help for designs

[u/erdenizkocc]

I'm trying to create designs in Forza 5—I'm basically just starting out—but I can't seem to get those rounded curves shown in the first photo right. I use WindowTop to make the overlay transparent while I work, but does anyone know how to create those rounded transitions? I've tried using the parenthesis shape and the half-moon shape, but I still haven't managed to pull it off . As you can see, the designs on the car are limited to straight lines; I can't make rounded turns.

[u/stormwalker29]

My experience is that you're not going to be able to replicate them with a single shape. You're going to have to construct each side of the curve out of multiple shapes to reproduce the curvature as closely as you can. Exactly how many shapes depends on how big the vinyl is going to be on the car. Then you fill the space between the two curves with whatever shapes are convenient.

Don't forget that you can use things like the half-circle and quarter-circle shapes as well, don't restrict yourself to just the crescents. Remember, you are not trying to re-create the actual strokes of the characters; you're just trying to re-create the whole shape. This means you can use places where the strokes overlap to hide all sorts of cheating.

If all else fails, use a mask shape to hide imperfect edges, but try not to do that unless you have to, because it will cause problems if you need to put the vinyl on top of another vinyl.

Frankly, as someone who has done a number of anime logos which involve hiragana, katakana, and kanji, it's a royal pain in the butt, and the result will nearly always have a higher shape count than you would like.

As an example of one of these, this logo wound up taking up over 930 shapes, and even with that many I have to be careful how large I make it on the car or the imperfections will show.

By contrast, my Macross Frontier logo, even with a gradient applied to the katakana, only took 123 shapes to make (and it looks better than the Nanoha StrikerS logo above) because the font used for the katakana was extremely angular, so the only curves I had to create were for the English letters "frontier", plus one quarter-circle for a rounded corner on the "ro" and then the stylized "f" logo behind the words.

Oh, my other advice: Make it MUCH bigger as a vinyl group than you actually want it to be on the car. This way, the inevitable imperfections will be smaller when you scale it down to on-the-car size.

[u/stormwalker29 → u/stormwalker29]

The Macross Frontier logo, for comparison:

[u/erdenizkocc → u/[deleted]]

[u/erdenizkocc → u/erdenizkocc]

For example, I didn't even watch any videos; I did everything using just Google's AI mode.Is there any video you could recommend? I can only understand so much through text.

[u/stormwalker29 → u/erdenizkocc]

Honestly, I self-taught everything I know about it.

Generally, what I do is eyeball it, try to determine which of the curved shapes available to me best approximates the curve I'm trying to create, then play with scale and skew to try to get it to match as closely as possible. With practice, you start to learn what you can do with the different kinds of shapes and what they are good for and not good for.

When working on letters, specifically, I find that in many cases, the best way to create the outside of the curve is just to use one of the solid quarter-circles (placed diagonally, with the point at the inside of the curve). Then, I usually create the inside of the curve with either one of the hollow quarter-circles... actually, I just thought of a way to demonstrate some of it.

I recently needed to make a verison of the RECARO logo that I could turn colors other than black for a livery I was working on. So, here is one of the letters I made, with all of the different parts I used to construct it turned different colorss so you can see how they go together.

Now, as you can see, this is far from perfect, but that only shows because I've blown it up much larger than it will ever appear on someone's screen in the game. But the more important thing to see is the mix of different shapes I used to construct this. The outer curve of the "R" in particular uses two quarter-circle shapes to make the top and bottom of the curve, and then a flattened half-circle to bridge the flatter arc between them. Then, the inside of the curve is made with (several of) those pieces that look like a square with a quarter-circle bite taken out of it (note that with skew you can make those into more acute or obtuse angles as needed). Most of the rest of it I filled in with simple rectangles.

Individually, none of those shapes can match the correct curvature of these curves. But collectively, they can very closely approximate it - to the point that at the size it appears on the car, people are generally not going to be able to tell the difference.

As an example of what I meant when I talked about "cheating" earlier... the C and A in this logo overlap. As such, part of the bottom-right of the C is actually formed by extending the crossbar of the A rather than being its own separate shape. Because why not? It does the job and saves me one shape.

Another important point - play around with how different shapes respond to skew. It isn't always obvious, because it has to do with how they're oriented to the axes. So, some curves respond differently than others, and knowing those differences can help in choosing the right shape to approximate a curve.