Firstly, I did not post this in the paint discussion because I am not promoting my paint or talking about technique etc.
I posted in the discussion because it needs to be discussed as a fault in the game & hopefully fixed.
I spent a few days and created this replica race paint job from he 70s for my partner. I carefully matched the white paint to Holdens off white and recreated all the decals, it looked great in the paint booth and very realistic.
But when I took it outside it looked terrible !!
This is how it represents in game - photo taken as a screen shot
The white paint is over exposed, The decals are all distorted, the stripes don`t line up
The brushed alloy rims look like grey plastic
If I go into photo mode it fixes the distortion for the photo but the colour is over exposed and unrealistic and the alloy rims still look like grey plastic
This really lets the game down and needs to be fixed.
The same issue exists on lots of cars but this one is by far the worst - which is a shame because it is my favorite race car.
I never use indoor lighting to paint a car… it could actually be realistic, and not a bug. If you paint in real life the indoor lighting is a bit yellow. I paint at a house with outdoor lighting, and then you would add more yellow to get the off-white colour. It would look wrong indoors however, but you aren’t going to drive indoors.
I don’t know why the decals don’t line up, it must be a bad car to paint.
I am an automotive spray painter by trade, the lighting in the booth should be pure white light for colour matching, outside light is yellow. In the game its whiter outside??
This should be the same rules in here - the car should be true to colour in the booth and when outside be a little darker - not lighter and over exposed white.
It doesn’t change the fact the aluminum represents as grey plastic when outside, it wouldn’t matter where you paint the car the rims will still look bad outside. The whole car does.
And yeah the decals are the fault of the car - I have witnessed this on many cars, but this one is the worst (back & both sides) and needs to be fixed - its been like this since release in FH3
Where do you paint? which house? are any better than others?
I find painting outside is annoying as the sunset / sunrise changes everything and its always overcast.
The more decals you have to use to create an unbroken line due to the weird in-game surface geometry of a car, the more likely it is to become a distorted, broken mess in actual play. A number of cars become rough to paint because of this. And in my experience, widebody kits and other additions tend to create problems of their own. I don’t think it could be retroactively fixed without potentially messing up existing liveries.
This is a single red stripe, it is one vinyl stretched the length of the car, while i accept a slight sawtooth edge if rotated slightly.
I do not think this has anything to do with what is happening on the side of this car - the stripe does not come close to lining up over the door and is not a consistent size either, the same distortion is all over the rear quarter panel as shown by the HDT decal if you compare it to the other pic in the booth.
I am fussy about my paint as it represents the realism of the entire game regardless of what you compete in.
As advised I have added some extra tint to my base colours to get the colour right outside but at certain times of the day it gets taken over by the tint and becomes very very yellow.
It is like the in game lighting (sun) is out of whack or over exaggerated. What looks off white in the booth is too white outside, when adding some tint to it to compensate becomes too yellow later in the day.
In the real world an off white car looks off white all day regardless of sunrise / sunset / overcast with only minor changes due to reflection. But it will still be recognizable as off white to the eye. In the game the same off white can show up as stark white or yellow at various times.
I have trouble with the rims looking like plastic rather than alloy when outside - this cannot be fixed by colour matching, it is actually not working properly - This is also due to the lighting effects of the game as it does show correctly at certain times in certain seasons.
Alloy should look like alloy regardless of the time of day!
And when laying a transparent tint vinyl over a base effect it shows as a solid colour at some times of the day with no effects visible through it, although it looks spectacular when in the paint shop. This is also due to the outside light effects for various times of the day / weather.
As far as I am concerned this is not working as well as it used to in FH3 where everything looked good regardless of the time of day or weather with only minor changes due to reflection as expected.
I would say this needs to be looked at as a fault or just accept it as a poor quality aspect of a game that used to be better.
Something is not right here and no amount of paint matching will fix it.
I have imported some FH3 paints over that used to look spectacular in FH3 regardless of the time of day only to see them all suffer the same problems in FH4 - there is definitely something not quite right with the outside lighting variations in FH4, probably due to the addition of seasons.
The distorted decals also cannot be fixed by creating vinyls in the editor or on the car. this has been broken since the car was released in FH3.
The same car in FH3 with obviously different paint. (the white paint is the same shade in both cars but displays very differently in FH4)
Look at how the alloy rims display and also the chrome exhaust tips.
The same rims in FH4 do not look anywhere near as good, neither do the chrome exhaust tips, these are both items i cannot paint - rims on both cars are special effect alloy - not paint, and the exhaust tips are not paintable at all. At least it looks like chrome in FH3
The difference between FH3 & FH4 is like chalk and cheese (or photos vs crayons)
Sorry to go on about it, but it seriously lets down the overall game quality if you play it for the love of cars.
Just for the rims, what is strange here is that the rendering is exactly the rendering when FH does not find the texture/color or takes time to find it ( often saw that in the auto show before race, the whole car has that color ). I guess you did but just in case you did not, I would suggest to test same texture/color on another car & this painting on another Xbox.
If color brightness/rendering can vary between inside and outside ,the loss of texture and the decals poor rendering are both bugs.
There are numerous mapping errors and distortions in the car inventory. Often they only show up in certain viewing modes, and they usually are not symmetrical, they will be on the left side or right side only. It would be great if they were to start fixing these things, but there a so many, it’s hard to know where to begin.
I made a grid vinyl to see exactly how bad the distortion was on this car. The grid is equal sized lines with equal spacing at 0deg with a copy of those lines at exactly 90deg to avoid saw tooth.
The results speak for them selves and fully explain why the decals on the car as so messed up!
This is the car in photo mode which shows the car without distortion
This one is how it represents on the road, not very good at all.
They probably remove polygons from the cars for that to happen. High poly for photos. They are probably using an automated polygon reduction tool. They could remap the graphics afterwards if they knew how. I’ve done that in my own games, it looks exactly like that, but I figured out how to fix it.
