Here's a quick Photoshop NR2003 paint tutorial for roof to fender alignment on the ASA 90 and Late Model 90 templates. I will use a paint scheme from DawsonvilleBill9 that has several angled stripes that run right under the window to show you how to do this. This is not a hard thing to do once you get the hang of it... just takes a little practice to get used to jumping back and forth from photoshop to carviewer.

Basically we will take the stripes and split them into 2 layers and move the layer that's on the roof section 4 pixels forward and then add a little line to our new arrangement. You use carviewer to check your work as you progress.

Click the title of this article to see the complete tutorial or click the tutorials link in the menu above to see all of our paint and 3dsMax tutorials now and in the future! Thanks to DawsonvilleBill9 for the images used in this tutorial and the idea to create it in the first place! Make sure to post back here in our forum with your results, questions or comments!

First thing I did was turn on the wireframe layer that you see below in Image 1.

Image 1

The wireframe layer lets us see exactly what will show up on the final car in game. The area we will be working on is on both sides of the car just below the rear quarter windows where the red white and blue stripes are, as you see in Image 2.

Image 2

Next we need to select the Polygonal Selection Tool (Image 3) so we can seperate the roof stripes from the side stripes.

Image 3

Select the layer with the stripes on it that you want to seperate and line up. Now using the Polygonal Lasso Tool, we will create an outline along the area where the wireframe is seperated along the lower window, around the back and along the other side window back around the front of the stripes like you see in Image 4.

Image 4

Once you have the area selected, right click and choose 'layer via cut' and this will seperate the area inside the dotted line so we can move it in the next step.

Select the Move tool as shown in Image 5 below.

Image 5

We now need to click on the selection inside the dotted area so we are on the layer we just created above. Now using the arrow keys on your keyboard, you need to hit the 'right arrow' key 4 times. This will move the stripes on the roof 4 pixels to the right like Image 6 below.

Image 6

Now right click on the top bar of the image box and choose duplicate, then check the box that says duplicate merged layers like below in Images 7 and 8.

Image 7

Image 8

Now up in the top left of Photoshop, click File>Save As and find the carviewer file you want to name it as, such as card.bmp or whatever mod you are working on. Now go open Carviewer and select the Direct x Mesh you are working on so we can see how our alignment came out as shown in Image 9 below.

Image 9

Overall this is pretty darn close compared to how far off these were in the beginning. With just a little adjustment, we can fix the white stripe on the far right and call this good. We now need to go back to Photoshop and make a few additions to the template to get it to line up.

Here we need to add a line to the white line that's already there... I usually like to use the line tool with a weight of 1 or 2 pixels as seen in Image 10, to create the new addition that will make the fender line up with the roof.

Image 10

Using the settings above, you will need to add your line to the Fender so it will make the original white line appear a little wider as seen below in Image 11.

Image 11

This is Trial and Error here in this step and may take 2 or 3 revisions to get it exactly as we want it. Once you have the line added, go ahead and right click on the top bar of the image frame, save as card.bmp or whatever your carviewer image is named and go to carviewer to check your work.

Image 12 shows our results up close. Remember the M and N keys let you zoom in and out in carviewer so you can really see the alignment well.

Image 12

Looking above, we can see the red line is still off just a tick, and if you wanted to you could go back and do the same steps for the red line as well... but if you zoom out just a bit in carviewer you will see that this looks pretty good and is almost unnoticable from a slight distance as in Image 13 below.

Image 13

This is when I call it done and say it's good enough for government work! Go back and check the other side of the car and complete the same process and your car will be ready to race!

Thanks to Dave (DawsonvilleBill9) for the use of his killer car to show you this tutorial. You can find the car in our Late Model 90 downloads category. Let me know in the forum if you want to see more of these in the future!

Thanks,
Robert Vining
www.racingrafix.com