The Best of Forza Motorsport 2 Community: Fantasy Liveries
In Forza 2, the automobile serves as creative outlet and canvas for Forza's prolific art collective.
By: Che Chou
Welcome to the first anniversary celebration of Forza Motorsport 2, the complete racing simulation on Xbox 360. Here's the short intro on this whole anniversary occasion, and it's really pretty simple. We here at Turn 10 (developers of the Forza franchise) felt that, with the arrival of May 2008, we've hit an important milestone in our studio's short but eventful history: the one year birthday of Forza 2 and its release into the wild. Since its debut, Forza 2 has run an incredible race, winning its place on the podium in the hearts of racing fans and Xbox 360 gamers everywhere.
The original Bruce Lee-inspired Nissan Fairlady Z, designed by one of Forza's pioneering artists, D1M3NSION.
This whole livery editor business began with the first Forza Motorsport on the original Xbox. Those of you who joined us for that party back in 2005 will remember that besides the eye-opening depth of Forza's physics engine and detailed graphics at the time, this curious racing sim had a livery editor to render vehicular paintjobs. Although the livery editor took a little getting used to, both in terms of high-level concept and low-level execution, interface was no obstacle to some crazy artwork that was created on Forza 1. The way the livery editor functions (and to a large degree still does today) is that you create images by layering shapes of varying sizes and colors on top of one another. The artist has the option of radically stretching, shrinking, flattening and altering primitive shapes to basically assemble anything imaginable -- given enough layers. So not only does the creator need to be artistically inclined, with a vision for the final design, they've also got to have a handle on assembling an image from hundreds of different shapes of their own molding.
Needless to say, painting cars in the Forza franchise isn't a skill you master in a few hours of play. One could argue it isn't a skill one ever truly masters -- that, as some have already expressed, given the limitations (at some point, you will run out of layers to use, right?), there are always more efficient ways of assembling primitive shapes to achieve a great whole. Yes, for those who want to throw some flames and racing stripes on their Mustang and hit the tarmac, the livery editor is easy-as-pie to use; yet, for a whole community of artists here at Forzamotorsport.net, the livery editor is a deep, game-within-a-game kind of experience integrated tightly into the Forza ecosystem. After all, cars that you paint with the livery editor get sold to other owners on the auction house, passed around as gifts, put on the track in single and multiplayer racing, and used as subjects in thousands of photomode glamor shots on the web.
A year ago, back during the exciting early hours of the Forza 2 launch, where lucky Japanese Xbox 360 owners got to own the game a week earlier, we here at Turn 10 witnessed an incredible phenomenon. Based on our experience with the original Forza on Xbox, we knew folks could turn out some crazy designs with nothing but shapes and layers, but what we saw from the early Japanese painters blew our collective minds. These guys had owned the game for only a few days, but they were already putting up liveries on the auction house that far surpassed what we'd expected from our audience -- at least for the first couple months. We knew then this whole user-generated content phenom was going to be a little insane. I remember Turn 10's studio manager Alan "Big Boss" Hartman telling me after the game shipped in Japan that we had inadvertently released a "car painting simulator." I think he was right.
So all of this background on the livery editor so far leads me to this point: Car painting in Forza 2 is a skill, and it is a skill that is acquired through many devoted hours of practice and gained insight. Because my own painting skills are terrible at best, I'm told by many that getting comfortable with the livery editor is something that comes to you in a Eureka! moment and from there on you only serve to improve yourself. So behind every paintjob is, of course, the mindboggling question of "how the heck did she/he just do that?" Sometimes the artist will reveal their secrets, as they do in these videos. Other times, the question lingers and, like a magician with his tricks, you don't really want to know because the final product amazes you.
A gorgeous Natalie Portman-inspired Porsche 911 GT3 designed by Ssikpiyelnats.
So in the next few pages, we've attempted to pull together a quick scrapbook of Forza 2 paintjobs we've found that made us ask that very question: "How in the world did they manage to create this with nothing but a handful of shapes and colors?" And like the racing liveries and photomode features before this, I also want to preface this collection by saying that this is by no means all that's amazing out there in the woodwork. There are so many incredible accomplishments by the community as a whole I wish we could do equal justice. Perhaps some day. In the meantime, check it out. They're awesome.
// Next: A gallery of the best fantasy liveries 2007 - 2008! //