I thought there was a way to make a gradient paint, but it doesn’t look as if there is. I can make a gradient with transparent vinyls, but the special colours are just reflective colours… I think.
Are you thinking about a colour shift design/ base??
A gradient paint can only be done by adding gradients with vinyl shapes (i think…)
Yes I wanted so that X is one colour, and Y is another colour in the paint shop to get a gradient. They should add it.
I think the current method of using vinyls to define the gradient is a better, more flexible method. If they were to define a fixed paint type, they would have to hard-code how the gradient was applied to the car. You may want the gradient to go front-to-back, top-to-bottom, side-to-side, sides-to-center, or maybe even apply it at an oblique angle. If they provided a canned gradient finish, you would not have that freedom.
I think the need two things to really make color gradient useful:
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Make the transparency effect suck less. If you semi-transparent vinyls to tint an underlying special color, such as metallic, two-tone, or polished/brushed metal, you lose the effect of the special finish quickly when the transparent overlay is applied. Actually, it looks okay in the paint shop view, but once you get it out in free roam, it does not look good unless the vinyls you applied have very little opacity. But if you limit the opacity of the gradient vinyls, it restricts the amount of color shift you can achieve.
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Provide a mechanism to limit the cut depth of the new mask tool. Since the mask tool, in its current form, cuts through all vinyl layers below, it is incompatible with gradient vinyls applied directly over the car surface, since it will cut through them too. We need a means to apply mask partitions in the layer stack, to stop the masks from going all the way through. This would be useful for other effects, as well.
The masking tool functionality you note here was requested by multiple painters multiple times within about 4 and half seconds after the masking tool update was released. Hopefully it is added soon … as being able to mask only certain layer groups specifically instead of all layers beneath the mask will significantly expand what can be done with the masking tool.
^ Sorry, I guess I wasn’t signed in.
You can use an opaque mask to make a gradient as well. I think a top to bottom mask in the paint booth would save time quite often though.
I guess I can see where that would be somewhat challenging. The sides front and back would be easy, but the top could require a number of non-linear variations to get the colors to line up correctly. Not sure it is a common enough use case to justify a new paint type, but I guess it would be more useful than a half-dozen camo patterns that don’t even let you select the primary colors.
I forgot that the lining up was out. Normally modellers will line things up, but with so many cars to build I can understand them not having time to build perfect models.