Damn, that St. Luzia is gorgeous. Wow. I've been a bit absent from the AC scene for a few days and look at what I miss. Thanks for sharing, both of you guys. Oh,
@rcallsign - do you live in Portugal? You sure seemed to know a lot about that hillclimb to St. Luzia. I enjoyed the narration you provided. 👍
I'll give that ACU Istanbul track a try when I have a chance. I know that I used to have a fairly sizeable number of tracks installed labeled ACU. If I'm not mistaken, they did Bathurst and they made a night version of some track which I hated...which track it was escapes me at the moment. Ugh. I can't even remember what ACU stands for.
Be sure to set up the light sources and brightness and such for your CM Showrooms while viewing a KS car. I made the mistake of changing everything to make a mod F1 car look good (was one of the '95 F1 season cars), and found out the hard way when I looked at a car with good shaders in CM showroom, and it was all overexposed and looked like arse. I changed all the settings to suit a KS car, and then realised how bad the shaders are on those F1 cars. I managed to find someone who'd fixed the shaders for those cars, but I downloaded them, and when I had a look in CM showroom, they'd somehow managed to make the cars about 50% bigger than they should have been. It looked ridiculous enough to give me a giggle, but was kind of annoying, as I was glad I'd found the F1 cars with fixed shaders, only to find they were broken in a different, and more significant way.
Anyway, at least now my CM showroom preset is set for KS cars, so it'll show up any flaws in the shaders of mod cars now. We need someone who is a bit handy with modelling here, because there are some really good mods that are simply outdated now and need various small fixes (like the aforementioned shaders n the '95 F1 cars).
BINGO! I've been using Content Manager's Showroom for so long, with custom made presets from other people, I think I forgot that the person who made the preset might not have used default lighting...and when I checked, yup! They tweaked lighting color, brightness, etc. and as you pointed out, that isn't always the best lighting for cars that have flaws, or whatever.
I always liked Istanbul Park. It's a real rhythm-based track kind of like when F1 used to race Magny-Cours.
I mentioned that I installed my first mod of any kind of Assetto Corsa when I downloaded the Ginetta G55 GT4 mod. In my usual runs, I had a chance to race it. It was a very good mod. I possibly want to try to provide skins for this car. I do have a track or two I downloaded also. So I hope to add that as my first third-party track used in Assetto Corsa.
For when I decide to release skins, I downloaded a mod just for some guidance. So I know what to do and how to structure folders for when I release my first skins.
I want to close by showing you an example of Content Manager lightning settings I have been tinkering with. I want to share one of my past designs and a recent update to the livery I made. These two pictures are examples of me trying different scene settings in CM. Don't pay so much attention to the liveries, but more towards some of the lighting touches I used:
Then...
Now...
For more of my Assetto Corsa work:
Assetto Corsa on JMDesigns
What I did was decrease the lighting for the scene as well as make the light source not as bright. And as you can tell, I added a mirror reflection for a little extra elegant pictures. Having an overall black scene with a reflective floor is reminiscent of how cars were featured in "Sports Car GT." One of the biggest changes I made was going from 300% ambient brightness (which explains why I toned down the gamma on my images previously) down to 250% ambient brightness. I have Brightness at 50%. I would love to make my own scene for making more elegant and beautiful pictures, but I am the "quality over quantity" type. The ambient light is at white (255, 255, 255 RGB value). The one thing I question was whether or not to stick with mirror reflections or have blurred mirror reflections for taking car screenshots. I disable the mirror floor when I try to make car + team pictures.
Now that I've been in the skinning groove of late, I am still enjoying working with Assetto Corsa skins. I already began work on a number of other possible cars I want to make skins for.
You have a very interesting way of writing.
I'm glad to see you're enjoying everything Content Manager has to offer. I haven't been able to wrap my head around the new neural network thingamajig x4fab is introducing to CM for building proper tires for a vehicle. I'm assuming his efforts are to put an end to people putting on tires that are so wrong for their cars...I haven't fooled around with it yet, but I was hoping to find some type of documentation - a forum post or two - from x4fab explaining things. I was nervous and didn't want to create a black hole.
I took a peek at your website
@JohnBM01. You've got some nice skins created for Assetto Corsa. 👍 I thought the Coca-Cola/Pizza Hut livery was cool. So was the FedEx skin on the GT86. Good job.
I don't know if you're aware of this, but you can assign Team Names, Drive Names & Nationalities to skins, if you want to, in Content Manager. For instance, you mentioned Sodexo being a French company and therefore you want it to belong to a French racing team.
All you have to do is go into Content Manager > Content > Cars > Select the car that has the Sodexo skin (Porsche 911 RSR). Now, Right-Click on the car (Porsche 911 RSR) and select Manage Skins. A new window will pop up showing the car and there will be a list of all the skins available for that car. The rest should be self-explanatory. Just don't forget to hit SAVE with each Skin you edit. Now, whenever that skin is used by an AI Driver, it will always have the Driver's Name, Team Name & Nationality you assigned to it.
Now, let's say that you have 4 different Skins for the Porsche 911 RSR, but you've only assigned a Driver Name, Team Name & Nationality to one of the skins. Well, when you're putting together the list of cars you'd like to race against, hit the button Detailed Settings. It's to the right of the Plus Sign where your Driver Candidates list it. Inside Detailed Settings you'll see how you can assign a specific skin to a specific car, plus you can apply specific Strength & Aggression percentages to each of the cars in this race/track day. Oh, and you can apply individual Ballat & Restrictors to the cars.
That might seem tedious and the first couple of times it may be. However, you can also do a Save Preset on that Detailed Settings page! For instance, let's say you want a field made out of GT3 cars, GT2 cars & GT1 cars. You list all of 'em in the Candidates column. Now go into the Detailed Settings and assign skins, ballast or restrictions. Save that as a Preset. Now, every time you have one of these GT1, GT2 & GT3 races you can use that preset which is as quick as selecting it from the drop-down box.
Something I recently discovered... Let's stick with the above example and lets just say that there is a total of 25 GT1, GT2 & GT3 cars and you've got them all listed in the Candidates section. Let's say that you want to do a 10 lap race with a total of 12 opponents. Content Manager will randomly pick out 12 cars, if that's what you want...Go enjoy your race. But, at the last minute you decide, "I want to race 12 AI drivers, but I only want a total of 4 different types of cars making up that list of 12. Now, you could either make another Race Preset and only list 4 cars in the candidates list, but then you'll always race those 4 manufacturers. That's not what you want. So, what you do instead is you keep that full candidates list and you click on the 3 dots (to the left of the Plus Sign) in the Candidates section. Car Variety Limit is Off by default. Change it to 4. Choose either Random or Shuffle as the Arrangement (I leave it on Shuffle which is the default).
Now hit the GO! button. You'll see that Content Manager came up with a unique starting field and there are a total of 13 drivers. You plus the 12 AI drivers. The AI drivers with be comprised of only 4 different types of cars. Is all of that a bit superfluous? Sure...But, it's there if you really want it. That concludes today's lesson. Pop quiz tomorrow!
I very much appreciate you guys recommending tracks that you find enjoyable. Please, if you come across something on that list, or anywhere for that matter, please post here if you don't mind. 
What a jerk. That's J3DModding.com, right? Man, I knew there was something I didn't like about that guy, going all the way back to when I first came across one of his mods on Race Department. Rude and arrogant and thinks very highly of his work while criticizing others. Screw him.
I read his writing to mean 24 different cars just like you did...so it's not like you misinterpreted what he wrote. If I were you I would have been expecting the same thing too. Before anyone says, "24 cars is ridiculous to think...maybe 2 or 3 cars at the most!" the reason I disagree is because I've come across some other modders, like a J3DD - they tend to be capable of quality comparable to J3D Modding. Not awful, but no where near A3DR.
