My personal project: vehicle banner PNG nostalgia

[Maxim Katsur]

Secondary logos for specific vehicles help an established model to be further recognized and extra flexibility in every diverse situations when primary brand logo isn't enough to be fit or effective. In video games, it sounds loke a thing of the past, but I got inspired by those driving games with such decals, such as Driver: San Francisco, Need for Speed (from II to The Run), Gran Turismo (duh 1-4), and CSR Racing trilogy (surprisingly). It's a small and insignificant detail, but it helped the player surfing the game frontend to recognize the real-world vehicle depicted in a game they're playing to.

I started with RUF, from 1976 to 2013. Ruf Automobile was the most widespread alternative to Porsche due to EA's exclusive licensing deal that finally ended in late 2016. For me this is what if Gran Turismo 6, a game released in 2013, could have more RUF cars that were actually premium AND had secondary vehicle banners returned as a small frontend detail (and for the rest of vehicles).

I ripped them straight from YouTube vidoes (and thumbnails), pasted logos on engines or rear plates, side badges; surfed some PNG download sites, GTSport Decal Search sites, used AI upscaling tools to process into my needs, ripped straight outta video game files (actually used pre-extracted GT3/GT4 vehicle logo sprites). I used GIMP to pay homage to how video game textures supposed to look like should be upscaled (NFS Most Wanted had secondary vehicle logos rendered in 256x64 resolution, DDS (DirectDraw Surface) format, by default; one fan made a mod that upscales car logos into 1024x256). Speaking of resolution, I prefered 1024x256, the quadruple (x4) of what NFS Most Wanted actually used, because it is efficient, but also brings me PS3/X360 vibes.

This might be surreal and/or janky, because there might be dupes, jaggies, oddities, shadow inconsistencies. etc. But I had a lotta fun. Why did I do that? Because I couldn't find such high quality PNG logos for my personal digital collection through Google, so I made the PNGS on my own, with subtle border shadows. That's all I can say.