What does it mean that you should pick your model before you find a picture of the plane? Aren't you supposed to first find the pictures and later find the model?

Well, no. To find first the documentation is like the joke of the bride who is testing her wedding dress and says: I have the dress, I have the church reserved, I rented the party house, I just need to find the man.

But first of all: what is a model? And what is a repainter?

For "just fly" simmers, a model is the totally blank plane, without colors. Have you seen when you load a complex plane that before you see the colored plane sometimes appears a white form of the plane? That's the model. It is the form of the plane, its weight, its power, fuel, speed, everything except the colors. When a modeler releases a plane, he includes one or two basic paint schemes, usually of a big airline or a big country air force, if a military one.

A repainter is someone who takes this model and adds another color scheme to the plane. Let's take one of my favorite modelers, Mike Stone. He released his Boeing 727-200 plane with the colors of Air France, Alitalia, Condor, Eastern and Piedmont. I have released repaints of this model in seventeen colors, from the very well known Alaska Airlines to the almost unknown Pride Air. By the way, I just discovered recently that Mike only allows "ready to fly" planes for virtual airlines. The rest of us must conform with texture only repaints, but we will talk more detailed about this in the next part of this series.

In a perfect world you can find any model of any plane you want. But in the real one, some flightsim plane models just don't exist. I'm still searching for a good CN-235 freeware model to repaint.

Freeware? What's that? Well, there are two different kinds of models: payware and freeware. The first one must be bought, and its repainting is limited; as you can't distribute a payware model for free, you are limited to the people who have bought the package and liked it and see your repaint and know how to download and install it.

The second group, freeware: it's free, OK, but the modelers not always want someone else to do anything with their work. They, as authors of the plane, can authorize or not to other people to make repaints. Let's say that each model is like a child of its author: you can't go to a father and tell him: "I just met your daughter today and I want to take her to the beach this weekend". The list goes from Shigueru Tanaka, who does not let anybody make repaints without written permission, to iDFG or Robert Versluys, who include a written authorization for repainting their planes.

And, of course, not all the models are good. I know at least one model which is so badly made, that you can draw a straight line, and the line is displayed like an "S".

That's why you must search first the model, and later think, with this model, which plane can you paint.

And request permission? Very important. Some models don't specify if the author allows repaints or not. So, you must send an email requesting permission, and must include the permission with the finished plane you release. If not, the modeler can write to the web site where you uploaded your job, and request to remove it. And worst, if he gets upset, he will never release another model. So, if not directly specified, PLEASE request permission. Many of them will give it to you.

Another kind of permission you must have is the one from some airlines, as American Airlines. You can't release a repaint of its planes without informing the company and without a notification telling that you have nothing to do with the company.

Well, enough for now. In the next part, we will talk about "Ready to Fly" files against "Textures Only" ones.

Alejandro Hurtado
dracosist@cantv.net

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