ACC Custom Liveries – Getting Started
Before we can create custom liveries for ACC, or any sim racing game, we need some tools and some templates.
All of the tools we are going to use are free, most are open source. Some may ask you for a donation but that is optional, I encourage you to support the products as a lot of work went in to creating and maintaining them and even a few pennies are appreciated and encourage further development.
What tools do we need?
- Assetto Corsa Competition of course
- A good text editor that understands files encoded in a specific way.
- A graphics application that can create and edit raster graphics, PNG files to be more precise.
- A 3D modelling tool to allow us to paint directly on a car model.
- Templates for image files
- 3D models for ACC cars
For brevity, this tutorial will not include step by step instructions for installing the software mentioned. They all have basic installers that you step through accepting the defaults, once we get into using the tools and introduction to the basics will be provided.
A good text editor
Windows comes with a text editor called Notepad. In theory you should be able to use this. I noticed in some of the tutorial videos that they use Notepad, but, many users of our tools have had issues with Notepad saving files in the wrong format, specifically with the wrong Encoding.
What is Encoding? I hear you ask. When you open a text file in your editor you see what you expect, the text content of the file. However the file actually contains extra information often referred to as metadata that you don’t see, that information tells applications that try to open it how it should be read, among that information is something called Encoding. The Encoding in a file tells the application how to translate the stored data in the into characters, an important element of this is how many bytes are used for each character. UTF-8 is the most common encoding these days, but ACC uses UTF-16 for the JSON files it creates. So what is the problem? Take a look at this example JSON.
{
"num": 0,
"str": "Some text"
} A really simple example of JSON (we will get into what JSON is in a later section). Several users of our tools reported to us that after editing a JSON file created by ACC in Notepad they get an error. When we get the file from them to investigate and open it in a different text editor the content looks like this.
{
"n u m": 0,
"s t r": "S o m e t e x t "
} This is because Notepad didn’t understand the Encoding correctly and wrote the file out incorrectly when it saved changes.
Our preferred text editor is Notepad++, it understands all Encodings and can even convert from one to another. There are others that are equally as good, try any of these.
A graphics application
Anyone working with graphics regularly will probably be using Adobe Photoshop, for a long time this has been the goto application for working with Raster images, but it is expensive. If you have it feel free to use it. If the only reason you need a graphics application is to create custom liveries for ACC there are alternatives that are free and some are open source.
GIMP is a great direct alternative to PhotoShop, it has all the same features and can even read and save to other formats including the PSD format used by PhotoShop. It is free and open source, although we encourage you to make a small donation to the team to show appreciation for all the hours they put in to developing it.
Paint.NET is also a good alternative although it has limitations (these can be solved with plugins). It is easier to use than PhotoShop or GIMP, but when you hit a limitation having GIMP around is a great idea.
There are other alternatives to PhotoShop, Photopea and Canva are two, but they are browser based so you have the extra step of dowloading the image after making changes, not a massive hardship but an extra step.
We will be using GIMP throughout this tutorial, specifically version 3.2.2. GIMP is updated fairly regularly and they do sometimes move things around so to be sure you can follow along get the same version we are using.
A 3D modelling tool
This is optional, but recommended if your livery design will be even moderately complex. As you will learn in a later section we will be creating flat bitmap images, but seeing those images applied to a car model in 3D as you work is a big advantage and time saver.
There are many 3D modelling tools out there and which one you choose depends on what you want to do. Some specialise in engineering other in animation. Two stand out as great all rounders Autodesk 3ds Max and Blender.
If you have a 3D modelling tool feel free to use it, and CAD application would do, but we are going to use Blender it is free an open source and is the goto 3D modelling tool for Indie game developers and many commercial game development studios.
We will be using Blender throughout this tutorial, specifically version 5.1. Blender is updated regularly and they do often move things around so to be sure you can follow along get the same version we are using.
Templates
Whether you are using a graphics editor to work directly with the image files needed or your are using a 3D modelling tool to paint your car and export the images you will need templates for each car you want to create.
A template for creating a custom theme for the BMW M4 GT3 using a graphics editor looks like this.
It is an image that includes each part of the car that can be customised flattened out and in wireframe format.
A template for creating a custom theme for the BMW M4 GT3 using a 3D modelling tool looks like this.
This shows a 3D model file imported into Blender ready for painting.
Both workflows have their pros and cons, which you will see as we work through this tutorial.
Below you can download a ZIP file containing both templates for the car you want to create a custom theme for. These were made available for us by Ohne Speed via his YouTube tutorials. I downloaded them from his Google Drive an packaged them up as individual zip files for your convenience. Simply download and extract the file to a folder on your local computer storage. I keep mine close to all my source code at C:\_src\acc-templates, each in it’s own folder.
So now we have all of the tools we need we can press on.