Creating a custom paint scheme for use within iRacing is a fairly simple process. Depending on your knowledge and experience with using graphical editor tools. Displaying your custom paint for other drivers to see within iRacing is again not a hard task. It just requires the use of a third party app. I will explain this and more in this iRacing car painting tutorial.
Requirements For Creating A Custom Paint In iRacing
- A Graphical Editor – Photoshop, GIMP etc
- iRacing Car Template Of Your Choice, you can either get them from iRacing or some forums like Reddit can have members post custom templates that you can use.
- Trading Paints – Trading paints is a third party app that allows you to upload your custom paint and download custom paints of your competitors to display them in your races.
Steps To Create A Custom Paint For iRacing In Photoshop
- Download the template of the car you wish to do custom paint for
- Open it up in Photoshop
- In Photoshop you can start customizing the base paint or use one of the custom car patterns
- Once you have painted the car how you like it you need to save it as a Targa (.tga) file
Once you have saved your custom paint this is were Trading Paints come in.
Latest Season 1 2020 Update Allows Spec Maps
– Support has been added for custom specular (spec) maps for all cars.
– – Our rendering engine now supports custom spec maps that can be used with custom paints. A spec map is a .tga image file that tells the iRacing Sim what properties the underlying materials on the custom paint .tga image are made of. By altering individual pixels in a specific way, you can tell the Sim if the pixel is metallic or nonmetallic, if the pixel is smooth or rough, or if it should be lit by our lighting engine or not. This should allow you to create all kinds of materials, from matte to chrome and everything in between!
– – Our Sim uses Physical Based Rendering (PBR). Physical Based Rendering uses shader and lighting models to accurately create materials that reflect their real world counterparts. Instead of using a spec, gloss, and environment map to create the spec maps for a material, you simply decide if the material is metallic, and then decide how smooth the surface of the material is. The shader does the rest. This greatly simplifies the process of creating spec maps.
– – For details on how to start creating your own custom spec maps, check out this page:
– – – www.iracing.com/painttextures
– For the pair of new Supercars, their car paints support translucency and stamping of text, numbers, sponsors, etc. onto windows or other translucent surfaces.
How To Upload Your Custom Paint To Trading Paints
- Log into TradingPaints
- Select your car on the left-hand side
- Click on the Upload button to upload your TGA file
- That’s it your paint should be ready within iRacing
Alternative To Using Photoshop For Custom iRacing Paints
You can use any graphics editing tool to create your custom iRacing paint. As long as it can open PSD files and export to TGA. One of the most used graphical editing packages is an app called The GIMP The GIMP is an open source graphical editor than open PSD and export to TGA. There is a bit of learning curve when it comes to using the tool but if you have used other tools this one won’t take too long to get used to
iRacing Paint Policy
An excerpt from the iRacing Custom Paint Policy:
iRacing.com respects the intellectual property rights of others and strives to make use of the service enjoyable for all users. So you should keep in mind that users can only use the custom paint feature in a manner allowed in our Terms of Use and End User License Agreement. For example, the use of this feature is subject to the following:
(a) You, and not iRacing.com, are entirely responsible for the graphics, content and paint schemes you use on your cars (collectively, “Paint Schemes”).
(b) Your Paint Schemes may not be indecent, libelous, defamatory, obscene, threatening, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, abusive, illegal, harassing; contain expressions of hatred, bigotry, racism or pornography, promote or otherwise refer to tobacco products, alcohol or illicit drugs, constitute or encourage a criminal offense, or otherwise objectionable.
(c) Your Paint Schemes may not infringe the copyright, trademark, publicity/privacy right or other intellectual property right of any third party. Without limiting the foregoing, you may not include in your Paint Schemes any trademark, logo, graphics, or any other content or materials of any third party unless you have obtained express written permission from the owner of the trademark, logo, graphics, or other content or materials to do so.
Essentially if you are planning on using sponsor logos for your paints you need to have permission from the company.
Extra Resources
List of resources to provide more information for custom iRacing Paints.
this video didn’t help me at all. zero sound and it seems to be incomplete instructions as well…