[Russell Sobie]

This is the first skin I made in Mudbox, I always used solely photoshop before this. For some reason that I haven't figured out yet is that most of my stencils end up being a low quality. I really liked the theme of my last skin so I used that again. Still haven't raced this week hahaha. Thanks Russell for making the youtube videos and the tutorials about Mudbox. They really helped me!

You are very welcome! I'm glad it was useful.

As for low quality, what resolution are you painting on in Mudbox, and what resolution are your stencils? I tend to paint 4096x textures, and all of my stencils are the same resolution. It also seems to help to have the Mudbox camera as close as possible to the surface being painted. Then when I bring it into Photoshop, I down res everything to a 2048x or 1024x textures to get it all under 10mb using a Photoshop Action I created. Here's what I posted over at RaceDepartment on the subject:

My preferred method of exporting the final dds file is to use an Action in Photoshop. I'd recommend googling "creating Actions in photoshop" for a good how-to, but here's a good list of commands to do in a row once you have your "multi-layer" psd ready to export to a dds:

1. Make sure the current active layer has some content in it.
   
2. Create a new Action.
   
3. Name it something clever and hit Record.
   
4. Ctrl-A (Select All)
   
5. Ctrl-Shift-C (Copy Merged)
   
6. Ctrl-N (New)
   
7. Ctrl-V (Paste)
   
8. Alt-Ctrl-I (Image Size)
   
9. Resize down to 2048x2048 using Bicubic Sharper (reduction) Resample method, or to whatever size you want your final image size to be. I typically work in 4096x and then resample down to 2k for exporting).
   
10. Shift-Ctrl-S (Save As...)
    
11. Save over the .dss file that makes your body or skin file for the particular car under your skin folder (with the appropriate .dss file format selected from the Save As dialog, of course).
    
12. Ctrl-W (Close)
    
13. Stop recording the action.
    
14. To the left of the "Save" command in the list of steps, click the "Toggle Dialog On/Off" button to tell the action to show you the Save As dialog every time you play the action.
    
15. Make changes to your source .psd file, and next time you want to export, just replay the action, and point to the file you want to save it to.
    

The good news is, at 200kph+ no one can see the pixelated-ness of anyone's work anyway.