Help Pixia is screwing up my repaints

[Batman93210]

Hi Yall

Has anyone had this happen using Pixia for an editor?




Pixia adds all kinds of different colors to the aircraft bitmaps. It's making a real mess out of my repaints. Now pixia doesn't do this to the panel bitmaps. Does anyone know why this is happening?

[Stratobat]

Hey Batman,

I could be wrong here, but those look like artifacts caused by compressing and uncompressing a texture to many times!

Regards,
Stratobat

[Batman93210]

Thanks for your reply Stratobat.


I'm not sure I understand what you mean by compressing and uncompressing. I ues DXTBmp to open the bitmap file, and Pixia for the editor. I usually dont get to finish a repaint at one time. I work a littel at a time. Is this what you mean by compressing and uncompressing?

[Sytse]

It depends on the filetype you're saving the textures as. If you save them as .jpg every time you get the compression screwing things up. I advise you to save them as 24 bit .bmp's.

[Batman93210]

I just save the bitmaps the same as it was opend.
ie.. the Cessna Skylane 182S is the aircraft that I'm working on now. when I open the bitmap it is BMP (DXT3) : 1024x1024 - 16 bit. So when I'm finished with editing I save the file in the same format BMP (DXT3) : 1024x1024 BMP. Is this wrong, and whats messing up the files ?

[Hagar]

It's a long time since I used Pixia & then it was to find out how it worked. I never actually used it for repainting but I'm sure it has a native format that saves features like layers. PSP & Photoshop have similar native formats, PSP & PSD respectively.

I would advise you to save in that format, whatever it might be, on first opening a texture & before repainting it. This will be your master texture. Save an updated copy of this every time you finish work on the texture. Then Save in the usual BMP format before using DXTBmp to convert it to the appropriate FS texture format. This saves an awful lot of work & by working from that saved master texture each time you wish to resume work on that texture, the image should be as crisp as when you first opened it.

PS. The Pixia native format is PXA or .pxa

[Batman93210]

Tahnks Hagar.


Ok I'll try that. I dot know much about the layers, and how thay work. I gess it is part of the learnning process.

[Hagar]

Please try it Batman. It will be just the same even if you don't use layers at the moment. Get into the habit of doing it now & it will come in very handy when you eventually get round to doing that.

PS. We're all still learning. If it was easy there wouldn't be much point in doing it.

[Batman93210]

See if I have this right. When I'm finished with editting the bitmap file, I should go to file/ save as..., then the dialog window pops up. I diden fined PSP or PSD. The only thing close to that is EPS and PXA. I'm thinking EPS is the format to save the bitmap in.



                         thank agen for you help

[wji]

May I suggest re-reading the basics of repaint-kits regarding the various file formats one uses. I fail to see what your current problem has to do with Pixia. It looks to me like a misunderstanding of file formats and which ones to use where.

There are several tutorials online -- including here at SimV. May I suggest reading this one again.

P.S. Save the finished repaint out of Pixia as a 24bit.BMP file (this is the default as I recall); those of us using Photoshop can save as 32bit.BMP for higher detail (and use directly in Fs9, in select cases).

Disclaimer: "Please Note:  there are many ways to repaint these planes - I'm describing the one I use, which may not be the "best", but works well for me. "

[Falcon500]

i dont know? i call it the mosaic effect, it seems to occur where to colors meet. for the most part i have to do one pass repaints, where you repaint the entire aircraft without saving it partway finished. here are repaints of my P-39 that got screwed up when i tried to redo the paintjob.