Hello. Just a heads-up that I once again feel inspired to do some TSW editor work and started working on a livery for the Expert BR 101. I picked the BR 101-003 which is advertising the DB museum in Norimberk purely because it looks cool so, wish me luck as I try to re-create the decals on the side. I will most likely try tracing them with vector curves in Inkscape or something. Btw. the geometric shapes are purely there to decide the color palette (like what exact shade is this blue supposed to be).
Ok. Working on this over the weekends, I see why it's usually not being done. Or why we generally don't have that many advertising liveries. You just pick a line, trace it from the reference and then fix up the shape artistically so that it flows nicely and aligns with the rest in sensible way. Then repeat it a bunch of times and you will get a meaningful progress. Good thing is that once I have one side, the other one is mostly the same with different colors so that will speed up the process. Then it's just the checker pattern. some text and logos that I can just slap onto the side.
Here's a quick update with finished lines on the blue sides (not a perfect alignment but that's not very doable anyway), tweaked dirt textures on front and back as well as the text and logos on the side. Considering that the paint effect will be very similar on the other side, all I'm really missing is the grey circle pattern so we are getting there. Please ignore the grey checker as that's just me trying to get a feel for the exact tone that I'll need for the final thing and I just stuck it on there for now. One thing I would like to point out though about the process is that you should always do your high-res beauty shots. Even if it's a WIP that is nowhere near being done, having good screenshots allows you to really point at things that look off compared to just looking at your work in the viewport. Yeah, it's a really high bar (because everything stands out) but it's also very satisfying to get it right. At least at small scale like with a single reskin. Also this is clearly turning into one of "those" projects where I want to give it everything with no regards for time-efficiency.
Ok. Since all the art is done and I can present some cool images, it's time for the final feedback round and trying to find things that either look wrong or that would really make it a top of the line artwork which could (hopefully) inspire other people to try and level-up their texturing as well. One wrong thing I do know about and that I will fix at the end (with other technical things) is the font on the side number, where 6 and 9 look different than on the real thing. I also made one artistic change and decided to not extend the blue paint streak to the front because it doesn't look as good in my opinion.
Ok, it seems like the editor fixes did happen so I could package it and get it into the release game. Yay!
