So you’ve got signed up to the league, you’ve picked out your number and been told your starting grade but what now? You head right on to your graphics package and start designing your car skins to make your car ‘pop’ as it steamrolls round the track on, hopefully, rails! Firstly there a few rules to consider before starting to paint for skin for Last Bend Racing.
Your number has to be to be readable, to help the league follow races and in replays, plus when we do make promotional videos, you’ll want your car to stand out, right? Your wing should be the colour of your grade so if you’re white, it should be white, yellow graders should be yellow, and blue graders should be blue and so on, and so on.
As for sponsors and signwriting, feel free to get creative but please bear in mind we don’t want any vulgarity or profanity on any of the cars, but if you’ve got some humorous ideas for your skins, you can double check with Admin and if there’s no problem with it, fire on. The last thing to consider is we want the cars to be different. You very well might be racing with a couple of friends, but no ‘team’ skins where the only difference is the name, number and wing colour as it will get confusing when it comes to racing and some people in that split second might be unsure if you’re a lap ahead or not, it’ll lead to trouble.
An idea for when you join your league and submit your skins is to send in your skins with all colour wings just in case you’re in amongst the grades throughout the Season it’ll save last minute dashes to your graphics program as the deadline approaches. If you don’t submit an updated skin you will not be allowed to race with the wrong wing colour, and have to use a ‘hire car’ which are not eligible to be raced in Championship races.
Grab your BriSCAF1 Templates download from here and double check the surfaces, the only car that is in there that you can’t use is the STUS16 which is not allowed to be used in the game for technical reasons.
For Tarmac, as per the F1 rules, you may use the following; brisca.car, briscae.car, briscan.car, burns.car, challenger.car, charger.car, Davidson.car, db515t.car, dblundy.car, elwell.car, elwellt.car, faldingt.car, finn.car, finn33.car, FWJ2000T.car, FWJ98.car, fwjt.car, houghton.car, Lundtar.car, lundy.car, moz.car, mozw.car, murray.car, ogden.car, smith94.car, speakt.car, Thornton.car, whorton.car, wittst.car, wobbes.car, yarrow.car.
For Shale, as per the F1 rules, you may use the following; asmith.car, briscaes.car, db515.car, briscans.car, briscas.car, faldings.car, FWJ2000S.car, FWJ98s.car, FWJS16.car, lundys.car, mozs.car, fwjs.car, murrays.car, witts.car.
When it comes to painting a skin for a game, remember that it’s running on a very, very old version of NASCAR Heat so plain colours sometimes end up looking a bit too cartoony when they translate to the game, what I’ve always done is played with layers of various textures to try and give my skins more of a realistic in game look but it’s up to you; have a play around and if you’re getting stuck there’s a good community of people around both Last Bend Racing and Scottish Stock Cars who are willing to offer help and advice.
Once you’ve got a skin ready to go, it needs to be saved as a .tga file first on the 24 bits/pixel option and then you need a program to convert it to a .tex file. I use WinRes Wizard to convert it using the MKTex section of it. Click browse to locate your .tex file and once you have it, click ok and look for the word ‘CONVERT’ in the bottom right. Click that, it’ll go grey and then back to dark blue to signify it is done. Your new skin is almost ready to be part of the game!
Once you have the .tex file you’ll have to change the name of it to car** (** = your car number) with your number on it, so for instance, mine would be car168.tex. Then it’s a matter of putting it in the right folder and editing the drivers.txt file properly so you can see it in your game to look for any errors, you’ll be surprised how easy it is to have something upside down and back to front on some of the templates!
Another alternative to switch your .tga file to a .tex file is by using a standalone MKTex program, which has instructions too.