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

[double A-ron]

I have just found the better quality the image is to start with the better quality the SVG will likely be, I downloaded a vector in .ai format, but it was lumpy and bumpy and could not get close to what I need. I then found the same logo as a .PDF, which resulted in a much higher quality trace, especially with the letters C,D and O. In fact I didn't have to use Inkscape's simplify feature at all to get it below the 15kb limit!

Moral of this story is start with 🤬 get 🤬 out!

It's not mentioned where you downloaded the .ai format artwork, but it's worth noting that a lot (if not most) of the logos found on sites like Brands of the Word are not the actually logos from the actual companies, they are recreations that were likely created from a raster image either by the autotrace tool manual tracing with the pen tool.

 

[Herrybo79]

I tryed to write a text in Illustrator and a save as SVG, Upload works, but in the Game I can´t see the text, any suggestions? File is uploaded, I can see the file also at the Game, but did not see the Grafik-

 

[JamCar0ne]

I tryed to write a text in Illustrator and a save as SVG, Upload works, but in the Game I can´t see the text, any suggestions? File is uploaded, I can see the file also at the Game, but did not see the Grafik-

I am encountering this too. From the online manual:

・The file size can not exceed 15 kb
・Lettering will be converted to outlines
・Ensure special blending modes such as addition and multiplication have not been used
・Ensure that bitmaps have not been embedded
・The SVG file version should be 1.0 or 1.1

What is the work around to this?

 

[double A-ron]

I am encountering this too. From the online manual:

・The file size can not exceed 15 kb
・Lettering will be converted to outlines
・Ensure special blending modes such as addition and multiplication have not been used
・Ensure that bitmaps have not been embedded
・The SVG file version should be 1.0 or 1.1

What is the work around to this?

You need to select the text and covert it to outlines. In Illustrator, it's under the type menu...Type > Create Outlines. Once this is done, it's no longer text and cannot be edited as such.

 

[Belifant]

I think I'm not willing to spend more money on the game and go with the decals the people share. But I wanted to give something back, with stuff I made. The concept of this feature is contra productive and frustrating. I hope you understand what I want to say.

I find creating a complete livery in GTS to be more complicated than vectorise a simple logo . The limitation to vector files (doesn't matter if svg, eps, pdf, etc) makes sense in the way that they are resolution independent, meaning you can scale them as large as you want on your livery, and also file size, they just use much less space than pixel files. Further, if any file type was allowed, I think the decal section would be flooded with bad jpgs on white backgrounds, making it really hard to find good quality decals. Already with this limitation we have now, there are some logos with questionable quality, but it would be much worse without any file limitation.

Also, don't be intimated by these softwares. To create a good quality svg file in any of the mentioned apps, all you basically need are 3 tools at most. I'm sure if you'd give it a go, within an hour you have learned the basics and created your first logo.

I was a bit intimidated about using Affinity Designer, but after following this video it's surprisingly easy, cant wait to be able to start uploading

Nice little tutorial, good find. It's a bit funny how she talks about "Hacks" and "secret features", while these are just normal workflows used by everybody . I also would have done some things a bit different, but overall, it's a nice little tutorial if you have never done any vector work.

 

[JamCar0ne]

You need to select the text and covert it to outlines. In Illustrator, it's under the type menu...Type > Create Outlines. Once this is done, it's no longer text and cannot be edited as such.

I am using Inkscape and thought I had done the conversion. I could see the text in the uploader, just not in game. So I started over from scratch and retraced/converted or whatever it is called that I do and again, could see it in uploader but not in game. The process of making the words is not any different than how I've made other decals, it's just really wide and not very tall. The text I am using is snailracing.org, 15 letters spaced out like in the league's logo. I tried breaking it up into three separate words, snail, racing & .org. This worked but requires three decals, so I tried two words, snailracing & .org and again it works. This got me thinking maybe I am just scaling the image too large. I've been using the icon viewer in Inkscape to set size. Tried scaling the text so it does not take the entire width of the icon viewer and it was a success. File uploaded fine and entire text is usable in editor. So the conclusion here is, there is some sort of width limitation of the svg image and when you exceed it, the image is not viewable in the editor.

 

[MatskiMonk]

I think I'm not willing to spend more money on the game and go with the decals the people share. But I wanted to give something back, with stuff I made. The concept of this feature is contra productive and frustrating. I hope you understand what I want to say.

I can understand your frustration, this is an important feature - it is literally what I'm basing my purchasing decision for a PS4 on...

... however, the decision to go with vector files, instead of JPG's/PNG's was absolutely the right one IMHO. I know it requires a little more investment in terms of time and effort, but the benefit is being able to generate a totalyl unique livery in a quality that is befitting the stunning 3D work and lighting engine in GTS. If it was easy, it just wouldn't be as good... that's the trade off. Any genuinely worthwhile contribution isn't "easy", whether it's a JPG or an SVG.

If you can persevere for an hour or two learning the basics of vector drawing, I think in the long run you would appreciate the benefits. Just my two cents.

 

[syntex123]

You need to select the text and covert it to outlines. In Illustrator, it's under the type menu...Type > Create Outlines. Once this is done, it's no longer text and cannot be edited as such.

Convert text to curves in Affinity.

I’m having a different problem.
It looks fine when I upload them but in-game they do not.

What am I doing wrong?

Edit: used the same method (without stroke) on a different decal.. And problem isn't there. Is the problem the stroke?

 

[MMX]

I had a bunch of my uploads look like they were scrambled, which made them unuseable. Looking online, I seen a mention of making sure to have a high enough decimal point. Mine was on 2, I bumped it up to 4, and hope that fixes it. I won't know until I get home this evening though.

 

[Belifant]

I had a bunch of my uploads look like they were scrambled, which made them unuseable. Looking online, I seen a mention of making sure to have a high enough decimal point. Mine was on 2, I bumped it up to 4, and hope that fixes it. I won't know until I get home this evening though.

Would you mind explaining this? I don't really understand what decimal point you mean. Is that something while uploading?

 

[MatskiMonk]

Convert text to curves in Affinity.

I’m having a different problem.
It looks fine when I upload them but in-game they do not.
View attachment 691555 View attachment 691556
What am I doing wrong?

Edit: used the same method (without stroke) on a different decal.. And problem isn't there. Is the problem the stroke?

Unlikely.

Open the the one that doesn't work, and the one that does work in Notepad, or a text editor and in the first couple of lines you've probably got something that says...

xml:space="preserve" style="fill-rule:evenodd;clip-rule:evenodd;stroke-linejoin:round;stroke-miterlimit:1.41421;">

I'd guess the one that doesn't work has gotten jumbled up, or is missing a tag.

 

[Belifant]

I would say it is unlikely that something is wrong with either svg, but it is possible that PD's implementation for svg might not like certain things in svg, like unexpanded strokes?

 

[MMX]

Would you mind explaining this? I don't really understand what decimal point you mean. Is that something while uploading?

It for how many decimal places to the right of the decimal point. Apparently this can effect the art in a bad way, if the number is too low.

 

[Belifant]

Ah got it. I'v used Affinity Designer so far for the svg export and it is not a visible option there. Increasing decimal point will help the quality, but can also increase the file size, that is something to keep in mind. I think decimal point has something to do with how the code is written? From the sound of it, @MatskiMonk probably knows.....

 

[Grandea GTR]

anyone getting issues with "invalid SVG format" messages? All of my attempted uploads end up doing as such.

 

[MatskiMonk]

Ah got it. I'v used Affinity Designer so far for the svg export and it is not a visible option there. Increasing decimal point will help the quality, but can also increase the file size, that is something to keep in mind. I think decimal point has something to do with how the code is written? From the sound of it, @MatskiMonk probably knows.....

It's not related to the way the file is encoded. In this situation it's just related to numerical accuracy (and therefore the number of bytes used to maintain that accuracy). Decimal points are used in mark-up languages for other reasons, but that's not what's happening here.

Reducing the number of decimal places in the SVG directly equates to rounding up, or down numbers in co-ordinates or vectors. The more it's numerically rounded, the less accurate the image will be...

... though how perceptually obvious this is will depend on the width and height of the original file.

Spoiler: Boring stuff

It's a gross oversimplification, but in principle:

A 10000.000 by 10000.000 square,
A 10000 by 10000 square,
and A 10 by 10 square,

... will all look identical (given they can be perfectly scaled in game)... but there's a massive difference in how many bytes of XML it takes to store each of those numbers.

A 10000.5 by 10000.5 square,
and a 10000 by 10000 square,
and therefore a 10 by 10 square

.. will all still look pretty much identical even though you've removed that 1 decimal place (it's 0.0005% different)

However, If you started off with a 10.5 by 10.5 square,
and removed that 1 decimal place to make it 10 by 10... it's 5% different

So decimal reduction should be done in relation to how many integers each co-ordinate uses.

 

[KING OF SKULLS]

I find creating a complete livery in GTS to be more complicated than vectorise a simple logo . The limitation to vector files (doesn't matter if svg, eps, pdf, etc) makes sense in the way that they are resolution independent, meaning you can scale them as large as you want on your livery, and also file size, they just use much less space than pixel files. Further, if any file type was allowed, I think the decal section would be flooded with bad jpgs on white backgrounds, making it really hard to find good quality decals. Already with this limitation we have now, there are some logos with questionable quality, but it would be much worse without any file limitation.

Also, don't be intimated by these softwares. To create a good quality svg file in any of the mentioned apps, all you basically need are 3 tools at most. I'm sure if you'd give it a go, within an hour you have learned the basics and created your first logo.

I can understand your frustration, this is an important feature - it is literally what I'm basing my purchasing decision for a PS4 on...

... however, the decision to go with vector files, instead of JPG's/PNG's was absolutely the right one IMHO. I know it requires a little more investment in terms of time and effort, but the benefit is being able to generate a totalyl unique livery in a quality that is befitting the stunning 3D work and lighting engine in GTS. If it was easy, it just wouldn't be as good... that's the trade off. Any genuinely worthwhile contribution isn't "easy", whether it's a JPG or an SVG.

If you can persevere for an hour or two learning the basics of vector drawing, I think in the long run you would appreciate the benefits. Just my two cents.

Thanks for the nice feedback guys. Maybe I could give it a try.

 

[Grandea GTR]

So I managed to get my svgs uploaded, but they show up as nothing in game.

 

[MMX]

I'm getting really frustrated with the uploader. Most of the files in game just looked scrambled, and I can't figure out what's causing it.

Most of my stuff I draw in Illustrator CC, on a Mac. I converted text if I have any, same with outlines, and still losing good art. File size is good, and they look fine on the computer, after upload, but in game they're a Trainwreck, and completely unuseable.

Help!

 

[syntex123]

I'm getting really frustrated with the uploader. Most of the files in game just looked scrambled, and I can't figure out what's causing it.

Most of my stuff I draw in Illustrator CC, on a Mac. I converted text if I have any, same with outlines, and still losing good art. File size is good, and they look fine on the computer, after upload, but in game they're a Trainwreck, and completely unuseable.

Help!

I noticed that too, for the ones I made using the first tutorial. I'm sticking with Affinity from now on.

 

[MatskiMonk]

I'm getting really frustrated with the uploader. Most of the files in game just looked scrambled, and I can't figure out what's causing it.

Most of my stuff I draw in Illustrator CC, on a Mac. I converted text if I have any, same with outlines, and still losing good art. File size is good, and they look fine on the computer, after upload, but in game they're a Trainwreck, and completely unuseable.

Help!

Upload one here so we can have a look.

 

[MMX]

Upload one here so we can have a look.

I've already deleted them. I'm going to try something this weekend, and hopefully get this figured out. It's holding me up from finishing cars, and some decals for friends too.

 

[Belifant]

Even though it shouldn't be an issue, it seems document size is something to consider. Make sure your document has a decent size, like 1000 px or more. It doesn't affect file size luckily.

 

[graveltrap]

I have been trying to optimise a decal, with SVGGO web app thing, but once the file saved as, the uploaded just tells me there is a server error.

I chopped the decal up and aggressively removed nodes manually in Inkscape and the uploader was happy with that file... So has anyone else had problems with files that have been adjusted with SVGGO?

it is the first time I have tried to use that app and then upload the results...

 

[solo_562]

I'm getting the same thing as graveltrap. For me, when I drag my svg file into svgo the image won't show up for some reason. It'll let me adjust the size and all, even save it, but when I go to upload it gives me the server error.

 

[MisterWaffles]

Hi all, I've been continuously encountering an error message "not valid format" for my SVG files. I'm using the free trial of Adobe Illustrator to convert my JPEG to an SVG. I don't want to do any fancy scaling or anything. The logo I have is small and doesn't have any white on it.

I just simply convert it into SVG, it has the correct file size but it doesn't want to upload for the life of me.

 

[MMX]

I think/hope something is up with their server right now. I have 3 logos I'm trying to upload, but keep getting "a server error occured".

This Uploader has been a major PITA. It's definitely a love/hate relationship.

 

[cheeves]

Does anyone know why I get "invalid SVG. format" when trying to upload certain SVG files? I use the same file converter, Pixillion, to convert the files but some upload and others give me that message. Also why does the SVG come out larger, sometimes quite a bit, than the original file.

 

[priesty_lfc]

Does anybody know if the files people upload become available for everyone or just that user?

I don’t have a PC/Laptop so it’s unlikely I’ll ever be able to make any decals.

 

[MisterWaffles]

Does anybody know if the files people upload become available for everyone or just that user?

I don’t have a PC/Laptop so it’s unlikely I’ll ever be able to make any decals.

It's like anything else in your library. You have to share it first before other people are allowed to see it.