Livery Design

Owned by Elizabeth M Rawson
Last updated: May 17, 2024
5 min read

Livery for the 22-24 solar car was designed by Aidan Hodgin. 

Step-by-step guide

  1. 2D Ideation
    1. I started by making a rough 2d version in Adobe Illustrator before doing SolidWorks to have a comprehensive look but this is not necessary.
      1. Don’t rely too heavily on 2D because MANY things will change in 3D. The geometry is very complex and you need to be able to see how it works in 3D to actually make the decal. For example, I had a lot of decals on a curved part and if it was just 2D then they would have worked from a perfectly normal angle but looked super distorted from any other angle.
    2. Definitely sketch it somehow though for an artistic vision just be prepared to make many sacrifices to that vision as you follow regulations and input from other members.
  2. SolidWorks
    1. To split line you are gonna take your .svg file and convert it to dxf or dwg.
      1. I used Illustrator to convert them but other ways should work too.
    2. Then use the insert (under file or something on the top left of solidworks to insert those files in).
      1. This will remove all the color (unfortunately that has to happen in SolidWorks). That’s okay, you will put the color in from the color manager after your split lines are done.
    3. Then you will go to the side view (or whatever view you want) and convert entities that version to an editable sketch.
      1. Here you may need to repair sketch first but then put it along the right plane or whatever plane you want that’s approximately parallel to the surface using the change sketch plane plus move and scale to get it to be the right size (the more parallel the less distortion) and then split line project it onto the face you want. I believe that there is another way to do this called something like project that may be worth exploring.
    4. Now is the part that’s really important. Split lines are dependent on each other in the feature tree if they affect the same faces so if you break or change one further up in the feature tree afterwards you will have to go back and change a lot of your dependent split lines and probably redo your decals on that face. I’m not sure how to do it in a way that doesn’t do this and it caused me a lot of headaches and lost time. Maybe it’s inevitable but also maybe worth laying it all out with decals and having everyone agree on all aspects of the design before moving to split lines which are vector scaleable. Also very important—The aeroshell file CANNOT be
      broken (aeroshell cannot be red) when you do any of this. It will make your work 10x slower.
    5. Have other members and systems fix all the errors and ideally finalize everything because every change earlier in the feature tree will mess up all your split lines.
    6. Then you match the split line sketches with the decals by moving and scaling them before split lining (but don’t make them all and split line later, split line as you go).
    7. In the color manager (that’s what I'm calling it—you get there on the right side in one of the other tabs than the feature tree and before the decals) you need to select colors.
    8. Look up UT brand guidelines for burnt orange and other school colors.
      1. Also sometimes colors will have different surface finishes in the advanced category. If you have multiple of the same color make sure these match.
      2. Also sometimes making another one of the same color is helpful because when you have like a million different faces selected it will slow that color down.
    9. About half of the logos have complex geometry issues in SolidWorks and cant be processed via split lines. If you can find a way around this that will majorly increase the quality of your renders. However I didn’t’ meaning I had to use many of them in .png or other resolution restricted image formats and insert them as decals. Make sure to draw from a folder with those images that you’ve already placed in Bild for the decals (which is the tool you use for putting images in)
    10. The important part here is to click process “using alpha decal channel” or something to make it transparent background and then select from current view for the reference and then align the view with the view selector up top in the main window (or at different angles for complex geometry (like the American flags on the 23-24 shell).
      1. This ensures they are placed with respect to whatever direction you want.
    11. Then you just have to set the size which I just approximated the area and roughly standardize it.

Important notes for the future:

May want to explore fusion 360. SolidWorks works but is weird. Electric uses
Fusion 360 for livery and SolidWorks for the design.

Put any fonts in a separate folder in Bild for people to download.


For the actual vinyl wrap, we were able to export a section of our aeroshell as a flat dxf file, onto which we were able to put the vector logos onto once again in illustrator and then got those sheets vinyl printed.

For vector logos you will need to get the logos in .ai or .svg format. This can be hard to find. See our folder in sharepoint for the old logos but you can also go to a companies website and copy their logo from the top left. These are often in .svg format. Some other websites like wikipedia also contain .svg files of many companies.




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