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

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On Inkscape, I'll make a decal in colour, but GTS loads it as a black image with the ability to change the colour. How do I set it to that colour beforehand in Inkscape? thanks.
 
Any ideas what I'm doing wrong here guys? I've got CorelDraw 12 to make my vectored graphics, but if I save them as SVG files in Corel, they show up completely blank in-game, so I'm exporting as EPS vectors and using websites to convert them to SVG files. They seemingly upload fine, but when I load GT Sport, I'm seeing just a fraction of the decal I uploaded. See screenshots below:

41954728640_6485d96e7d_h.jpg


43763012841_61ab426672_h.jpg


Assistance greatly appreciated.
 
Any ideas what I'm doing wrong here guys? I've got CorelDraw 12 to make my vectored graphics, but if I save them as SVG files in Corel, they show up completely blank in-game, so I'm exporting as EPS vectors and using websites to convert them to SVG files. They seemingly upload fine, but when I load GT Sport, I'm seeing just a fraction of the decal I uploaded. See screenshots below:

41954728640_6485d96e7d_h.jpg


43763012841_61ab426672_h.jpg


Assistance greatly appreciated.

What export settings are you using?

Off the tip of my head, before you save, select the decal in Corel, and make sure the export selected only box is ticked.

You might also want to make sure that if there is the option, styles are set as presentation attributes, not embedded CSS, as you need to edit the XML for the latter to work.

I'm using Coreldraw X3 so the options might be different.
 
Big help - making progress now. Thank you so much.

I've now got another problem when I'm exporting - the graphic is made up of a few separate parts that I've combined and then given an outline/stroke (which is set to scale with the image) - if I export as an EPS, it's all absolutely correct and as I would like it. When I save as/export it from Corel as an SVG, the outline is showing up much thicker than intended, and it also cuts across the intersections where the various components are joined. Any ideas?

EDIT: Disregard the above - I found a workaround that got the result I was looking for. Thank you so much for the help.
 
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Should have looked in to all these editors before starting! I've been learning for 1/2 weeks and it's just insane how much is involved. Logos etc are pretty easy and straightforward but when you start putting on random shapes and lines and don't forget the damn gradients i struggled with so hard!.

Finally on my way and creating a livery that is absolutely incredible in person. I'm hoping it relates in game! Taken to taking a side on shot of my car and using inkscape to freehand then transferring that over to decal uploader.

This stuff is too tricky just to make a car look cool! haha
 
Should have looked in to all these editors before starting! I've been learning for 1/2 weeks and it's just insane how much is involved. Logos etc are pretty easy and straightforward but when you start putting on random shapes and lines and don't forget the damn gradients i struggled with so hard!.

Finally on my way and creating a livery that is absolutely incredible in person. I'm hoping it relates in game! Taken to taking a side on shot of my car and using inkscape to freehand then transferring that over to decal uploader.

This stuff is too tricky just to make a car look cool! haha

Well done on the progress. The more you do the more it will click into place.

The principles across editors are mostly the same. It's unfortunate that some editors drop the ball with writing suitably simple SVG XML, because it gives the impression of the whole process being harder than it really is.

The good news is these are real world transferable skills!
 
what I found is that affinity is absolutely fantastic and has a nice feel, but it lacks major parts to it. Inkscape doesn't have the best ui but does the job better! I've progressed a lot in a whole 2 with inkscape Imo than with affinity!
 
Wrong thread? Shoot me.

View attachment 757491

Someone needs to clean up his decal list.. And maybe make a second user JUST for decals.. ;)

MMX
I've been there myself several times already. Haven't thought about making another account, just for decals. I may have to do that. 👍

You'll still have to save the decals you need on the main account to be able to use them... Or create the liveries with the second account.
 
You'll still have to save the decals you need on the main account to be able to use them... Or create the liveries with the second account.
Yeah, it's not ideal, but if the decal account shares them, I could add them to the collection on the main account, which I still have ton of space there. It would give me a bank of decals to pull from, that are never truly deleted. I've probably made, and uploaded close to 1400 decals, so I've deleted a bunch. I feel guilty using other people's decals sometimes, so have not downloaded to many, usually stuff that I forgot to make, and want to keep going without having to wait to make the decal. I'm not able to make decals at home, so it's a 24 hour turn around for me to make and use a decal.
 
MMX
I feel guilty using other people's decals sometimes, so have not downloaded to many
:lol: Sorry I had to smile at this one. That’s just too cute.

I don’t trust others decals enough so I always make the decals I need before I start a livery, I have a few good in my download folder but rarely use them. Only ones I do use ‘often’ is @BLiTZ’s carbon sheets. Those are too good! :drool:
 
:lol: Sorry I had to smile at this one. That’s just too cute.

I don’t trust others decals enough so I always make the decals I need before I start a livery, I have a few good in my download folder but rarely use them. Only ones I do use ‘often’ is @BLiTZ’s carbon sheets. Those are too good! :drool:

Likewise, (aside from a couple of small sponsor decals in the early days that I've since replaced with my own better versions) I think the only decals I've used from another user are @JKcreativeworks 's Sunday Cup number boards.

Whilst 99% of the GT Sport user base can't tell or don't care about decal quality (there's far too much auto tracing or absolutely nuking to death in SVGOMG going on), I take pride in making sure my decals are as accurate as possible.
 
:lol: Sorry I had to smile at this one. That’s just too cute.

I don’t trust others decals enough so I always make the decals I need before I start a livery, I have a few good in my download folder but rarely use them. Only ones I do use ‘often’ is @BLiTZ’s carbon sheets. Those are too good! :drool:

Likewise, (aside from a couple of small sponsor decals in the early days that I've since replaced with my own better versions) I think the only decals I've used from another user are @JKcreativeworks 's Sunday Cup number boards.

Whilst 99% of the GT Sport user base can't tell or don't care about decal quality (there's far too much auto tracing or absolutely nuking to death in SVGOMG going on), I take pride in making sure my decals are as accurate as possible.

Agree on both, which is the other reason I don't like to use others decals, but in a pinch I'll try to find the best I can get. I'm a graphic designer for a living, so totally capable making my own, but due to my computer situation, I'm usually trying to do it quick, without quality suffering, and under the radar. :odd:
 
Likewise, (aside from a couple of small sponsor decals in the early days that I've since replaced with my own better versions) I think the only decals I've used from another user are @JKcreativeworks 's Sunday Cup number boards.

Whilst 99% of the GT Sport user base can't tell or don't care about decal quality (there's far too much auto tracing or absolutely nuking to death in SVGOMG going on), I take pride in making sure my decals are as accurate as possible.

Oh yeah totally forgot about the Sunday Cup decals. Yeah I use those too. :)

Totally agree on your last part too. I love creating my own decals, it takes forever but it’s so satisfying you know your work is absolutely flawless. (Minus a few details sometimes :lol:)
 
Thanks to all of your guys help and the Inkscape tutorials I was able to recreate this logo for a company I do work for. I'm going to make three cars, one for this company, one for my personal business and another company I sub-contract for. The logo isn't perfect but I hope to improve my skills the more I play around with Inkscape, seems like the possibilities are almost endless with that program.

Screen Shot 2018-08-09 at 21.09.59.png
 
Can someone please help, I'm new to this. I was checking through peoples gallery's and I want to know how they are able to upload decals with a variety of colours such as cartoon characters. Whenever I try to upload something with a range of colours, I have to break the image up into 1 colour per decal and then chop those individual colours up just to get each 1 under 15kb. I then have to try and jigsaw them all back together again when uploading to a car, it's all super stressful.
 
Can someone please help, I'm new to this. I was checking through peoples gallery's and I want to know how they are able to upload decals with a variety of colours such as cartoon characters. Whenever I try to upload something with a range of colours, I have to break the image up into 1 colour per decal and then chop those individual colours up just to get each 1 under 15kb. I then have to try and jigsaw them all back together again when uploading to a car, it's all super stressful.
From what I've seen, thats exactly what people are doing. Although I've seen many super detailed anime decals that have been uploaded, if only they would put their talents into making decals that are cooler than cartoon girls. I have been working on manually copying logos so I can keep the amount of points down, as I think thats where the best way to keep the file size down is.
 
Can someone please help, I'm new to this. I was checking through peoples gallery's and I want to know how they are able to upload decals with a variety of colours such as cartoon characters. Whenever I try to upload something with a range of colours, I have to break the image up into 1 colour per decal and then chop those individual colours up just to get each 1 under 15kb. I then have to try and jigsaw them all back together again when uploading to a car, it's all super stressful.
You just have to try and make it as simple as you can with as few nodes as possible.

Perhaps you can zip and upload one of your decals (that you can't get below 15kb here) and we might be able to give you a few pointers.

Oh, and what vector editing program are you using?
 
Here's a couple of examples I found while browsing the decal gallery. I just can't see how these are under 15kb with all the colours and outlines. There must be a good few hundred nodes.



panther.png
misato.png
 
Here's a couple of examples I found while browsing the decal gallery. I just can't see how these are under 15kb with all the colours and outlines. There must be a good few hundred nodes.



View attachment 758357 View attachment 758358
Have a look at the attached files. It's the decal I've probably spent the most time on to get under the 15kb. Compare and contrast them to see what I had to do to each shape.

Check how many fewer nodes there are in the smaller one.
Check how some shapes go underneath others so you get to use fewer nodes. Instead of drawing two jaggy lines, you're drawing one.
Check also to see how much detail is left out that you don't really notice. The eye is very good at filling in detail that's not really there.
 

Attachments

  • dangurney1.zip
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That is pretty good. But the difference is I can see quite clearly how your work could fit under 15kb, the 2 decals I attached are beyond me. There's just too many colours, curves and bends. I've zoomed in on them too see if any shortcuts were made but they really do look like someone has just grabbed them from the internet in their entirety and uploaded them.
 
That is pretty good. But the difference is I can see quite clearly how your work could fit under 15kb, the 2 decals I attached are beyond me. There's just too many colours, curves and bends. I've zoomed in on them too see if any shortcuts were made but they really do look like someone has just grabbed them from the internet in their entirety and uploaded them.

Why?
It barely fits under the 15kb limit.
Em, you mention colours, that leads me to think you're talking about tracing bitmaps, like this?

2qkp2ma.jpg



Because that's not how they do it. They trace the entire image by hand.
Look at this .svg, for example, it has more than 500 nodes (still unfinished) and its size is 11kb.

kcytzk.png
 
Here's a couple of examples I found while browsing the decal gallery. I just can't see how these are under 15kb with all the colours and outlines. There must be a good few hundred nodes.

View attachment 758357 View attachment 758358

Couldn't find the one of the girl, but I've had a look at the black panther decal.

It's 14.8kb (15,166 bytes) with 1244 nodes (points)

It's effectively a black stencil, with some colour layers behind it... with the colours taken out and just the lines left, and those to main sections pulled apart, it looks like this... (the tiny squares are how Corel shows nodes).

upload_2018-8-12_12-11-55.png


The reason why it's got so much detail and quite a few nodes under, and stays under 15kb is because the designer has been very economic with the XML.

It's not uncommon for SVG's to end up using 5 or 6 characters for each co-ordinate in the code. The Panther decal uses one or two at most.... if each one has a 2-3 times fewer numbers in each co-ordinate, you can use 2-3 times more nodes...

To make that an obvious visual comparison take a look at the image below; It's a screen shot of a section of the code that makes the panther image (on the left), and another random decal I made on the right...

upload_2018-8-12_12-19-37.png


See how the numbers on the left are one or two digits, compared to the more complex longer numbers on the right? That is the reason that panther file is detailed and still small.
 
Couldn't find the one of the girl, but I've had a look at the black panther decal.

It's 14.8kb (15,166 bytes) with 1244 nodes (points)

It's effectively a black stencil, with some colour layers behind it... with the colours taken out and just the lines left, and those to main sections pulled apart, it looks like this... (the tiny squares are how Corel shows nodes).

View attachment 758564

The reason why it's got so much detail and quite a few nodes under, and stays under 15kb is because the designer has been very economic with the XML.

It's not uncommon for SVG's to end up using 5 or 6 characters for each co-ordinate in the code. The Panther decal uses one or two at most.... if each one has a 2-3 times fewer numbers in each co-ordinate, you can use 2-3 times more nodes...

To make that an obvious visual comparison take a look at the image below; It's a screen shot of a section of the code that makes the panther image (on the left), and another random decal I made on the right...

View attachment 758565

See how the numbers on the left are one or two digits, compared to the more complex longer numbers on the right? That is the reason that panther file is detailed and still small.

Thanks for replying. That does sound like something you would find in an advanced tutorial. Any idea how time consuming this method would be compared to me breaking up an image in inkscape and uploading one piece at a time?
 
Thanks for replying. That does sound like something you would find in an advanced tutorial. Any idea how time consuming this method would be compared to me breaking up an image in inkscape and uploading one piece at a time?

Well, manipulating the XML mostly comes down to two things;

1/ What options your editor has - in inkscape there are decimal accuracy settings that do part of the job, not sure about affinity or illustrator. My version of Corel doesn't have said options but I do have a work around, which involves....

2/ Using SVGOMG to optimise the files afterwards.

In both cases though, it's still only half the battle, you've got to make sure you're using the smallest number of points/nodes as you can in the first place, and that's only really possible if you're drawing stuff up from scratch, or spend a lot of time cleaning up traces etc.

Slicing stuff up in inkscape isn't ideal, but sometimes, it is really your only choice - some stuff will just never be less than 15kb. In practice, having to upload multiple parts to a decal isn't really that big of a deal, I've had to split some decals down into as many as 20+ parts before. There's a couple of ways of doing that too, but I don't use inkscape that much so I'm not the best person to detail that. I have used the PathOps extension for inkscape, which makes it much easier to cut up a multilayer decals into easy to reassemble shapes, so I'd recommend that.
 
Anyone using Inkscape, the free version? I am having a hard time reducing the image to 15KB or less to upload to GT Sport. I could use some guidance please.
Thank you in advance.
 

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