rFactor Alpha Channel Tutorial

After trying to explain this to people for the umpteenth time, I decided I would throw together a quick visual aid.

I'm always surprised at how many "featured painters" on rFactorCentral have paint schemes that obviously have no Alpha, making the cars stupidly shiny. Even the painting tutorial on rFC (and others I have seen) completely ignores this most important part of creating an rFactor car skin.

It's not just for making gold and silver foil effects as I do here. Just highlighting all your decals and making the Alpha of those areas darker will do wonders for your paint schemes. It's not hard to do, really!

Most rFactor templates have their default Alpha channels much too bright, so the cars are too shiny even if you don't do anything to them -- even IF you managed to save the Alpha with your DDS in the first place. The Panoz GT2 template has a nice dark Alpha that gives the car a slight reflectivity, but nothing horribly unrealistic.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• rfactor
• alpha
• tutorial
• skins
• simracing

[MacMillanSniper]

It tells me too many channels to export

[Keeper1st]

@MacMillanSniper Flatten your image before saving. I think that's what causes that error.

[aud6875]

i need one for photoshop 8

[Keeper1st]

@aud6875 I imagine it works pretty much the same way, only with some buttons in different places.

[Keeper1st]

@bigfish10111 If you're making an object with transparency. For a car paint job, I'm not so sure it would work. The lack of pre-saved mipmaps makes using TGA impractical either way as it just eats CPU cycles unnecessarily.

[bigfish10111]

@Keeper1st TGA has alpha...

[MwrRacingSeries]

@Keeper1st Yea I found that with some Mods it screws up the Paint Job, and doesnt use Alpha like you said. I mainly do NSCR

[Keeper1st]

Not only that, but TGAs require the graphics system to generate mipmaps on the fly, which eats up CPU cycles. A DDS has embedded mipmaps. This is why it is always recommended to use DDS files when building tracks as well.

[Keeper1st]

@MwrRacingSeries No you can't. Not really. The TGA would have no alpha, so your resultant car (provided the mod was made correctly) would look like glass.

[MwrRacingSeries]

GUYS! I found out you can STILL import cars as a .tga instead of a .dds

I found this out with a help of a friend. Save it as a .psd or something first so if this doesnt work with .tga's you can still save it as a .dds