This article started recently when I received an email from one person who downloaded a Pokemon repaint for the default Cessna 172. He wrote me that any character on the left side of the fuselage was reflected, inverted, on the right one. I have not made repaints recently due to real-life time limitations, but I always answer an email.

I answered that the reason behind this apparent madness was a matter of space. If you design your plane's model to be covered with only one side, then you are reducing the size of the texture files by half. It saves disk space, and MAYBE memory. But the drawback is that you can't write anything on this plane, unless you want to fly it just looking the left side.

Why a modeler would do this nonsense, apart to save one or two megabytes of disk space? Well, I'm not a modeller (can someone write a column called "How To Be A Modeller", please?) but the reason is simple: if the plane is one of these monsters with twelve or more wheels, will you do a texture image for each one of them, both sides? I will not. Or will you do a separated image for each blade of a C-130J? It's easier and makes sense to read the same texture over and over for these parts of the plane.

The problem begins when we follow this rule to larger pieces of the plane: what about the inner part of the engines? Or the upper and lower surfaces of the elevator? The bomb racks of a military plane?

One of my repaints was made over a Mike Stone model, an A-10A. He painted the model with the grey camouflage. But I wanted to paint it like a Europe One version. And here started the problem: the left and right inner tail surfaces were mirrored. Same for the inner engine surfaces. Same for many armament supports. The flaps and ailerons too. Don't misunderstand me: I like Mike Stone's planes. This one was complex and difficult to do. It is well done. And if you want to paint this plane full grey, then this mirror images makes sense. But if you want this plane to look like a lizard, well... you must tweak a bit the color pattern to make it fit with the restrictions you have. I'm including the file corresponding to the fuselage's texture, and a view of the finished plane showing the mirror images of the inner engines and flaps. Looking at this texture file you'll learn many paint tricks that I haven't explained yet, like scanning a 3-view drawing, line guides, unfinished borders to prevent the formation of joining lines and so on. I'm usually more careful about these details, but after two months making this particular repaint, I was too tired to clean it.

So it carries us to some of my previous articles, when I wrote that you must find first the model and later the picture. Just check that all the major textures are displayed in the .bmp files. Sometimes you can find even poetry inside the texture files!

Just like a complement, I'll include inside this article the answer to another question that nobody has made me: Why some fuselages are displayed with both sides pointing on the same direction? Well, because it's easier to check this way that the letterings from both sides of the plane are correctly lineated. The same thing for windows, joinings, etc. But it's a matter of choice. I prefer to waste some more time aligning the marks and lettering instead to have to paint one of the fuselage sides horizontally inverted. At the end, it doesn't care what do I or you believe, because we must obey whatever the modeller has disposed for us.

So, select a model, open the textures files and... be happy!

Alejandro Hurtado
dracosist@cantv.net

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Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 12