Needing help on how to approach recreating carbon fiber decal

[Ratchet2448]

Hi, I'm needing help trying to figure out how to recreate a carbon fiber decal (I use Adobe Illustrator). The decal was on GT Sport but did not transfer to GT7 (was originally made by Majid7883, but pretty sure no longer plays). The carbon fiber decals that are available don't quite achieve the effect I'm looking for that this one could do. The 1st picture below is the base picture, the one after is how it looks when you overlay it onto other colors.

This is one area of decal making that is new to me... I saw some previous conversations from @MatskiMonk, @pioSko, and @BLiTZ that talked about being able to generate a repeated pattern, but i'm not sure if this one would fall under the same method or something else (the ones i've seen basically look like a "wave" between black and transparent/color). Is another program needed or are there features in AI that could make this?

 

[MatskiMonk]

This is one area of decal making that is new to me... I saw some previous conversations from @MatskiMonk, @pioSko, and @BLiTZ that talked about being able to generate a repeated pattern, but i'm not sure if this one would fall under the same method or something else (the ones i've seen basically look like a "wave" between black and transparent/color). Is another program needed or are there features in AI that could make this?

I've not looked into this for ages, but to the best of my knowledge it's a "spread method: Repeat" style linear gradient fill is still the best method, and possibly could make those decals.

It's tricky though. I don't use Illustrator, but I know for example that in Corel, though you can draw it as though it should work, when it exports to SVG it doesn't actually use the spread method repeat tags and you end up with a massive file, so the way I've done it in the past was to just code the SVG from a blank page using something like Mozilla playground and something like this as a starting point

<svg width="400" height="400" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
  <defs>
    
      <linearGradient id="RepeatGradient1" spreadMethod="repeat" x1="0%" y1="0%" x2="5%" y2="0%">
      <stop offset="0%" stop-color="black" />
      <stop offset="80%" stop-color="white" />
    </linearGradient>
    
      <linearGradient id="RepeatGradient2" spreadMethod="repeat" x1="0%" y1="0%" x2="0%" y2="5%">
      <stop offset="0%" stop-color="black" />
      <stop offset="80%" stop-color="white" />
    </linearGradient>
 
 </defs>
 
  <rect fill="url(#RepeatGradient1)" fill-opacity="50%" x="0" y="0" width="400" height="400" />
 
  <rect fill="url(#RepeatGradient2)" fill-opacity="50%" x="0" y="0" width="400" height="400" />
</svg>

Which should yield a pattern like this...

Which can obviously be tweaked...

However, having said all that, anything like a CF decal is going to rely on multiple different layers having different opacities, and I'm pretty sure GT7 doesn't recognise these, and always makes the top layer's opacity 100%. I don't think this was an issue in GT Sport (GTS didn't allow for changing opacity in the livery editor, so I'm guessing it's something to do with that), but it is now in GT7.

edit: Yup, the above pattern renders like this in the livery editor as it's made the Y gradient 100% opaque...

edit2: looking at your images again, you can just draw it as a shape and see how often you can repeat it for 15kb. I might have a look at that.

 

[Ratchet2448]

How i've been approaching it was just trying to see if I could make a small section and start by just drawing straight, thick lines (thought drawing a box/rect would just add extra anchor points that would increase file size). To me, the pattern seemed like it could be broken down into 5 unique lines, 2 of which would have gradient characteristics. the remaining could possibly just be solid colors with a certain %opacity. With that said my initial approach looked like this

For just that little bit, the file size 12kb but regardless when I uploaded to GT7,

• the "vertical" gradient carried over...kind of.... i'll need to play with using black instead of white.
• the "horizontal" gradient basically defaulted to a solid fill. Two of these I tried to apply no fill to see if it would change anything but all it did was make them grey instead.
• I did another test later on where I applied a gradient to the top left black square. That one showed up on GT7 so not sure yet why my "horizontal" is being blacked out.

 

[eran0004]

thought drawing a box/rect would just add extra anchor points that would increase file size

Since the rectangles are evenly sized and evenly distributed you might be able to reduce file size by limiting the number of decimals for each anchor point.

 

[MatskiMonk]

I tried something similar yesterday. I got each repeat down to about 200 bytes, so I'd get about 60 or 70 repeats in one file. I'd written it by hand to keep it small, then I realised what that meant tiling it and gave up.

 

[Mugo]

I've never attempted anything like this. But would cloning not be a viable solution? Or is the multiple gradients, coupled with layers an issue?