AI Liveries are White Faded or Blank

Hello there, this is my first post on the forum so please be gentle with me.

 

I have been working on AI And a problem I come across every now and again is a livery that is either

Completely transparent

or

Incredibly pale

 

I am not really sure what could be causing this to happen or if there is a way to fix it. I noticed the glitch happens to liveries in .DDS form, though most other liveries in .DDS with the same settings work without an issue.

 

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I've had problems like the 2nd pic with the "faded out" look. In my case it turned out to be that the alpha channel was the wrong color when I converted the paintjob to DDS format and it was actually reflective qualities of the surface. I THINK I loaded the alpha into the paint program and lightened it a bit, then merged it back into the texture file. It's been so long that I can't remember and I don't paint em anymore. I wasn't that good at it anyway, but I got lucky with a few.

I also seem to recall that I also ran into this problem when I changed over to DX10 and there was a setting somewhere in Steve's DX Fixer program that corrected it.

I apologize for not being more help. It's just been a long time since I did any painting on anything other than styrene plastic models.

Nowadays the bane of my existence is yellow acrylic paint. That's a problem on 1930's US Navy planes! Yellow everywhere!

PS- Now that I look closer, that first pic isn't transparent. It's a full on reflection of surrounding scenery. It's like your alpha channel is completely black. Try a nice gray alpha and I'd be willing to bet that'll fix it. But save the original plane! Copy the texture files to a new folder and name it something memorable so you can add the newly painted textures to an ai plane and make it fly into a podunk little airport with no other traffic to "test fly" it.

 

Try this link to The Painters workshop for a better description:

https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/showthread.php?205336-Editing-Alpha-in-PhotoShop

Edited July 23, 2019 by Hossfly68

Further to Hossfly's good advice, some models have reflection built-in, and don't need an Alpha channel in the texture file at all. The first pic looks a model with built-in reflection AND an Alpha channel in the texture.

Indeed I remember that for instance the good old AIA models used to have a reflective and a non-reflective model version of each airplane.

 

Jorgen