Editing textures. Any experts out there?

Hi All,

 

I am trying to edit textures in the IRIS PC-24. The plane came with a "paint kit" which is 3 .psd files. The files are blank and all white. What I do is:

1. Open the .psd in Gimp

2. Edit it to my liking

3. Merge all layers (otherwise the file cannot be saved as .dds)

4. Rotate the image by 180 deg and flip horizontally - for some reason the paint kit is right way around but the standard .dds texture files are upside down so I suppose that's the way they need to be saved

5. Save as .dds

 

When I load the aircraft it is all black with no textures on it.

I made sure the file location and name is correct.

 

So then I tried another way:

Editing existing .dds textures which came with the plane and work.

 

1. Open .dds in gimp

2. Edit

3. Save as .dds overwriting the existing file (I made a backup)

 

That seems to work about 20% of the time and when it doesn't black aircraft again. I tried everything I can think of by now.

 

I run Steam Eddition

I don't have the aircraft in question but I can comment on point 4 above .

Rotating your paint 180 degrees is not required , just that the textures are flipped horizontally . By the way , this is not always the case , the Aerosoft Airbus A320 / 321 textures are just saved as DDS without flipping BUT the A318 / 319 do require this .

 

John

You only need to flip the texture vertically & not 180 degrees horizontially, I use GIMP & find it better to save as a 32 bit bmp & open the texture in DXTbmp add alpha channel & save as dds DXT5.

Most texture files have an alpha channel.

it is part of the file.

 

You can open the file in the progr Dxtbmp

there you see the image and the alpha side by side.

 

Youcan send the image to your editor (Gimp) and edit. Then save as 24 bit bmp.

Then use Dxt.bmp to load the original texture file, and replace the image witht the one you made and saved. Using "Import New Image" function.

(Be sure to keep a clean copy of the original texture folder as well.)

 

You then save the result as .dds (I use .dds with DXT5 usually.)

 

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I usually start this off by making a copy of the original folder and placing on the desktop.

I then rename that folder to the name I want to eventually have it.

There I do the editing.

And I add it to the aircraft when finished. As a new extra texture.

The original texture (folder) I keep as well. If I want to disable it I do that via the aircraft.cfg file.

 

For safe keeping I usually copy the original file twice in that new folder. One as:

-0- orig.dds.bak

(that's the permanent backup.)

 

One as:

-0- orig.dds

(So I'm able to have a look at the original to compare.

 

The original filename one I use during editing.

 

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If done with that edit, but much later I want to do more editing on it I:

save the created one as:

-1- description.dds

 

And the new series of edits happens on the original filename one again.

 

That way the different versions of the files end up in the folder organised in order of creation. (because of the

-0-

-1-

-2-

etc.

 

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Dxtbmp is freeware. Use google to find.

Thank you John. I just tried flipping but not rotating. Still no good. Maybe it's another one of many drawbacks in the PC-24 because I tried adding some graphics to another plane and that works.

This is why I love this forum. Worked flawlessly. Thank You!!!

Once I create something decent I'll share it with you guys.

My error , I just continued to use the term you used in the original post , the textures are of course flipped " Vertically " .

 

John

Thank you for all your help. I gave it a try. Some rough edges and probably not very artistic but here it is.