Forza Horizon 5 FH5 Car Designs Guide

Introduction

As described above, there is no perfect method to making a car look "nice". It is subjective. That is why this guide is designed to inspire you, and will use ideas that I believe are generally accepted that will make your car look professional.

Unless you have already read the table of contents, this guide will cover all things looks on your car. This guide does not go into detail with any other topics.

This is (an agreed) less appealing / basic design:

This is (an agreed) more appealing / advanced / professional design:

This comparison is extreme, and to many it is funny because of that. This doesn't hide the fact that I see cars like the unappealing design regularly while playing forza. In these images, they are opposite ends of the spectrum, and I doubt anyone attempting to improve will be so low down on it.

The Mclaren P1 (the car in images above) is (at least in my opinion) a very nice looking car, so it is actually quite difficult to create an ugly design (compared to other cars) but I believe I managed to add many features that should be avoided.

I hope you understand that I cannot and do not glorify my designs when I describe them to be professional etc. because the whole idea of appeal is inspirational and subjective. It is my view but I believe it is compatible with many.

I hope this guide helps!

Let's start off with some stereotypes. In my experience, it is very rare to find a player that has a design that wasn't made in less than a minute, except for downloaded ones, although those are usually pretty goofy anyway. Look out for:

• Basic Colours

• Bright and glossy default selection

• No contrast throughout the entire car

• Forza aero.

• Carbon hoods

• Random stickers

• Widebody kits just because it's an option

• Massive wings just because it's an option

I'm not saying that you can't use these things and anyone who uses them will be looked down upon, but they are signs of basic and uninteresting designs.

Colours

Colours. The most important part of the design.

First thing to know: There is so much more than just the normal colour pallet, it's just a simple gloss material. Special colours have so many more options. From carbon fibres to WOODEN CARS. Jokes aside, there are so many cool choices. For example, I have an addiction to the two-tone polished material. No, I don't like the weird mix of orange and purple, instead the things you can do with it. Along with many other materials, in the bottom left there is a fine tuning option. click the button associated with it, and a menu will show with colour sliders for the finest adjustments. Let me show you some examples I have created with it:

BMW 850CSi (e31) • Mclaren P1 • Lamborghini Adventador Superveloce • BMW M3 (e30)

I highly recommend it for glossier and darker colours, it works perfectly.

here are the fine tuning settings for the Mclaren P1. As you can see, there is hardly a difference in the tones compared to the default setting. This is because I didn't use it for two-tones, instead as one colour because it turns out so well. Whenever you are making a colour for anything, never have the values at maximum. It looks too strong and fake, ending up looking like a plastic toy. When using the two-tone polished material, to achieve the look shown in images above, the highlight must be at a lower brightness than the lowlight. Set the hues to pretty much the same colour, and the saturation close. If the saturation and or hue is too far apart, you will get ugly blotches*. You can mess around with it until it suits you, don't just copy my numbers. The whole point of this guide is to inspire your future designs and you shouldn't rely on me.

Two-tone polished is great for darker glossy colours. I realised this when I couldn't make a bright enough colour one day. Another great material is "Metal Flake". It has the same fine tuning options in which there are highlight and lowlight colours, providing many different options. In my experience, metal flake is a little less glossy and much brighter than the two-tone, which is useful in many cases.

*Here are some (extreme) cases of blotches:

Wheels

Rims

Most importantly: Do. Not. Colour. Your. Rims. Anything more than a little bronze or copper is pretty awful. Bronze, copper and similar are the only exceptions, which can look very nice in moderation.

Just take a look at the difference:

Blue wheels

Black wheels (with white accents)

This brings us to the next part: Contrast. I will allow black on black and white on white, but other than that, I highly recommend a colour choice that contrasts the body colour. Allow me to explain:

Lighter wheels with a darker body

Darker wheels with a lighter body

Note: The lighter bodied car (minus the brake calipers) is a manufacturer colour, meaning a professional has a similar idea.

lighter body colours can (a lot) more often use lighter wheels than darker body colour can use darker wheels in my opinion. Take this into consideration for body colour, as a medium brightness can take medium wheels. I would make the wheels equally opposite from the body colour from medium brightness.

As I mentioned above, bronze and copper wheels are honestly the only colour options you have without making the car look either too abstract or like a Hot Wheels one. Here are some examples:

19" Porsche 911 GT3RS

13" Mclaren P1

You may have noticed one some of the cars in the images above have wheels with more than one colour. You can do this by using the "advanced" option when selecting rims to paint. This will bring up a menu with a list of different parts of the rim.

This is the menu on the gt3rs above:

Below, I have painted each group in easily noticeable colours

🔴 Paint Group 1

🔵 Paint Group 2

🟢 Paint Group 3

🟠 Inner Barrel

🟣 Outer Lip

No car will have the same selection for groups, and don't expect many if you have selected custom wheels when upgrading your car.

Tip: As seen in the second image in this section, black with white accents look very similar to many modern cars' stock wheels.

Calipers

calipers are part of the brakes on your car that wrap around the discs behind the rims. There isn't much to say about calipers. I usually follow monochrome, red or yellow. Use your knowledge from The colours section so that they are not too bright and intense, unless they are meant to follow a certain colour theme for your car, perhaps with a livery.

19" Porsche 911 Carrera S

Tints

Tints do not go into much detail. There is nothing wrong with a car that has normal windows, so you don't have to feel like you need to do something with them, as I rarely change them anyway. I don't recommend coloured windows, as mentioned before, your car may look like a toy when you're finished.

Also mentioned before: Contrast (in the wheels section). This is important when tinting windows as a car with a lighter body will make the tint more obvious and vice versa.

On the left, there is a light-coloured body with no window tint. On the right, there is a light-coloured body and a dark-coloured body with the darkest tint.

As you can see, the dark-bodied car has a less

noticeable tint. I don't have much more to say other

than to take this into consideration when tinting your

cars (and filling up this section with stuff)

Upgrades

Random Tip: If you plan on parking up to a spot for a picture of your car, try to minimise sudden actions to avoid tire marks all over the floor. It makes a big difference in pictures. If you are using a keyboard for what ever reason, I recommend using a very high gear for slow and precise movement.

SoundsThis section is purely my advice for if/when you plan on driving these cars perhaps for cruising or racing etc.

When driving, you are almost always exposed to the sounds the car produces out of the exhaust. When I describe how sound is produced, I am not trying to be accurate to a real life vehicle, but to show how to do it in forza, which isn't exactly a simulator. Why not make the most of them?

Factors that affect sound produced:

• Engine swaps

• Exhausts

• Intakes

• Aspiration (natural, turbocharger, supercharger)

Note: Different turbos in engine part menu also have different sounds. Explained later.

Not every car will have the option to change all 4 of these affectors, so don't worry if you can't find one/some of them. This could be because the engine can only be naturally aspirated for example.

You might think other parts can change the sound and you are right, but this is only (to my knowledge) the changing of the rpm limiter of the engine, which is different, although good to know.

While upgrading your car, there will be a button you can hold to rev your engine and preview the effects the upgrades will have on the sound. The button is stated in the bottom-left of the screen along with others and their actions.

Note: I have noticed that aspiration (especially superchargers) do not sound the same inside the festival outpost building (where you upgrade your cars) than outside the building in freeroam. Superchargers sometimes are hard to notice inside, which has lead me to not select them in the past when they most likely would have sounded nicer.

I recommend:

• Stock, sport and race turbos all sound different as well as perform, so if you plan on driving your

car for a longer amount of time, I recommend finding one you like.

I recommend against:

• turbochargers with anti-lag (ESPECIALLY FOR CRUISING) because they can quickly become

very obnoxious with all of the backfire.

Overall, it is your choice and you can fiddle with all the factors until you find something that suits you.

Modifications

First off, you can't go wrong with lowering your car. (except for rally / baja etc. obviously)

I recommend buying race suspension, and then manually changing the height to something suitable in the "custom tuning" section in the upgrades menu.

Tip: any suspension kit that states it unlocks custom tuning costs the same and only serves as a preset which you can completely change into another, so don't bother buying more than one.

On older or cheaper cars, the visible brake discs are sometimes quite small. Usually when I make a heavily modified design, I will replace the brakes with custom ones to fill the empty space and to give off an impression of power. I recommend this at is can really make a difference. My go-to are the sport brakes, as the street ones are too small and the race ones look out of place for anything but a time attack car. The only issue with the sport brakes is that the discs can sometimes seem too bright, but it hasn't caused too much trouble in my experience.

Left: Stock 350z | Right: 350z with street brakes and race suspension (9cm front, 9cm rear)

9 times out of 10 custom rims will be better. I'm not sure how to describe and link rims with cars, so I won't go into that. However, please let your tires be visible, don't give the cars 23" rims, ok? Don't make a donk car but don't make a drag car. Have normal rim sizes. For smaller cars, I mostly use 16-17", and for larger cars... 18? 19? It is very rare that I use 19" but every car is different and I believe you can use your common sense to find the right sizes.

At the bottom of the "sport rim style" list there are some nice bronze JDM rims that I have used a lot, some cool work rims, and some kyusha-type 4 spoke ones just above.

I recommend using wheel spacers but NEVER let them poke out. If you do so, you will lose your human rights. For tire compounds, I wouldn't recommend slicks because I think having some texture on the side is pretty nice. Semi slicks are more low profile and look closer to regular tires, if you want to use that.

Note: slicks also are a sign of maxing out the car (upgrading everything to the max) which may be seen as a bad design stereotype as seen in the introduction section.

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3277937401

FH5 Car Designs Guide

Introduction

Colours

Wheels

Tints

Upgrades

More Forza Horizon 5 guilds