A few handy tips

[Hoot]

I just started repainting aircraft recently and thought a couple tricks I use might come in handy for everyone else.

1) Paint-mapping is an easy way to tell what part sits where, and even how it sits. What you do is paint every piece of the aircraft a different color to start. Once you've got it painted, and set up so FS will see the repaint, crank FS up. Taxi the aircraft off to some lonely corner of the ramp that's clear of any other aircraft, that way they won't get in the way of taking screen shots. Taking screenshots of how things line up/look can be done two ways. Paint Shop Pro and Adobe both have a "Screen Capture" function, but running either along with FS creates a memory hog from hell. The easy way is to use Screenshooter, which can be had from www.hovercontrol.com All you have to do is unzip it, run it, and hit Print Screen when you want to take a shot.

Using the screenshots as a base, you can paint the aircraft fairly precisely. If you used a gradient fill (one color fading to another) to paint it, then you know exactly where everything will sit. I found this out the hard way by painting the aircraft and firing up FS with each new fix. Finally I just painted each part a different color, with a gradient fill, to find out what sat where. In my case, I used black as the "fade to" color.  It gave me a really good idea of where everything sat.

2) Kill the mips! This tip I found by hunting these boards earlier. Using DXTbmp is pretty easy, but getting sharp textures is a royal pain. That's because it saves nine shots, or mips, when you make the DXT3 image. To get rid of those (thank you Hagar!) fire up ImageTool. It's in the MakeMDL SDK or in the gmax folder if you have FS Pro. Load the image in ImageTool, go over to Image and hit Extract Mips. Here's the fun part: the second to last pic will be the "big mip", or master image. Save that as the exact same name as your texture part and no more fuzzies! Say I was doing "wings.bmp" in this way. I'd load "wings.bmp" into ImageTool, hit Extract Mips, and find the biggest mip of 'em all. Then I'd save that mip as "wings.bmp". It'll always come out as a razor-sharp image!



Enjoy!
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Hoot

[Smoke2much]

Thanks Hoot, useful tips.

Will

[Felix/FFDS]

Great tips...

Another thing that some people use - and I picked this up some time ago from Ken Simmelink of (then) Project Freeware - is to make a numbered - colored grid.

To a certain extent, I presume you're working from a source file and assigning textures the same way, but the technique will also work from a repaint point of view.

By overlaying a colored/numbered grid over the aircraft's texture, you can then determine where the adjacent textures "line up" .

THis is where layers, and controlling the layer's opacity in the paint program, helps.

[Hoot]

Quick update: Unchecking "Use Mips" in DXTbmp will kill off your MIPs without having to use ImageTool to remove them.

Quick Alpha tip: Take your original image and make it a gray-scale image. If you're working in PSP or Photoshop, place each component on a separate layer so you can control the reflectivity of everything without needing to repaint the alpha from scratch. Remember, black is chrome and white is matte (no reflection at all).


Have Fun!

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Hoot

[G-force237]

Using the screenshots as a base, you can paint the aircraft fairly precisely. If you used a gradient fill (one color fading to another) to paint it, then you know exactly where everything will sit.

I also found that if you just crank up the texture map resolution in G-max to the highes it can go (512X512) it will be almost as high res as in fs2002, so that way all you have to do is make your change, save it, and update map in g-max.

BTW, thanks for all of the tips you have taken time to post up. I am definatly going to try tip #2 right now