Great idea! Please add a feature where we can select the max amount of characters available (some motorcycle plates only allow 4 characters) More on reddit.com

All I have wanted to do since I got GT7 is obtain the three sports cars that have had the most influence on my life: the Datsun 240Z, the Nissan 300ZX, and the Subaru WRX. I wanted to get them and spend hours in Scapes taking pictures of them, remembering all the good times I had driving them and being young and stupid (or, in the case of the WRX, vaguely having a midlife crisis). Well, the 300ZX showed up in the Used Cars a day or two ago, and my wife giggled watching me as I discovered that, yes, the exact Nissan paint color that I had on my 92 300ZX (Red Pearl Metallic) was available in the Livery Editor. Of course, those "Fairlady Z" paper plates looked… lame. I set out to remedy this, and I encountered enough, ahem, bumps in the road that I figured I would share what I discovered with everyone. This tutorial concentrates on California plates, but can easily adapt to most any state for which you want to take the time to assemble the necessary graphics. You will need three things: Inkscape, the open-source vector graphics program, an alternative to Adobe Illustrator. It makes great SVGs. If you want to get into making livery for Gran Turismo, this is your best bet. Don't bother messing with online SVG browser apps, they will just frustrate you. A TrueType Font called "Dealerplate California". You can find it here. (Click the "download" button on the right.) They have fonts for most other states and Canadian provinces, too. An SVG file of the "California" logo. I found a vector file created by a person named Kristin Berkery, who runs a site called KB Designs. She asked, explicitly, for people not to host the file elsewhere. I want to respect her wishes, and the file is essentially perfect, but needs to be converted to SVG from what appears to be the native Illustrator format. So download it from her site here and then convert it in Inkscape. Okay, tools acquired. Unzip the font and install it. On Windows, this is done by right-clicking the TTF file and selecting Install or Install for All Users. Next, install Inkscape. Now, let's convert that California logo. Unzip it, open it up in Inkscape, and then just do a "Save As" and select "Plain SVG" as the file type, with a different file name. This is the file type you will want to use for all your files going forward. Inkscape should automatically convert the file. Next, you need to create the decals necessary. This is the trickiest part of the entire endeavor. Create a new document in Inkscape. Create a new text object with the text you want for your license plate. Set the font to Dealerplate, the font size to 70, and the "spacing between letters" to 2.46 (that's the first of the five boxes of numbers on the toolbar up top). To set the color, click on the color swatch down at the bottom next to the word "Fill". The color toolbox will pop up on the right; the RGB code for the blue color used on California license plates is 9, 37, 76. This next part is the important part. If you don't do it, your SVG will either be blank in GT7 or look wrong, and you will come back here and post a comment that says "my decal looks wrong, your instructions are bullshit, this doesn't work" and I'll tell you that you didn't follow the instructions like I said. Use the Select tool - the "arrow" tool at the top of the tool list on the left. Select the text object you just created. Go to the "Path" menu and select "Object to Path". Then, go to the "Object" menu and select "Ungroup". If you did this right, instead of just one outline, you should now see an outline around each individual letter. Note that, after you have done this, you can't edit the text as text anymore, so make sure you're happy with it before you do the Object to Path and Ungroup steps. What you just did is convert an SVG object consisting of text information into SVG objects that are pure vector information. An SVG can say "this is text consisting of this font at this size", etc. But GT7 can only interpret so much of that, and obviously we're using a custom font here, so GT7 doesn't understand if we send it an SVG image using a special font. Therefore we have to convert it to a pure vector file in order for it to be rendered correctly. If you've been having trouble getting your decals to show up, this is probably why. Make sure everything is still selected; if it isn't, grab everything so that it is with the Select tool. From the File menu, select Document Properties. In the resulting toolbox on the right, under Custom Size, select "Resize Page to Content…" and then click "Resize page to drawing or selection". What this does is reduce the size of the canvas to the size of the actual text, so that the decal itself is no bigger than your graphics, like trimming the excess off a sheet of paper. Save the file as a Plain SVG. If you want to go the extra mile for the tags, I recommend you do that in Inkscape as well, instead of trying to do with the fonts in the Livery Editor. Upload your newly minted SVG decals to gran-turismo.com in the "Decal Uploader" section. Note that the interface for gran-turismo.com is kind of annoying on computer browsers, and the toolbar has a tendency to go off the edge of the screen while also not showing you a scroll bar to get to it. You may need to zoom your browser down to 90% or more in order to see the button for the Decal Uploader, or you can just append "/decal" to the end of your GUID URL (instead of "/profile" or "/notification", for example). After that, it's all pretty basic livery editor stuff. Project some basic polygons on the car, size them correctly, pick the right colors, scale things appropriately, add a little heavy water, and ta-da! You have authentic looking license plates to complete your ensemble. I hope this has been of value to somebody! I had a lot of fun figuring this out today. More on reddit.com