Random disconnected NR2003 thoughts

[DaleTona75]

I'm sort of at a crossroads with Nr2003 projects. A part of me wants to paint a rolling season update of paint schemes as the year goes on starting next year, but I also don't have as much interest in modern NASCAR as say the mid 2000's. I've tried doing sets of cars from the 2000's but often end up finding myself painting the same stuff over and over, so that has me burnt out as well (not to mention the difficulty of finding reference material for one off schemes/teams)

I've also tried mock season projects, but even those are sort of uninteresting now. I'm just out of ideas and motivation aside from the occasional car here and there, yet still wanting to do a major, long form project. Anyone have any help to get me out of this funk?

 

[Mystical]

I'm sort of at a crossroads with Nr2003 projects. A part of me wants to paint a rolling season update of paint schemes as the year goes on starting next year, but I also don't have as much interest in modern NASCAR as say the mid 2000's. I've tried doing sets of cars from the 2000's but often end up finding myself painting the same stuff over and over, so that has me burnt out as well (not to mention the difficulty of finding reference material for one off schemes/teams)

I've also tried mock season projects, but even those are sort of uninteresting now. I'm just out of ideas and motivation aside from the occasional car here and there, yet still wanting to do a major, long form project. Anyone have any help to get me out of this funk?

This is why I love doing fictional. paint whatever, whenever, however, no matter how silly or nonsensical it is it doesn't matter as its my own series' and the real world rules of manufacturers, car bodies, etc don't apply. Less stress and more fun for me. The last time I painted and race only against real drivers/schemes was early Nascar Racing 2. Even as a kid in 1990's on NR2 I was like "I'd rather just make up my own series of cars and drivers" and enjoyed doing that more.


in unrelated random thoughts:

Sometimes when I have a vision for a base design I end up with way too many layers it could easily be 2-3 separate bases for different cars (and you guys know my bases are already wild as they are). Then I have to painfully decide what to cut:

 

[DaleTona75]

This is why I love doing fictional. paint whatever, whenever, however, no matter how silly or nonsensical it is it doesn't matter as its my own series' and the real world rules of manufacturers, car bodies, etc don't apply. Less stress and more fun for me. The last time I painted and race only against real drivers/schemes was early Nascar Racing 2. Even as a kid in 1990's on NR2 I was like "I'd rather just make up my own series of cars and drivers" and enjoyed doing that more.

I've tried doing fictional series once or twice, but I'm not the most imaginative person when it comes to custom designs, and it is hard to not just rip off real paint schemes.

I used to be really good at that kind of stuff back when I first got NR and painted most of my cars in the ingame paint booth, but as I have honed my painting skills with replicas, it has become harder and harder to stray from "how things should be"

 

[Jacob Craigo]

Meanwhile, i sit in the in-between, blending the worlds of fiction and reality in a way that I feel I've managed to perfect on most schemes I make, with the occasional outlandishly fictional or devilishly close-to-real scheme floating around.

 

[mtblillie]

I'm also not very imaginative when it comes to fictionals. I'll be honest, I mostly take other peoples ideas and make my own cars out of them. I feel like it is kind of fun especially to take a scheme that looks difficult to make and see if I can recreate my own version of it. But this of course means I am ripping peoples work (I do them from scratch, just using a render as a reference point) so I have to use them purely for myself offline.

 

[stevenmerzlak]

I feel like my offline project with ISCRA was way more realistic than most other offline series. That's part of what kept me interested... it was run how I wanted things to be in real life, instead of just being completely outlandish.

I wish I could get it back started, but my friend who ran the races had a hard drive crash earlier this year that basically sucked our motivation dry. It's just too much of an effort to get it rebooted now.

 

[Ceej]

A thought occurred to me recently: A Piston Cup (from Pixar's Cars) mod might be a good candidate for someone's first mod. No interior, custom cockpit, or driver model is needed.

 

[DaleTona75]

I think I might have a solution to my project dilemma. Part of what made me burn out is making every variant of a scheme I can find, especially for back-markers. I might reel in my scope to just primaries/major schemes rather than all of the random one off promotions and variations (including the various movie/video game cars.)

Then once I have a basics done, I can move on to filling out the roster with the schemes I feel are 100% needed for a mock season, and then just leave the rest on the cutting room floor. Also I'll try and reduce the backmarker schemes to maybe at most 4 or 5 schemes difficulty pending, and share them amongst drivers rather than make each variation the various drivers ran, and the race to race rotating associates.

Also I'll try and keep all the cars "generic," in the sense that they will not have track accurate grills/tape, but rather a single car that can be used for all pourposes.

 

[KyleBasaglia]

Thinking about taking a base NR track and going into sandbox with the sole purpose of making it the greatest abomination the world has ever seen. Something you could load up with friends and have some really funny races on. It's something I've messed around with in the past, but I haven't made one in a good while. Hell, it probably doesn't even have to be a base NR track.

 

[Zak103tv]

Thinking about taking a base NR track and going into sandbox with the sole purpose of making it the greatest abomination the world has ever seen. Something you could load up with friends and have some really funny races on. It's something I've messed around with in the past, but I haven't made one in a good while. Hell, it probably doesn't even have to be a base NR track.

sounds gnarly

 

[DaleTona75]

Have you ever felt at a point where you've gotten so good at painting it is a detriment? Sounds stupid, but I've gotten to the point where I can make cars so accurate, it feels wrong to me to not put 100% detail into a car, which can make painting for fun stressful at times as I plainly see the flaws/innaccuracies in paint schemes that I a year or two ago would be OK with.

That is apart of why I haven't yet gotten far on many projects, as 90% of the time I kill my own motivation by critiquing my own work, and anything less than 100% effort just looks wrong, even if I am just noodling around with concepts for fun.

Fantasy cars suffer from the same issues in a different light, where I rarely am satisfied with a car, always thinking "it could be better." I guess it is jsust the perfectionist in me screwing with my own head.

 

[Mystical]

Fantasy cars suffer from the same issues in a different light, where I rarely am satisfied with a car, always thinking "it could be better." I guess it is jsust the perfectionist in me screwing with my own head.

Yeah sometimes if I complete a car quick in my mind sometimes I'm like "you didn't do enough work". But I have to remind myself I can paint fast becasue I've lined up lines on bases a billion times and also sometimes simple bases is better, especially with a balance between complex designs to simple. I know in real racing simple schemes is more realistic but I'm not trying to emulate real world so I do prefer to make complex designs more often as a challenge.

 

[stevenmerzlak]

Currently gathering all of my replicas from other sites and uploading them here... would it be worth it for me to upload my replicas from older mods like BR15 and MENCS17/18? I still have everything on my Mediafire, but I don't want to waste the bandwidth here on something that may not really need to be uploaded.

 

[KyleBasaglia]

Yeah sometimes if I complete a car quick in my mind sometimes I'm like "you didn't do enough work". But I have to remind myself I can paint fast becasue I've lined up lines on bases a billion times and also sometimes simple bases is better, especially with a balance between complex designs to simple. I know in real racing simple schemes is more realistic but I'm not trying to emulate real world so I do prefer to make complex designs more often as a challenge.

That is something that can be hard to accept as a painter. It seems like a lot of painters nowadays want to make the most complicated insane paint schemes the world has ever seen, but sometimes the simple ones can pack a really good punch. I suffer from this as well where I really want to make a scheme more complex, but in the end the scheme is/was fine as is.

 

[mtblillie]

Currently gathering all of my replicas from other sites and uploading them here... would it be worth it for me to upload my replicas from older mods like BR15 and MENCS17/18? I still have everything on my Mediafire, but I don't want to waste the bandwidth here on something that may not really need to be uploaded.

I would say go for it. Especially if you could just link it to your mediafire downloads anyway, but that is just me.

 

[Taiyu86]

been running online nr2003 races, and theres this one server i run in where i basically wreck out every single time and it ticks me off

 

[Zak103tv]

that must be frustrating

 

[Mystical]

holy crap. I just found out a feature in Affinity Photo that automatically exports any layers or a whole document automatically with the export persona.

Painting cars can be tedious becasue you have to move the lines in your image editor, then save, then re-open or refresh manaully the file in whatever program or carviewer you are viewing your scheme to see if the lines line up. I eliminated a long time ago the preview side with Marmoset Toolbag which automatically refreshes any textures that have been updated (blender also has an auto-reload texture addon I use too). However still always had to resave manually in the image editor program any file I made changes too.

Now I literally can work on a scheme moving lines around and see it refresh in marmoset just a split second later. This will be a huge time cost saver no longer having to manually resave the file a billion times when moving textures around or moving lines that are pixels away from where I want them for both paint schemes and 3d models like track 3dos I am working on lol

 

[DumbManLo]

Sounds like an absolute Lifesaver. If I had a Penny for every Time I had to tediously move a Line or something around so it lines up with another Part of the Texture, I'd have a fair bit of Money.

 

[Mystical]

Not directly NR2003 related but cool to see professional behind the scenes designers for racing teams that paint the cars and do designs for the teams. All of us painting cars/concepts as a hobby pretty much lowkey are doing a poor mans version of what real team designers do lol. With that said I like doing this as a hobby with no bounds. All my crackhead designs and color use that would never be approved have a place to live lol

Also I really need to get an ultra wide monitor in the future. I have a quadruple setup but not having gaps in-between the screens must be real nice. One day when I get a house would like to expand my desk size lol

 

[Herman_5395]

Meanwhile, i sit in the in-between, blending the worlds of fiction and reality in a way that I feel I've managed to perfect on most schemes I make, with the occasional outlandishly fictional or devilishly close-to-real scheme floating around.

I'm kind of like this as well, most of the time i even get my ideas from real life paint schemes and adjust from there (most recent example below).

 

[stevenmerzlak]

Not directly NR2003 related but cool to see professional behind the scenes designers for racing teams that paint the cars and do designs for the teams. All of us painting cars/concepts as a hobby pretty much lowkey are doing a poor mans version of what real team designers do lol. With that said I like doing this as a hobby with no bounds. All my crackhead designs and color use that would never be approved have a place to live lol

Also I really need to get an ultra wide monitor in the future. I have a quadruple setup but not having gaps in-between the screens must be real nice. One day when I get a house would like to expand my desk size lol

As someone still trying to be a designer for a living... this video makes me so jealous. I know I could do amazing things in an environment like that, but I just can't get my foot in the door.

 

[Mystical]

I am guessing with the way the economy is many racing teams are not hiring as much but it could change as teams (especially Nascar) get more cash flow, especially if the new TV deal gives teams more % of the earnings.

 

[mtblillie]

I am guessing with the way the economy is many racing teams are not hiring as much but it could change as teams (especially Nascar) get more cash flow, especially if the new TV deal gives teams more % of the earnings.

Their criteria for hiring is probably evolving too. It probably was more common for people like this getting hired because they have an actual graphic arts business and have had a decent amount of schooling on the subject. I'm sure there was a time when that was the only type of person that would get hired. Sim racing has created a whole community of closet graphic designers who have gotten really good with little to no schooling just by painting racecars for games. When those guys started getting hired to do the real thing it gives a lot of us in the community hope that we have a chance.

 

[DaleTona75]

Been "standardizing" my Cup2000 Templates, both Collected, Scratch Made, and Cobbled together, and I currently have 35 different models, both real, and fictionalized



Those of you with keen eyes will see names like Edsel, DeSoto, and GMC amongst the list. Yes I created whole ass fictional templates for these makes. The Plymouth Accolade is a semi-fictional model based on old Mopar rumors, based off the Intrepid, as is the Road Runner to the Charger everything else is based on a real car (with the Eagle being a Chrysler 300M, which was a hasty rebrand after the Eagle brands demise.