Dave Eckhart's B-26 - missing textures

Hi everyone,

just going through some older aircraft in my collection and noticed that Dave Eckhart's B-26 is missing some textures, particularly the port upper outer wing panel and starboard lower outer wing panel. Looking throough this forum I see that some other threads have spoken about this issue but I didn't find a fix. Can anyone help before I go and bother the man himself??

Best regards,

Dave C

Thanks for taking the trouble to look into this Zippy.

Yes, you are perfectly correct, the Marauder-1 update is perfect, it is the Damien Radice repaints which have the problem. I have compared the texture files and they (Dave Eckhert's and Damien Radice files) appear to have exactly the same texture bitmaps in them. Obviously Damien's textures must be missing something. If nobody knows of a fix I will write to Damien.

Best regards,

Dave.

I downloaded the FS2004 B-26 by Dave Eckhart and not only Damian Radice's textures but also the one that came with the aircraft does the same thing!

Yup,

that's the problem. It's no big deal, I only got interested because I am doing scenery packages for RAF's Matching Green and Stansted, which were the main Marauder's lairs in the UK, but it is one of those problems which gets under your skin. If anyone has a solution I would be grateful.

Best regards.

The cause of the see-through wing is B26_insig.bmp. Well, the cause is using an old model in FSX. The fix is B26_insig.bmp.

Here I have loaded the .mdl file in Model Converter X, with MCX set to display Coloured render mode. I have selected B26_insig.bmp with "Highlight selected" and you can see the area of the top of the wing covered by that texture.

Now I have selected B26-wing1 and you can see most of the wing is covered by that texture, except for what is covered by B26_insig.bmp. Or so it would seem.

Here I have removed B26_insig.bmp from the model and selected B26_wing1.

So what we have is a complete wing, textured with B26_wing1, that is "overlaid" with a small section of the wing, textured with B26_insig.bmp.

If we look at B26_insig.bmp from b26mann.zip we can see how this works. On the left are the RGB channels and on the right is the Alpha channel.

The Alpha channel controls what parts of the RGB we see on that small section of wing. Where the Alpha channel is white we see the corresponding pixels from the RGB displayed on the small section of wing. Where the Alpha channel is black, the small section of wing is supposed to be transparent allowing us to see what is painted on the full wing underneath.

This works as expected in FS9, and I believe in FSX pre-SP1, though I might be wrong on the FSX part.

To "fill the hole" what you would need to do is paint the RGB in B26_insig.bmp to match the rest of the wing and either paint the Alpha channel all pure white, or my preference, save the file as DXT1-no Alpha.

Hope this..

a) helps

...and...

b) has not bored you to tears.

peace,

the Bean

Thanks Bean for this fascinating input!

I am not going to mess about with Model Converter or anything like that but, having identified that the .insig bmp is the culprit, and (like Zippy) having noted that the updated version of the B-26 does not have this problem, I copied the .insig bmp from the updated version into the faulty versions and ... là voilà, as they say around here. OK, the colours do not match exactly but hey, they did Battle Damage Repairs in those days, didn't they?

Thanks all for your help.

Best,

Dave.

... and in case anyone's interested, here are some B-26's at my RAF Matching Green, complete with AI traffic.

Looks great, Dave.

I am not going to mess about with Model Converter ...

It was not my intent to suggest you fix the model with MCX, in fact you cannot.

I was using MCX to show how the plane works and demonstrate how to fix the texture.

MCX is a great tool for troubleshooting stuff like this, yet is not necessarily the way to fix it.

peace,

the Bean