rFactor 2 Paint 2013 Nissan GT500

The 2013 Nissan GT500 GT-R in rFactor 2 comes with four liveries, and is the only available Super GT car, so I decided to paint more to fill out a race grid having more variety. I created two new fictional race liveries using simple shapes, logos from the existing cars, and my old dragon drawing. Expanding on last post painting with chrome, I used the same technique to create a shiny rear window. The other challenge was including a large drawing on the car’s hood which is made of several pieces. Both of these designs I consider a work in progress. Let’s have a closer look.

Recall the Studio 397 paint guide on how to use regions for materials. My habit is to set the black region for the main car paint, red region for carbon, and blue or green regions for whatever works out for the car, usually a second paint or chrome.

Both cars include shiny rear windows using chrome material on the blue region. Decals with transparency work nice on windows, so I included logos on the rear windows. Similar to the previous post on chrome, after using the web-based material editor to set regions, here blue for chrome, edit the json file. I used an existing car’s material file created by Studio 397 as a starting point. Edit the lacquer color first in the material editor before editing the json file, but finding the values using a paint editor works as well. Below is a snippet of the blue region definition of the json file.

},
"Blue": {
	"baseCoatRefractiveIndex":1.171597,
	"baseCoatRoughness":0.541958,
	"baseCoatSpecStrength":0.602604,
	"clearCoatRefractiveIndex":3.7435,
	"clearCoatRoughness":0,
	"clearCoatSpecStrength":1,
	"lacquerColour":[
	  0.14902,
	  0.1784314,
	  0.721569,
	  1
	],
	"metallicFlakeColour":[
	  1,
	  1,
	  1,
	  0
	],
	"metallicFlakeStrength":0,
	"metallicPaintStrength":0
}

A large logo or drawing on the hood can get tricky. Notice in the image above, the dragon design covers several sections, some of which go down below others, and one of them being vertical. One could ignore the vertical section since from straight above it would not be seen, but from a blank section may appear to cut out part of the design. The image below shows the flat two-dimensional paint file where sections of the orange dragon can be seen in four other places besides the main design in the center. I used the wireframe to estimate the size and section to cut and where to place. In two of the sections, I needed to adjust several times to get a best fit on the three-dimensional model. This can be easily accomplished by leaving both the paint application and rFactor 2 open to the tuning area then after each edit use the tuning car-paint reload button to view the change.

There on the nose of the car, beneath the Nissan logo, is a small section near the dragon’s tail. The dragon’s head broken into two additional parts, including one stretched out for the vertical segment found just above the full dragon design. This vertical section is not accurate, but in game from an angle it appears good enough.

The 2013 Nissan GT500 can be found in the Steam Workshop and includes its paint template.