Duff, I'm the same way, now trying to get extremely functional cars from the tuning section. I need help tuning as well, and a lot of these guys spend days tweaking, really know their stuff.
I'll send you a porsche, I've taken a bit of a break as well, got a 550 in mind, but COD4 multiplayer is simply amazing, and I can't stop playing it. We should play some time. Just so addicting!
As far as the shifting, you know my take on that, I use two cars at once, one to do all the logos- size and position them, then save them as large groups. Then I have a clean final one, do the background stuff first, then spend a while at the end pasting everything together. So I have two working ones going at once.
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