In this tutorial, we'll be looking at the concept of how a livery is made up and how to edit them using your own unique style and look. I'll also be sharing a few tips which will (hopefully) make the process of editing liveries just that little bit easier to complete.

Start With An Idea

Whether it's going to be a sleek British Airways classic livery or a scruffy old bush paint job you're thinking of editing, the concept is the same.

The Components Of A Livery

So what are the ingredients of a typical aircraft livery and how do they work?

An aircraft livery consists of either one simple image or a series of images. Due to the increasing complexities of aircraft design, it is not uncommon to see multiple images used for different parts of an aircraft.

When I took my first basic steps in livery creation, I wondered at first how a flat image could end up covering all those intricate parts of an aircraft. After a while I worked out that each image, which is of course flat, wraps itself around an area it has been assigned to, a bit like cling film if you like. When I understood that, everything became a lot easier to understand.

The images used in a livery are mostly PNG format (Portable Network Graphics) which is a common format used by most graphic editors. You may also come across the PSD format, which is the format used by Photoshop.

Starting Point

For illustrative purposes I've decided to use the Embraer EMB-110 but in hindsight, the default and resource friendly Cessna 172 would probably have been a better aircraft to choose. Still, the principals are the same for whatever aircraft you decide on.

First we need to venture into our aircraft folder so that we can have a look at the livery resolutions.

Liveries in X-Plane commonly range from 512 pixels, right up to 4096 (4K), with 4K demanding the very latest in hardware (4K textures will bring most computers to their knees).

Looking at the 'Air Rarotonga' livery object folder, we can see that files use_back.png, fuse_front.png, leme_png and wing_left.png are at 2048 pixels x 2048 pixels resolution. These are shown below in figure 1.

Figure 1

Depending on what details you intend to add or remove, you can edit the above files as necessary. It's up to you what you leave and what you take out, but for the purpose of this tutorial, we are going to leave the wings alone; they suit our purpose as they are. If you did however want to make simple changes to the wings, such as color adjustment, some graphic programs have a facility called 'Color Swap' which will exchange every instance of a certain color for one chosen by yourself. I've used this method on quite a few occasions by using Xara Designer Pro X. This feature saves a lot of time and trouble drawing round areas of color.

Figure 2 below shows the fuse_front file. For our edit, we will be removing the Air Rarotonga logo and the accompanying purple stars. In your graphics editor, use a combination of the rectangle tool, and fill tool to remove these items. Most editors have these tools, but just in case it doesn't, download Gimp (freeware) which has a host of tools at your disposal. Note: remember to restore details like rivets and doors back by the use of cutting and pasting.

Figure 2

As you can see in Figure 3, the shading of the fuselage gets darker toward the bottom and lighter towards the top so here's a trick I use to preserve this. Copy a rectangular area to the left or right of the Air Rarotonga logo (one which is in line with the edited area) and paste it next to the logo. Then, whilst still selected, extend it so that it covers entire logo.

Figure 3

By using the above method, we can achieve pretty good results (Figure 4) in the removal of unwanted areas.

Figure 4

Changing Solid Areas Of Color

If we were to simply select an area in our graphics editor and paint over it, we would, in most cases lose all detail. It would become a solid block of color with no features. This is where a package with the ability to replace defined colors comes into its own and it is a feature I highly recommend.

Figure 5 shows the leme.png file, which includes the tail section. As you can see by comparing it to Figure 1, I have carefully removed the flower logo from the top tail section of the picture. This was done by manually painting over areas and color swapping. I then removed the flowers manually which meant copying any detail back by using the cut and past technique. This took me 10 minutes working carefully.

Figure 5

In contrast, I took the blue tail section with the now removed flowers and color swapped it for red. It took me 10 seconds working carefully. A real time saver and far more accurate as Figure 6 shows.

Figure 6

Adding Your Own Details

When adding your own details or logos, choose both wisely and tastefully as bad looking graphics will spoil all your hard work. A graphic from the internet which is too small will look jagged when stretched to size, so the rule is to always go bigger than what you need as you can always shrink to fit. Shrinking an image, unlike resizing, will not cause image degradation.

Whilst JPG are fine to use, PNG format would be a far wiser choice, especially if the background is transparent. This avoids the necessity of having to cut around your chosen portion of the image.

Figure 7 shows an example of why PNG is the preferred format. The chequered background on the logo below is transparent which enables the detailing of the aircraft to be displayed. In JPG format, the task would have been far more time consuming, as careful cutting would have been necessary to remove the background.

Figure 7

Figure 8

Again, by looking at Figure 8, you can see the advantage of using PNG images with transparent backgrounds. There are no rough edges and no noticeable cutting marks.

Final Steps To Completion

When you have finished your editing, the next step is to create a folder for your new livery. Name this folder something appropriate. The next step is to name each of your edited graphic images with that of its original. Next, make 100% sure that each image is of the correct image size. This means 512x512, 1024x1024, 2048x2048, etc. Being just a single pixel out will result in your repaint failing.

Figure 9 shows the file hierarchy of where your repaint must live.

Figure 9

The procedures used above applies to all the graphics files contained within a livery folder.

I hope this tutorial on editing liveries has been both informative and interesting.

Regards.

Paul Mort