The original plan was to create a scratch-made racing livery (with some influence from 20th Century artist Clyfford Still) for the McLaren-Mercedes SLR 722 Edition in the game Need for Speed Most Wanted 2005. The idea was to commemorate the Steelers victory over the Cincinnati Bengals this past weekend, as well as DeAngelo Williams breaking of the 10,000 yards from scrimmage milestone.
As with my warm-up exercise, my inspiration came from Clyfford Still's "1957-D No. 1." Still was an abstract-expressionist painter who, despite his lacking prominence relative to his contemporaries, would be one of the pioneer artists for the basis of the abstract movement. I've been a car fan since I learned how to talk, and going to the Steelers game and seeing them win provided the drive to do what I did for this. I decided to try to commemorate their victory in the form of a racing livery for a car.
I took a similar approach to that which I used for creating "The Fracture," but had to deal with the constraints of the car and the game engine in which the car would be rendered and playable. Using Clyfford Still's "1957-D No. 1" as my inspiration, I attempted to create an original racing livery for the McLaren-Mercedes SLR 722. Still's "1957-D No. 1" fit quite well as the inspiration, since the color choice in "1957-D No. 1" is quite similar to that of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Originally, I tried to create a scratch-made livery for the car, which worked to an extent, but didn't physically fit in a way that I liked. I made some minor changes, like moving the logo forwards a bit on the hood and adding some fragmentation to the white sections. While this looked good in the image editor, it didn't work in-game. In fact, the game crashed when trying to render the image onto the car. After struggling with the original attempt and getting unsatisfactory results, I switched to using the Hamann livery as the template and modifying colors from there. The gold stripe is a homage to the gold stripe that runs down the middle of Steelers helmets.
The outcome is a racing livery that fits on the car, but doesn't appear to take too many risks. Some community-created tools were used, such as nfsu360's NFS Tex-Ed to rip textures from the game to allow for editing, as well as re-import them after editing. GIMP was used to edit the images to create the finished product, and Nvidia Shadowplay was used to take in-game screenshots of the image applied to the car. The final product started out as the black-on-white Hamann livery, which can be seen below. After inverting the colors to white-on-black and removing the Hamann logo, I changed some accents to grey and some to gold. I also added the gold stripe down the middle and then added the Steelers logo onto the hood. I was hoping to have some tears in the shapes, but that caused problems getting the livery to line up in the right spots on the car when rendered in-game. As a result, I settled with what I had at that point and took screenshots.
Personally, I think this work ended up a flop. I started out trying to take a risk by creating the livery from scratch, but it did not fit the car perfectly and looked a bit messy in some areas. I then attempted to clean it up, and after verifying that it was cleaner, I decided to add some fragmentation to the white sections. This caused the game to crash, as the livery did not render correctly on the car (did not fit). After that, I was running out of time, so I used the Hamann livery as a template and went from there. I wouldn't be so disappointed if it didn't take away from the creativity aspect.
The biggest mistake that I made with this project was not giving myself enough time to refine my work. As this course progresses, I will eventually be able to refine this work. For now, though, it is what it is. Had I given myself more time, I would've been able to add more commemorative elements, like a one-off Terrible Towel that commemorates DeAngelo Williams breaking the 10,000 yards from scrimmage milestone this past weekend, as well as a number 34, which also pays homage to Williams. My biggest takeaway from this is that I need to give myself a lot more time to refine the work and make sure it fits pixel-perfectly onto the car so that the end result is far more presentable.
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