I'm sure many of you have gotten started on painting your personal truck now that there is some way to view it. Although the models haven't been released yet, you still can get started on painting the old fashioned way (before we had a car viewer of any kind), meaning saving your texture, opening N2003 and importing. There is a small specific method you have to follow for the moment, that is until we have a Car Viewer style method of checking your work.

The first step is simple, simply save your .tga truck texture (512 or 1024, it doesn't matter) in the exports_imports folder. Then start the game, and make the CTS your active series. Go into Opponent Manager, and select or create a car. Now this is important: DO NOT GO INTO THE PAINT SHOP AND IMPORT YOUR TEXTURE THERE! Stay in the Opponent Manager screen, and look to the bottom right. There will be "IMPORT" and "EXPORT" buttons there. Click "Import", and of course, import your texture. Save and you're set.

There is a reason not to import the truck texture from inside the Paint Shop. The Paint Shop was created with the standard, pre-patch, WC car models in mind, not trucks, T/A cars, F1/CART/IRL cars, Legends, or any other non-WC-BGN model. If you attempt to import your truck texture from within the Paint Shop, it will not map correctly. If you don't believe me, try it both ways, and you will see.

Now some of you may be thinking why Papyrus didn't modify the Paint Shop to accept truck models. The thing is, Papyrus cannot officially add any non-WC functionality to the game without having to shell out more money for those additional licenses from NASCAR. That's why you have not seen one official word from Papyrus acknowledging all the mods being made, whether it be in the readme.txt, the official forums, or any place on sierra.com. So just accept the fact that all non WC textures cannot be imported inside the Paint Shop.

Now the 512x512 BGN textures can be imported inside the Paint Shop, as the standard WC models that came with the game are the ones used. If you have any questions, mail me and I'll amend this post if need be.