mirror-like reflective surface down to a brushed-metal appearance. Fancier texture types, like metal flake paint, are not supported. Even this level of functionality would add a tremendous amount of new flexibility to vinyl and livery design. The game engine itself is clearly capable of doing this, since a number of default liveries utilize varied textures. Some of the Formula Drift liveries, for example. It is just not exposed in the livery editor.