User Decals - A Tutorial On How To Make .SVG (Request in separate thread)

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Anyone got any good ideas on how to make the red stripe detail in the image below? I can't seem to get the curves to match the car in the editor... šŸ¤·ā€ā™‚
 

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if you are an illustrator user / decal creator this will make you consider a different export method
 
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Anyone got any good ideas on how to make the red stripe detail in the image below? I can't seem to get the curves to match the car in the editor... šŸ¤·ā€ā™‚
Is it the bleeding distorting your line? For pinstripes over 3D curves, especially over special paint surfaces like the silver flake, I sometimes use a straight line, and align the camera to try and find the angle from which the the curve looks straight. It might need multiple angles, sectioning the line and trying to find angles and rotations that blend without drawing the eye to the join; that looks like a 2 possibly 3-liner to me :) The decal depth can help in blending sections. Which car are you putting this on btw?

If the closest to straight angle still has a curve, Iā€™ll give it a go with a straight line, then replace with a curve. For subtle curves, the patterns-1-55 decal is good, once you stretch it up and skinny it in, you can skew it to tweak the curve.
 
Is it the bleeding distorting your line? For pinstripes over 3D curves, especially over special paint surfaces like the silver flake, I sometimes use a straight line, and align the camera to try and find the angle from which the the curve looks straight. It might need multiple angles, sectioning the line and trying to find angles and rotations that blend without drawing the eye to the join; that looks like a 2 possibly 3-liner to me :) The decal depth can help in blending sections. Which car are you putting this on btw?

If the closest to straight angle still has a curve, Iā€™ll give it a go with a straight line, then replace with a curve. For subtle curves, the patterns-1-55 decal is good, once you stretch it up and skinny it in, you can skew it to tweak the curve.
I'm putting it on the Gr.3 Viper. It's mainly a matter of getting it to match the edge of the vent opening. I can get it to work partially as one decal using straight protection from above, but it always distorts. I'll try get a pic up.
 
I'm putting it on the Gr.3 Viper. It's mainly a matter of getting it to match the edge of the vent opening. I can get it to work partially as one decal using straight protection from above, but it always distorts. I'll try get a pic up.
I tried the rear vent going around the lights at the back of the Gr.3 Viper, it seems to be a horrible surface where points map to more than one place. If you put a decal in this area it appears somewhere else and/or goes all pixelly.

There are other cars like this, the Audi S4 around the passenger window, the RUF number plates, around the headlights of the GR Yaris, the door handle of the Gr4. Atenza and there are others. Iā€˜ve wondered in the past if anyone ever made a list of these annoying buggers. Also stuff like wavy surfaces, take a bow the front of the Stratos hood, where I used a wave to get a straight line :grumpy:

sometimes using depth can help, and replacing lines with squares (so that the depth is calculated in a tight viewbox) or vice-versa, I never overcame the ones Iā€™ve listed and the Viper has me beaten too, interested to know if anyone can overcome these anomalies
 
If there is room for an XML editing guide, I was going to ask about importing SVGs into Vectornator on iPad, but I found an XML editor and it solved the problem. I used to edit XML for Inkscape gradients (need a new laptop atm), removing any transforms in the code so I could set them back to ā€˜absoluteā€™ co-ordinates. w3schools have good guides for xml and svg editing, once you get used to <> and </> itā€™s pretty easy, you just learn what works for your graphics app and the quirks of GT Sport, work on a copy file and experiment. Also useful for optimising down to 15kb, and learning how compact you can get by examining the gtplanet svg :) You can create decals directly in xml, I followed the w3schools gradients tutorial and had masked radial gradients that worked.

Vectornator didnā€™t play well with decals using ā€˜fill=even oddā€™ applied to a group of paths inside a viewbox sized rectangle. The decal was basically un-editable. I removed the <g> definition... </g>, and applied a fill to the paths individually, also removed the rectangle, voila, Vectornator allowed editing.

For gradients, Inkscape was set to ā€˜absoluteā€™ saving (rather than relative), but transforms were still applied in the xml, so I removed them, re-opened the file and the raw gradient appears now in the wrong place, often far from the original so Iā€™d have to mess with the viewbox settings in XML too to see it. Move it back to the right place, re-size (but donā€™t skew), save and the gradient works.

The ā€˜donā€™t skewā€™ part is interesting. I never figured a way to get rx and ry to work, i.e. an ellipse/oval instead of a circle, so Iā€™d end up skewing everything else inversely, then skewing back in GT Sport. In other words, when PD say ā€˜simple shapesā€™ for gradients, do they mean either straight or a circle only?

Hereā€™s the link for W3schools SVG: https://www.w3schools.com/graphics/svg_intro.asp they do xml too.
 
I tried the rear vent going around the lights at the back of the Gr.3 Viper, it seems to be a horrible surface where points map to more than one place. If you put a decal in this area it appears somewhere else and/or goes all pixelly.

There are other cars like this, the Audi S4 around the passenger window, the RUF number plates, around the headlights of the GR Yaris, the door handle of the Gr4. Atenza and there are others. Iā€˜ve wondered in the past if anyone ever made a list of these annoying buggers. Also stuff like wavy surfaces, take a bow the front of the Stratos hood, where I used a wave to get a straight line :grumpy:

sometimes using depth can help, and replacing lines with squares (so that the depth is calculated in a tight viewbox) or vice-versa, I never overcame the ones Iā€™ve listed and the Viper has me beaten too, interested to know if anyone can overcome these anomalies
imho the only working method which can conquer these flawed model areas is to project a custom decal via camera angle and then adjust the decal in your vector software until it fits. very tiresome but some of my highly qualified discord members use it if all other approaches are proved futile. and even that is not a guarantee for success.
 
Thanks @CBOT, I clicked on your DISCORD link and before I knew it Iā€™d ā€˜slid onto your serverā€™, Iā€™m bit notification-phobic but hopefully Iā€™ll slide back and say ā€˜hiā€™ at some point, but ā€˜hiā€™ here in the meantime :)
 
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all cool, @SouperK.
very small, low activity server*. sent you a DM. if you want to join just answer that.

*also: right click on the specific discord server icon lets you mute it. if you dont want a permanent alarm clock keeping you awake all night that is šŸ˜‰
 
imho the only working method which can conquer these flawed model areas is to project a custom decal via camera angle and then adjust the decal in your vector software until it fits. very tiresome but some of my highly qualified discord members use it if all other approaches are proved futile. and even that is not a guarantee for success.
That's the approach I was using, I just can't get the mapping right yet. Always comes out distorted and I can't seem to reverse engineer the distortion accurately.
 
That's the approach I was using, I just can't get the mapping right yet. Always comes out distorted and I can't seem to reverse engineer the distortion accurately.
yea. some errors are total šŸ’© and seemingly can't be fixed no matter what you do. shame.

anyhow, just let me know when you need a hand and i will try to help if i can.
 
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yea. some errors are total šŸ’© and seemingly can't be fixed no matter what you do. shame.

anyhow, just let me know when you need a hand and i will try to help if i can.
Thank you! I'm going to have another go at the weekend so I'll let you know if I get stuck.
 
Hi everyone! I'm a new member of this community and I want to make some amazing waifu itasha liveries. I already have Inkscape and tracing a screencap from this game. I know it's 3d and all, but I was thinking of just tracing the shape by just relying the outline itself. Not only that, making it cel shaded.
Eb2ncrRWsAQCRrz.jpg
 
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Hi, new here, just being scrolling through this thread for advice, ideas etc. I've got to say SVGs are a whole new education for me and getting the little blighters under 15Kb has been frustrating. Somewhere on here I spotted a post about manually reducing the nodes which seemed to work a treat

Before
SMD Screenshot Nodes Galore.png


After
SMD Screenshot Reduced Nodes.jpg


I use CorelDRAW for vector stuff at work and I've just started trying Inkscape as well so I can tweak them at home. Once I've got a few more finished liveries I'll start posting them in here (wherever the right subforum is to post them anyway!)
 
Hi, new here, just being scrolling through this thread for advice, ideas etc. I've got to say SVGs are a whole new education for me and getting the little blighters under 15Kb has been frustrating. Somewhere on here I spotted a post about manually reducing the nodes which seemed to work a treat

Before
View attachment 1105812

After
View attachment 1105813

I use CorelDRAW for vector stuff at work and I've just started trying Inkscape as well so I can tweak them at home. Once I've got a few more finished liveries I'll start posting them in here (wherever the right subforum is to post them anyway!)
Aaaaagh, they're still black with no fill
 
OK, anybody got any ideas? I've looked through this thread and followed as much of it as I understood but I still have the same issue. Although the preview in the Decal Uploader looks OK, with gradient fully intact, the image in the Livery Editor itself is plain black. I have reduced the number of nodes, I've created the gradient after any resizing, I've converted both the object and the outline to path. I've even fed the finished result into SVGOMG and it has made no difference. Can somebody with more experience of this (I literally only started playing with the Livery Editor about 5 weeks ago) have a look at the file I've attached and let me know what I'm doing wrong.
 

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  • SMD Racing Gold Path.svg
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OK, anybody got any ideas? I've looked through this thread and followed as much of it as I understood but I still have the same issue. Although the preview in the Decal Uploader looks OK, with gradient fully intact, the image in the Livery Editor itself is plain black. I have reduced the number of nodes, I've created the gradient after any resizing, I've converted both the object and the outline to path. I've even fed the finished result into SVGOMG and it has made no difference. Can somebody with more experience of this (I literally only started playing with the Livery Editor about 5 weeks ago) have a look at the file I've attached and let me know what I'm doing wrong.
try this it should work
 

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Nope, I'm still missing something. I've found and input the X1, X2, Y1 & Y2 values. I can't see anything resembling a Matrix Transform string though. I mean, I've got a long string of characters but it looks nothing like the examples given in the thread.Screenshot (32).png
I mean, look at it, it's about 30 times as long! And there are no commas to separate the points either. Any help appreciated
 
Nope, I'm still missing something. I've found and input the X1, X2, Y1 & Y2 values. I can't see anything resembling a Matrix Transform string though. I mean, I've got a long string of characters but it looks nothing like the examples given in the thread.View attachment 1106919
I mean, look at it, it's about 30 times as long! And there are no commas to separate the points either. Any help appreciated
(you need to open your svg file in a text editor before reducing it)

But when I made the corrections in your file, I opened it with my software (affinity) and after saving it, it's coded differently than in Corel.
Apparently there's no matrix transform in your original file. I'm not sure the google sheet is useful for you.
 
(you need to open your svg file in a text editor before reducing it)

But when I made the corrections in your file, I opened it with my software (affinity) and after saving it, it's coded differently than in Corel.
Apparently there's no matrix transform in your original file. I'm not sure the google sheet is useful for you.
Thanks for getting back to me. I use CorelDRAW and I've started using Inkscape and I get the same output from both. I'v not come across Affinity tbh. I've managed to get simple gradients created with Corel to upload before, so maybe I'm just being a bit too ambitious trying to get so many stop points in these ones. If I can get very simple transparency fades to works, I might try building it up from several layers. I've put a highlight and a shadow layer under the file you tweaked for me and it worked quite well. It's just a shame the Livery Editor doesn't allow you to group decals so you could move them all together.
 
Thanks for getting back to me. I use CorelDRAW and I've started using Inkscape and I get the same output from both. I'v not come across Affinity tbh. I've managed to get simple gradients created with Corel to upload before, so maybe I'm just being a bit too ambitious trying to get so many stop points in these ones. If I can get very simple transparency fades to works, I might try building it up from several layers. I've put a highlight and a shadow layer under the file you tweaked for me and it worked quite well. It's just a shame the Livery Editor doesn't allow you to group decals so you could move them all together.
If you already made gradients that worked, there's no reason this one shouldn't work.
It might also be just a problem with your black outline.
In your file, the outline is above the gradient, and I don't know if it's going to be clear: the outline is a substraction of 2 shapes.
and sometimes I have the same issue. I don't know if that option is available in Inkscape, but in Affinity, I must invert the "inside" curve.
Or in your case, you could put your gradient above the outline, but some letters (d,r,a) would be full black behind the gradient.
 
I hadn't thought of what order the layers might be in tbh. When I'm doing normal work in CorelDRAW, the outline is always treated the same as the object but I guess to do this they are separate and the order then matters. I'll check the layer order and try again. Thank you.
 
YYESSSSSSS!!!!!

Layer order seems to be the problem. I've only redone one so far but it came into the Livery Editor perfectly and applied to a car. Just got all the other ones to tweak now.

Thank you for all the advice
 
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