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In this tutorial we assume readers have some prior painting skills. If not, visit the links page. From there you should find links to help with those skills. First note that rFactor uses *.DDS textures. A file type that is rarely supported in "out of the box" products. Therefore a plugin is usually required to view and edit these files. These are obtainable from nVidia and are fully compatible with Abode Photoshop, Jasc Paint Shop Pro and more. When creating skins for rFactor we recommend using Adobe Photoshop, though Jasc Paint Shop is a much more affordable solution which is comparable in features. Microsoft paint is definitely not an option. You will find that you may want to download MAS Tools for rFactor too. These can be obtained from here.
In order to skin a vehicle you will need to either create a new team or add another car to an existing team. The first step is to direct yourself to the ..\rFactor\GameData\Vehicles\*VehicleType*\*Team folder*. ..\rFactor\GameData\Vehicles\ZR\SRGP for example.
Depending on whether you wish to partially re-skin the vehicle, or wish to change more than just the body decal will determine whether or not you need to extract the MAS file. Whatever is not in the team folder will be located in either a [Vehicle].MAS file 2 folders up, or 3 folders up in the CMAPS.MAS. The files located in the [Vehicle].MAS for example, are the files specifically for that type of vehicle. For example the ZR.MAS contains all the files specifically required for the ZR vehicle. It contains all the models and all specific textures to this vehicle. The CMAPS.MAS file contains textures that are common to all or more than 1 vehicle. Things such as environment maps, skid marks, sparks, raindrops, etc. Remember that they also include some actual car textures that are common among several vehicles, such as tire textures, exhaust textures, dials, etc. If you place a texture from either the [vehicle].mas or cmaps.mas into a team folder, it will appear only on that vehicle without altering this texture on any other teams (Note that this will not work on textures that appear on the track itself, such as tyre marks). We highly recommend you don't alter the [Vehicle].MAS or the CMAPS.MAS themselves otherwise this will replace the original textures, which may be undesireable for some users. If you insist on changing any textures within these files, it would probably be wise to place these textures inside the team folder. If you expect that the folder size will be rather large it would probably be best placing the textures inside a TEAM.MAS file inside the team folder, to do this you would have to include a new gen file (which is pointed to by the veh file) in the team folder. When changing the gen file, simply add the following section of text under the SearchPath=Vehdir section. //---------------------------------------- SearchPath= MASFile=team.mas
//----------------------------------------
If you extract a file from a MAS file, edit it and place it in the same directory, this will allow you to view the skin or model in the game without physically overwriting the file. Once you have finalised the model or texture, you can compress it inside the mas file.
To open a model in Zmodeler select file, import, select type as GMT (or it will not open), then select the GMT file you wish to edit. Remember not to save/export the vehicle if all the skins are not in the directory, ZModeler will remove the missing textures. Unfortunately you still have to reload the GMT file in ZModeler to view texture changes that you have made.
C:\Games\rFactor MP Test\GameData\Vehicles\ZR\SRGP\Team_Green
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