After trying to explain this to people for the umpteenth time, I decided I would throw together a quick visual aid.I'm always surprised at how many "featured painters" on rFactorCentral have paint schemes that obviously have no Alpha, making the cars stupidly shiny. Even the painting tutorial on rFC (and others I have seen) completely ignores this most important part of creating an rFactor car skin.It's not just for making gold and silver foil effects as I do here. Just highlighting all your decals and making the Alpha of those areas darker will do wonders for your paint schemes. It's not hard to do, really!Most rFactor templates have their default Alpha channels much too bright, so the cars are too shiny even if you don't do anything to them -- even IF you managed to save the Alpha with your DDS in the first place. The Panoz GT2 template has a nice dark Alpha that gives the car a slight reflectivity, but nothing horribly unrealistic.