JDM: Japanese Drift Master has expanded its Paint Shop with a new livery system designed to make a car’s appearance as personal as its driving setup. The update introduces decal-based liveries with extensive per-layer controls, two-point colour gradients, paint options for eligible rims, and multiplayer support for saving another player’s active design.
The patch also addresses a range of crashes and technical problems across driving, multiplayer and Photo Mode. That combination matters: a detailed customisation suite is most useful when players can reliably bring their creations into online sessions, take screenshots and share their work with other drivers.
Players should update before attempting multiplayer. An up-to-date game version is required to connect to other players.
A Paint Shop built around layered liveries
The headline addition is a livery and decals editor integrated directly into the Paint Shop. It includes more than 100 decal designs and shapes, alongside hundreds of decals and stickers that can be used to build a vehicle design. A single livery can contain up to 5,000 sticker layers.
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In practical terms, a layer is an individual visual element placed on the car: a sticker, shape or decal. Stacking layers lets a player construct a complex image from simpler parts. A basic number panel, for example, might need a background shape, an outline, the digits, a small logo and a few shadows or accents. More ambitious work can use many separate pieces to form patterns, racing-inspired graphics or original illustrations.
The 5,000-layer ceiling is therefore a capacity figure, not a suggestion that every car needs thousands of elements. A restrained design can be just as effective as an elaborate one. But the limit gives players room to work at very different levels of complexity without immediately running into a small editor cap.
Each layer can be scaled, rotated and recoloured. The editor also provides symmetry mode and camera precision settings. Scale changes the size of a placed element; rotation changes its orientation. Symmetry mode can mirror placement, which should be useful for maintaining matching graphics on opposite sides of a vehicle rather than rebuilding the same motif by hand. Precision camera controls are similarly important in a vehicle editor because the surface being decorated is curved: a small shift can be the difference between a decal sitting neatly on a panel and spilling across an edge.
Colour controls go beyond choosing a hue. Players can adjust saturation and brightness on layers. Saturation describes how intense or muted a colour appears, while brightness determines how light or dark it is. Those two controls give designers a way to make related stickers feel consistent even when they begin with different base colours—for instance, by reducing a particularly loud accent so it does not overwhelm the rest of a livery.
Layer management is as important as the sticker count
The update includes tools to reorder, hide and duplicate layers. These are the less flashy parts of an editor, but they are essential once a design grows beyond a handful of decals.
- Reordering determines which element appears above or below another. It is the tool that turns separate shapes into an intentional composition.
- Hiding lets a player temporarily remove an element from view without deleting it, making it easier to compare versions or inspect what sits beneath a graphic.
- Duplicating creates a copy of a layer, useful for repeated motifs, matching marks and rapid variations on an existing shape.
Liveries can also be saved as presets. Each preset creates a separate save file in the game’s folder. That is a meaningful detail for players who plan to make several looks for one car, keep a clean version before experimenting, or maintain distinct designs for different occasions. Presets provide a way to preserve work without treating every change as permanent.
The depth here makes the Paint Shop more than a simple colour selector. The original body paint remains the foundation, while the livery system supplies the visual language layered on top of it. Together, those options give players a place to pursue styles associated with street-car and drift culture without imposing one fixed look on every vehicle.
Sharing happens through multiplayer inspection
The update supports livery sharing in multiplayer, but its implementation is deliberately tied to seeing another player’s car in the game world. Players can drive to and inspect another participant, then save that player’s active livery to their own library of livery presets.
This means sharing is not described as a broad external catalogue or an automatic download system. Instead, the exchange begins with an encounter in multiplayer: spot a design, inspect the vehicle, and save its current livery. It is a fitting approach for a driving game because it makes the car itself—the thing another player has brought to the session—the starting point for discovery.
There is an obvious practical consideration for creators. An active livery is the one other players can save, so anyone wanting to show off a particular design will need it equipped while playing online. For collectors of designs, presets can help keep saved liveries organised once the library begins to grow.
Because this feature depends on multiplayer connections, the instruction to patch first is especially important. Players who have not updated will be unable to connect with others, which means they will not be able to inspect or save multiplayer liveries either.
Gradients add a second colour toolset
Alongside decals, the revised Paint Shop now supports colour gradients. The system uses two points: a start colour and an end colour. Rather than relying on a flat single paint colour, players can define a transition between those two colours across the vehicle.
The editor includes controls for gradient angle, brightness and saturation. The angle governs the direction of the transition; a diagonal fade will read differently from one that runs front-to-back or side-to-side. Brightness and saturation controls make it possible to alter the character of the blend rather than merely swapping one pair of colours for another.
Gradients can serve as an understated base for decals or become the defining visual element of a build. A livery with many stickers may benefit from a quieter transition that supports the graphics. Conversely, a minimal car could use a more pronounced gradient as its principal styling choice. The new livery tools and gradients are complementary rather than redundant: one supplies individual placed elements, and the other changes the broad paint treatment beneath them.
The Paint Shop interface has also been redesigned with gamepad use in mind. That is notable given the number of layer, camera and colour settings now available. A livery editor requires repeated small adjustments, so an interface that is easier to navigate with a controller can have a significant effect on how approachable the system feels.
Eligible rims can now match the rest of the build
Rim painting is another new option. Single-part and three-part rims can be painted in the same manner as the car body, though stock rims cannot be changed.
The distinction is useful to keep in mind. The feature applies to eligible rim types rather than every wheel fitted to every car. Players using stock rims will not be able to recolour them through this system, while single-part and three-part rims gain body-style paint treatment.
Available finishes are factory finish, gloss, metallic, sateen, matt and chrome. As with body and decal colours, saturation and brightness can be adjusted. Material finish affects the intended visual character of a colour: gloss suggests a shiny painted surface, metallic adds a metallic look, matt reduces shine, and chrome aims for a reflective appearance. The supplied list uses the term sateen for one of the available selections.
Rim paint can be a small finishing detail, but it can also determine whether a livery feels coordinated. Matching a wheel accent to a decal colour, darkening the rims beneath a bright body treatment, or choosing a contrasting chrome option are all choices enabled by the expanded Paint Shop—provided the car is using compatible rims.
Stability fixes reach wheels, crashes and Photo Mode
Customisation is the central attraction, but the patch also includes broad fixes. Several crash scenarios have been addressed, including crashes associated with force feedback steering wheels, entering the car parameters screen, the HUD, and collisions during gameplay.
Force feedback is the resistance and vibration response delivered by compatible steering-wheel hardware. Fixing crashes connected to that equipment is significant for players using wheel setups, since a crash during normal driving input is more disruptive than a cosmetic issue in a menu.
Multiplayer sessions should also behave more consistently after leaving them: traffic and AI drivers now spawn correctly after a player exits multiplayer. That targets the surrounding road activity rather than only player-to-player connectivity.
Photo Mode receives several corrections. The patch fixes a post-process effect that could oversaturate images in certain circumstances, addresses screenshots not saving correctly on Steam, prevents the gear from going into “Natural” when leaving Photo Mode, and fixes a Landmark activity problem that could register a landmark without the player actually taking the required photo.
Post-processing refers to visual effects applied to the final image after the scene has been rendered. Saturation is the intensity of colours, so an oversaturated post-process can make an otherwise carefully chosen livery appear excessively vivid in a screenshot. For a patch focused on car presentation, fixing that problem is particularly relevant.
The Landmark correction also restores the intended relationship between the activity and its requirement: taking the photo. Meanwhile, the Steam screenshot fix addresses whether the resulting image is saved correctly, not merely how it looks on screen.
What players should do after updating
For players interested in the new tools, a sensible first step is to create a simple preset before attempting a large project. Establish a body colour or gradient, add a few decals, save the result, then experiment with duplicated layers and alternate colours. That makes the preset system a safety net rather than an afterthought.
For multiplayer-focused players, equip the livery you want others to encounter, update the game before connecting, and use vehicle inspection to save designs that stand out. The system turns online cars into a moving gallery of selectable presets, while retaining a direct in-game route for sharing.
For a broader look at the update’s livery focus, see the details on the 5,000-layer Paint Shop expansion.
With decals, deep layer manipulation, gradients and compatible-rim finishes now gathered in the revised Paint Shop, JDM: Japanese Drift Master gives players considerably more control over the visual identity of their cars. The accompanying crash, multiplayer traffic and Photo Mode fixes aim to ensure that the work is not confined to a garage menu, but can make it reliably onto the road and into saved images.
