Skinning your car in CarEd

This is basically gonna be me explaining what I learnt from Boose's tutorial. Any instructions given will be based on Photoshop 4.0 and CarEd. If you are using a different graphics program, you will need to find the similar commands.
by LJ

Right, I'm going to presume that you have already made a car in CarEd, and now you want to skin it. Open CarEd and open your car. I'll use my Mini as an example.

In the Component Edit window, select the part of the car you want to skin first, and tick "only visible". You'll see your component (car part) in each view: left, top and front.

Take a look at your component, and see which angle would be the best to skin from - i.e. which gives you the most surface area to skin on, or which one will allow you to put the details you have in your head on. For example, with the front windscreen, you will want to choose 'front' so that you can get the best cover with the texture. Zoom in on the component in this view window, so that you can make out each green line clearly. Go to View --> Show Axis to untick it.

Now, you need to take a screenshot of that area. CarEd comes with a function that allows you to do this, but if you prefer (as I do), use another program to grab the shot. If you are using CarEd to do this, press Alt + Print Screen and then load up your favourite image editing software (I'm using Photoshop 4.0). Make a new image (File --> New) and paste (Edit --> Paste or Ctrl + V) what you've just done.
Right, we have the shot of your component. You need to 'crop' the image so that you have just your component showing. To do this, select the marquee tool (the one that lets you select rectangular areas) and draw a box around the component so that the outermost points are on the edges of your box.

I find that the best way to do this is to zoom in, and draw the box around the middle point of the 'X':

Then 'crop' the image (Image --> Crop). You will see just your component in the image. In order for Carmadeggon 2 to use this as a texture, it needs to be resized. Open up the resize option (Image --> Image size). Untick "Contstrain Proportions" at the bottom. This will allow you to change the height and width separately (make sure you use pixels). Right, now change the both the height and width to a power of 2: 2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256. These do not need to be the same. E.g. you could have an image 16x32. Right, now that the image is resized, it can be used in C2: it is called a texture.

Save this cropped, resized texture in your car's tiffrgb folder. This can be found at: CarEdfolder/yourcarname/tiffrgb. You must save it in RGB colour mode (check this is ticked under Image --> Mode), and in the .TIF format. When you save, use the dropdown list to change the format to .TIF
You can now import your texture.tif (or whatever it's called) into CarEd. In Component Edit, add the new texture (read the CarEd tutorial if unsure about this). Then select the texture in the dropdown list under your component, and align it to whichever side you took the screenshot from.

Press refresh and you'll see your component skinned with this black texture, with the green lines in the correct places. Now you can open up your texture again in Photoshop, and edit it to look the way you want. The lines will help you position your shading properly.
This is the best way to skin your car, and I'd like to thank Boose for his excellent tutorial which helped me learn this. I now pass the knowledge on to you ;-)

Summary

• Grab screenshot of component from best angle
• Crop and resize image
• Save as a .TIF in RGB colour
• Edit texture and place it on your car.

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