Do you make these from scratch? If so would it be to much to ask for a 2010 Shellby? I'd love to see that on an outlaw.
http://www.stangnet.com/images/stories/2009/01/GT500/2010_gt500_intro.jpg
most or all of these are stickers from real life dirt car body manufacturers...
Yeah, most of the decals I've done are from real manufacturers for dirt/asphalt (i.e. Five Star, ARP, and Performance all do asphalt and dirt bodies and often share the same decals). I made it a quest when we started the templates for diRtFactor to try and amass as many dirt oval nose decals as I could to recreate the *real* decals. BLD (Brent from Short Track Sim, he's also part of Slingin) and I have talked about being a stickler for realism in the past and we were noting how the Cup fans/sim-racers on the NR2K3 side were pretty staunch in trying to get things nailed down to even making a super-speedway car look different from an intermediate or short track car via template variations and options such as grill add-ons, decal placements in relation to the nose height, etc.
With the dirt stuff, for the longest time... the majority of what we used were sourced from old NR2K3 templates for our needs which is to say... little of it was truly "realistic" on dirt but it served our needs. Nobody really put the time into doing up a nose set like what we've done with dF and for that's something that I'm pretty proud of, but it goes deeper than just the noses... to me that's only a pittance of how awesome the dF templates are. I owe so much to Tyler Sutton on them as he even went as far as include different brand prefilters, different brand breather covers, the actual filters for the breathers (no joke... boggled my mind when he put that together), the breather nuts, the hood grill inserts, lexan body protectors, etc. He even put black under fills for the rollbars where they come through the decking, and even custom built the quick change layers on the car to be multiple layers.
Just so happens though that since most of the body manufacturers for dirt are involved in pavement... well... that's a big part of why I was keen to get the stuff out to the NR2K3 sim racing guys (i.e. all of you, the people at Shorttracksim, and Outlaw Paintshop... the other part is, I've run into some awesome people from the asphalt side and often enjoy my time on the paved sites as much or more than our own sites). Performance, while primarily a dirt body mfg. (they do all of their own aluminum panels), actually buys their molded plastic parts from Five Star (hence on dirt they both have their "MD3" series of noses, the noses = the same) and just includes their own decals. They do sell ABC bodies for asphalt as well (completely built by Five Star) with largely the same decals as what they use on dirt. The ARP Bodies stuff for dirt also uses their pavement nose decals. The same is true of Five Star. About the only one that isn't prominently seen on asphalt that builds dirt bodies is Aerotech Styling. They pretty much are dirt only (modifieds, sprint cars, and late models).
Yet in this day and age when anyone can buy decals from any vinyl printer (i.e. Chase and DirtWrap; and yes... Chase's Monte Carlo/Impala have run on pavement before... Randy Lajoie's son has had their decals on his car and someone finished that car up as a request on OPS)... there's nothing stopping people from running their decals on an asphalt car with another brand nose. I've seen dirt guys who had a deal with ARP for noses running Five Star or Performance lights on an ARP nose (first time I saw it... I believe it was Anthony [DWB] White of TN), and for that matter... vice-versa. Heck, Brian Ruhlman's < 2010 Mustang and Corvette's predate even Aerotech Styling's Corvette nose. Sobe92's dad (Delbert Smith) has run a Saturn Sky nose on dirt (his TORA car, topless LM... they also have a Camry-nosed car [how I got the old Performance Camry nose/grill that's in the dF templates]). There was even an Illiana regular running a car out there when I went to the Bettenhausen that had the Cadillac nose decals that Five Star now sells for dirt (prior to Five Star doing up a set, many were getting vinyl printers to do them).
Every now and again I take a stab at something for fun. Hence the Holden's (GM of Australia), Ford of Australia/Europe (Falcon's [I have one that is unreleased that thus far... only Josh [Combs] from our site has seen], Mondeo, etc.), a couple of the Mustangs (a few real LM drivers use the pre-2010 Mustang noses on dirt but they're all custom done by vinyl printers;
Brian Ruhlman out of Ohio was one of the first to do so that I've seen), the Saturn Aura, etc. I have to admit, the 2010 'stang is on my list of cars I aim to eventually get to.
And well... to explain how I do it... I do some of the stuff from scratch and some is done from editing stuff from high resolution imagery I find with Google Image Search or Windows Live Image Search, etc. I also will modify the heck out of things on occasion to make a sort of scratch done + found combination. I usually use the pen tool (vector) to cut the decals out of a real image (I keep the vector layer with it) so when I get it to the template to resize it to fit... I can use the "make selection from path" feature in the paths palette in Photoshop, then do an invert (reverses the selection), and then use the delete key on the keyboard to clean up/erase any artifacts that might result from scaling. Beyond that even though... My Charger RT/SRT8 = a ton of editing and even some custom creation of stuff (i.e. the grillwork = a custom pattern I made from scratch) but I used quite a bit of base art from images I found, cut up (the actual light shape that I plugged the details into was a custom vector shape I made... but I cut/copied pieces out of a real Charger headlight, and then did my own detailings based off of how the real car looked), tweaked, and even did art on top of.
The Camry set I did = similar in that regard. Many of the real brand noses (i.e. Performance Bodies, Five Star, Aluminum Racing Products, Aerotech Styling Dominator, Chase Race Decals, etc.) I do are basically copied/resized from high resolution image finds... either pictures I took or pictures I was lucky enough to source from others or lucky enough to find a workable image that I could use (e.g. the Chase Ford Taurus that's on the dF template was salvaged from a medium-low resolution but very clear shot from the Chase website... with minimal scaling and little need for the unsharp mask... it looks pretty high resolution honestly). In some cases I had to do extensive work to clean them up (one of the Pontiac GTO light decals and grill I had was from a dirt car that had quite a bit of mud on top of it, looking at it you wouldn't even notice it) and make them work. Another example the *NEW* Chase lights I just recently posted were from a huge high resolution shot of them that I took last year but... most of the cars that feature the Chase Monte/Impala lights have a # or logo plastered on top of them and mine was no different (yet if you'll look... I removed the car #/logo that was on it, wasn't as hard as you'd expect either). The DirtWraps Impala was from a lower resolution photo (unfortunately) but I was able to salvage it into something decent (it had been through a bit of a war on the track too as many pieces of the decals were scuffed or sandblasted off from running laps). I still aim, like I did with the first Chase Monte Carlo, to redo the DirtWraps nose once I source a better shot of the light and grill decals but since they're based out of the SE U.S., it's rare that I see anyone running their decals.
The Grand Am I did recently is but one example of the custom noses I do though, the same with the 2010 Fusion, and I have a Cadillac CTS that is part of the dF template (along with a bunch of other noses). I also did the Taurus SHO that was inspired by the last generation car and the fact a real racer on dirt drove a dirt late model (Clint "Catdaddy" Smith) years ago with the old round light Taurus SHO nose even though Performance, Five Star, and ARP never offered one. My Charger (RT and SRT-8) and Camry (I did a version with 2 different grill options) sets are also my own take on it, I wanted something different as the Cup ones for the Charger were a bit too cartoony for my tastes and all too many mfg.'s use them (even ARP uses a variation on them on dirt and pavement) and on the Camry... well, I own a Toyota product (Scion tC) and am admittedly a pretty big fan of their products (very solid and reliable, love the way my tC drives compared to my 2 previous Chevy's). That said, I've always had a warm place in my heart for old Mopars so doing up the Charger was high on my list too.
Moral of the story... I'm pretty much game to do anything when the interest arises. The Grand Am I did was actually a request I filled when I got bored one night... I'm not a huge fan of them (family once owned one, was one of the worst GM cars we've ever owned) but I like to help out and everyone has their own preference. I actually put a few other noses I have been working on, on the back burner just to give it a go and see what I could come up with.
The Mustang is definitely one I aim to tackle at some point though.
