Boeing 747-8f by SkySpirit and Project Open Sky.

Having just seen two Boeing 747-8f aircraft visiting my local airport on the same day I felt inspired to add the type to FS2004 back at home. So I came onto Flightsim.com where there are two Freeware offerings available - Project Open Sky and SkySpirit with both available in Air Bridge Cargo colours.

 

Well ... the bobbins I have experienced began when I took a look at the Project Open Sky Boeing 747-8f externally as it was taxiing to go. This was when I noticed that it had no cockpit and that the cockpit windows were just an open space! Though the download does include a full set of textures the interior was completely missing. Enough I thought and so I offloaded that version. Five minutes later the SkySpirit Boeing 747-8f had reached the same location.

 

All well until I looked at the aircraft externally whilst it was in flight. I thought I noticed something unusual so I zoomed the view in closer ... Sure as s**t I had seen an anomaly. The aircraft was part transparent and I could look straight through it!

 

So be aware of these shortcomings if you too are on the lookout for a Boeing 747-8f for FS2004. I don't know if the same problems exist with the Boeing 747-8i passenger version which both Freeware producers have on offer. Would be interesting to find out.

I came across a very, very transparent b747 (AI traffic) the other day - first time I'd seen that. It was like a ghost.

 

But it's really easy to fix - you just need to lighten the fuselage bitmap alpha channel using a tool like DXTBmp (or replace it with a plain white one) and some kind of image editor - I use Photoshop (CS2 available as a legitimate free download) , but any other basic freeware one would probably do. My ghost 747 was fixed this way in less than a minute.

Martin, Hi and I hope you are well.

 

Thank you for this advice and I will give this a try. Sounds as if it will fix the Skyspirit anomaly I discovered but as for the POSKY missing cockpit / interior goodness knows!

 

Thanks Again :o)

The transparency can also be found in scenery objects such as hangars, and as a scenery maker I have found it to be caused by human error, namely by me using for a part of the building a texture that is not DXT3 and is instead just plain 32 bit. So check the plane's textures out.

Roger, Hi and I hope you too are well.

 

Thank you for providing the insight you have done into texture transparency issues on FS2004. I am currently investigating the problem regarding the SkySpirit version of the Boeing 747-8f in a bid to rectify what I have discovered about it.

 

I hope something can be done to fix the issue as otherwise it is a good rendition of this aircraft for FS2004.