New Vinyl Texture Feature

Over on GTPlanet, someone pointed out that there is a new vinyl texture feature implemented in the FH5 livery editor. This allows for matte vinyls on a glossy finish, or glossy vinyls on a matte finish. If you enter the livery editor, you will see there is a new option called Vinyl Material (space on the keyboard, not sure what it would be on a gamepad). The caveat here is that the setting is global, rather than selectable at a per-primitive level. So, if you select matte vinyls, all vinyls on the design will be matte. The cool thing about it is that the setting is a slider, so you can scale the texture and reflection on the vinyls. They don’t have to be full-on glossy or full-on matte. This is actually more control over the texture of the vinyl finish than we have on the car paints at this time. This can be useful for situations where texture contrast is important, like a black vinyl top on a black car. Hopefully Motorsport will implement something more flexible, but in the meantime, this is a step in the right direction.



11 Likes

Looks like a nice feature to play with. Next step would be for them to allow the metallics and 2-tones in the vinyls.

4 Likes

START button on the controller :+1:t5:

Good spot, probably would’ve taken me ages to notice it, LoL.
Had a quick butcher’s at it, might come in handy for some but my initial thoughts are it won’t suit how I paint. I tend to place large squares over my cars as a base rather than paint directly onto the car itself so I’d probably prefer to be able to select individual vinyl groups.

Feels like a small step in the right direction but, like a lot of things, you wonder if they realise the potential for this kind of tool and that they really could’ve done a lot more with it… Are there any actual Forza painters among the Devs??? :person_shrugging:t5:

Anyhow, maybe I’ll play around with it and change the way I do things, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

3 Likes

Looks good for fabric roof too.

3 Likes

Nice addition! This makes for even more realistic vinyl designs

1 Like

I tend to do the same. My initial thought here is to do the reverse and stick a big glossy vinyl on a matte painted car, then use masks or vinyls turned into masks.
Admittedly it won’t work for many vinyls but I’m gonna play with that idea.

2 Likes

That does sound like a potentially awesome upgrade to the tools, thanks for sharing the info !

Yeah, i stumbled upon it when it looked like there was too many options on the bottom. Found by accident, but its awesome. FINALLY something useful for the paint booth. The best things theyve added are mask layers and now texture change. Cant wait to see how they improve it next. I very rarely give props to Forza as Ive seen a lot of stuff wrong and things that have plagued previous games, but it feels like theyre going in the right direction

1 Like

That’s actually awesome and a great and much requested feature.

/edit: For stuff like this it’s definitely great…

…but it would of course have been nice if it would be applicable to individual vinyls. Like it would be if you could apply masks to individual layers. Not sure if there’s some kind limitation that keeps them from given us this feature or if they simple don’t consider it as relevant enough.

What ever. It’s definitely appreciated and a step in the right direction.

1 Like

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.

2 Likes

Interesting information and good explaination, thanks.

Thanks for the point out. A couple of things I’ve noticed which all make sense are:

It applies to manufacture decals
It applies to the entire vinyl for gradients.
You can set transparency to 0. 78% to only affect the base paint. Satin metallics are possible as are gloss woodgrain, Damascus etc.

1 Like

Another fun trick I discovered with the vinyl texture is if you put black vinyls on top of one of the polished metal paints such as chrome or gold then scale it all the way to matte you end up with a super dark matte black finish.

I love this feature! It’s a simple little addition which gives designers so many more options!

3 Likes

Car looks like its made from carving foam. :sweat_smile:

It reminds me of… FM5 or 6, I think? where you could trick the game into allowing you to fine tune the color of the special Zinc paint and make the blackest cars.

It’s the secret ingredient to my weight reduction kit.

1 Like

So I gave the matte thing a try and was not impressed. If it could be applied to an individual vinyl it would be nice. But I don’t like the global approach to the matte finish. Just my opinion.