Why are my textures black?

[Daycab]

Well, I am trying to add some textures to my plane and came across a problem.

First, to make the texture, I made a 2048x2048 palette of just plain red in Photoshop.  I am just playing around right now and wanted to figure out what I was doing before going any further with painting...

Then I saved that as a Bitmap, opened it in Imagetool and saved it as a .dds file.

Then I went into Max and set that as a Flightsim X texture and applied it to the plane.  Then I used UVW unwrap to map the plane to it.

I have been using the Extra as a donor plane, to test my model, so I went into the texture.1 folder and replaced the extra300s_T file with my own and renamed it to match.

Now what I get is a black plane, and for some reason the planes for the reference images are showing up as well, even though I set them to not render...

[Brett_Henderson]

The bitmaps have to be converted before saving them as DDS.

My routine is:

-Edit them  as  16-million color bitmap, in PSP

-Convert them to DXT5 with DxtBmp (you can use DXT1 if there is no alpha channel)

-Save the DXT5 bitmap as a DDS  with ImageTool

[Brett_Henderson]

--- I'll add more ..


Extended bitmaps (DXT) don't show up in Gmax, and regular bitmaps don't show up (as you know now) in FSX.

Gmax seems to be able to sort out files of the same name, but with differrent extensions.. FSX isn't so smart ..lol

In other words.. A regular bitmap,

[Daycab]

Thanks, Brett...

Where can I find Dxtbmp?

[N2056]

I use PSP 9, and I was able to get the Nvidia DDS plug-in to work. When I want to get a texture into FSX I just flatten all the layers, flip it, and save it as a .dds texture

[Daycab]

Thanks, the plug-in worked fantastic, but I think either way would work fine.   The Plug-in seems one less step though.

Having said that, here is what I have.  I'm not sure why the textures are not aligned, because they seemed to be on the UVW Unwrap.  I'm just glad to have gotten this far...

[Brett_Henderson]

I'm not sure about the differences/similarites bewtewee Max and Gmax, but they've gotta be pretty close.


N2056's method is probably a "better" way to do it.. When you get to where you're managing several bitmaps, and making spec maps, and tweaking all the alpha channels.. the big key is to be disciplined and methodic. I like using DxtBmp because you can send the bitmap (or the alpha) directly to an editor when you're experimenting... and to date, it has given me flawless, error-free DXT compression. You can remove the ImageTool/DDS step until your completely finished, because DXT5 works fine in FSX. DDS is supposed to be more efficient for in-game-rendering, but that's not a concern when you're editing. I keep ALL the information (diffuse-layers, diffuse-alpha, spec, and spec-alpha) in one PSP file. So either way is about the same, step-wise. You'll eventually come up with your own methods and naming conventions.

As for mapping. Using an 'Un-wrap' can be tricky... but necessary for fuselages so that things like rivets don't get stretched.

[BrandonF]

[quote]Thanks, Brett...

Where can I find Dxtbmp?