Texture Oddity

[ragupasta]

Hey guys,

I decided to have a bash at repainting a freeware aircraft that I have. A Saab 340 turboprop. Nice aircraft indeed.
Now Im not new to graphics at all. FSX graphics I am though.
So I do high polygon hardsurface modeling, and that includes texturing. That usually comprimises of large res textures, and I use .tga files, I dont work in any other format.

Now the Saab works with DX9 in FSX, so I want to upgrade the textures to .dds which is fine. The problem is with the .bmp files.

Here is an image of it in FSX, texture is nice....

http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c44/ragupasta/kaiTak.jpg

Here is the fuselage texture open in Photoshop...

http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c44/ragupasta/fuselageScanlines.jpg

And The Gimp wont even open it...

http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c44/ragupasta/fuselageScanlinesGimp.jpg

Im at a loss. Like I say I don't use .bmp file format at all, so maybe its an option I dont know about.
Googling turned up no results, and trying to describe it as "scan lines", brings up links about interlaced DV footage (hate interlaced footage...).

Any idea's?

[Flying Officer Jevans]

It is a format you don't know about. You know you're in trouble when the GIMP won't open it! :)

FS has always used it's own 'unofficial' format for bitmaps, so that they can contain an alpha channel. To open and convert these bitmaps, and to convert to dds textures too, you need to freeware program DXTbmp. Search/download that, and you should be set. Open the texture in DXTbmp, then it will display the main texture and the alpha channel separately, and then you can set it to use Photoshop CS3 as your editor. Once you're done in Ps, you save it and reload it into DXTbmp before saving it into the final format. There's a help file in the DXTbmp folder that explains the whole process.;)

[Fourtyfreak]

Hi,

The BMP format that FS uses is slightly different from a standard BMP format. You need to use a tool called DXTBmp (http://www.btinternet.com/~mnwright/programs/dxtbmp.htm) to convert the Extended BMP's to and from the standard format.

Hope this makes some kind of sense.

Paul

EDIT: Oops seems like our posts crossed. :-)

[ragupasta]

Thanks for the swift postage guys. I'll have a looksee at that app.

Cheers

Ragu.

[Flying Officer Jevans]

Always reassuring to see someone agrees with me...:D;)

[Fourtyfreak]

Always reassuring to see someone agrees with me...:D;)

Funnily enough, I was thinking a similar thing.

As a repainting newbie myself, it's nice to know that the advice I give is backed up by someone else. :D

BTW, Ragu, just in case you haven't come across it already, this repaint tutorial (http://members.multimania.co.uk/mcwdainow/tutorials/complete_walkthrough/main_page.htm) is full of handy tips and tricks.

I've been slowly working my way through it, bit by bit.

Paul

[ragupasta]

Oooo thanks for the link Paul. :)

*Bookmarks the link*

Cheers

Glenn.

[Flying Officer Jevans]

And here's another tutorial for the basics:

http://www.flightsim.com/main/howto/paint1.htm

Sometimes a bit long winded but worth a look.

[ragupasta]

Cheers guys. I will take a look at those tutorials this weekend. Having said that I have been playing around with the textures.
Whoever originally textured it, did'nt quite keep to the fuselage, so some parts are tricky to understand what is what. Like the outside of the cockpit is a square white blob, not easy to decipher the shape.

This is just a dry run to see if it all works out, then I will move on to texturing it properly.

This morning...

http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c44/ragupasta/kaiTak.jpg]

This evening...

http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c44/ragupasta/001-6.jpg

http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c44/ragupasta/002-4.jpg

http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c44/ragupasta/003-4.jpg

Due to adding this new texture it has brought to light some smoothign errors in the mesh that I didn't see before hand.

Cheers

Glenn.