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Showing results for tags 'repaint'.
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91 downloads
no screenshot no readme its just a repaint dont use it in PMDG thats it lol -
18 downloads
following my same work on SSP, I want to bring that paint to 4K texture using CaptainSim's Model So here you go, a Rendition of that JA622J wearing JAL special sticker....I hope you know that from the title. Install using CS's ACES tool Requires "GE model Expansion Pack" since its CF6, 4+4 doors model -
![More information about "[FS9+]SkySpirit(now TDS) Boeing 777-346 Repaint : Japan Airlines JA8941 "2010 Doraemon Jet""](//content.invisioncic.com/i324524/monthly_2023_12/2023-12-30_23-14-20-672.thumb.png.b5a55591b69343f2e3ff1461b8944384.png)
Version 1.0.0
57 downloads
Sticker for the airing of the Doraemon the Movie 30th. Textures only, no model included For use with (-300 no ER Pratt & Whitney Engine variant) I will no longer write sim version in title anymore since it's specified on file section. -
![More information about "[FS9+]SkySpirit (now TDS) Boeing 767-346ER Repaint : Japan Airlines JA622J "Dorajet '17 ""](//content.invisioncic.com/i324524/monthly_2023_08/2023-8-12_7-34-44-573.thumb.jpg.cd9771487cc470e2bdfd719703697533.jpg)
Version 1.1
172 downloads
Sticker for airing of Doraemon the Movie 38th Textures only, no model included. (Configuration : 4 door no winglet GE engines) -
![More information about "[FS9+]SkySpirit[now TDS] Boeing 777-3D7 Repaint : Thai Airways Intl HS-TKF Special "Royal Barge Suphannahong" Khun Lahan Sai"](//content.invisioncic.com/i324524/monthly_2023_12/2023-12-30_23-40-49-264.thumb.png.175e3af27c8f39a131d6b1fbb96d9d34.png)
Version 1.0.0
58 downloads
TG's Special livery in commemoration of HM King Rama X reign in 2019 textures only, no model included configuration : -300 no ER with Rolls Royce engines with proper permission to upload from original painter at FB Page : Airbrush Simulator -
95 downloads
TL;DR can be used from FS2004 and ahead Add this to title : +A4000 +TF92000 +D00 for correct winglet and options -
![More information about "[FSX+]Thomas Ruth's Airbus A340-541 Repaint : Thai Airways Intl. HS-TLA "Khun Chiang Kham""](//content.invisioncic.com/i324524/monthly_2023_12/2023-8-17_8-54-15-718.thumb.jpg.8f283586a79b8e2464cca5a41d8a67de.jpg)
Version 1.0.0
25 downloads
Texture only as always. Once upon a time, this thing was used for US flight from Thailand. Well, it's now resting silently at U-Taphao Intl in favor of newer B77Ws -
![More information about "[FS9+]Thomas Ruth DC-10 Repaint : Thai Airways Intl. (Speedline) HS-TMC Khun Sri Ubon"](//content.invisioncic.com/i324524/monthly_2023_12/2023-12-14_20-1-10-733.thumb.png.faabcc59e9d21ca2e071f16bbca53dae.png)
Version 1.0.0
20 downloads
Only textures are included, no models. -
Version 1.0.0
52 downloads
Repaint, AI flight plan and ADE airport files relating to the TAG Airlines C208B base in Guatemala City. An HD targa file is included for users of FSX and P3D. See readme file for complete details. By Doug Roth-
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- ai traffic
- fs2004
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Version 1.1
651 downloads
FS2004 University of Illinois (U of I) C-45H N9887Z/52-10603/AF-533. This repaint is from a photo of a 1953 University of Illinois C-45H, N9887Z, that my great-grandfather co-piloted in 1960 with the Illinois State Water Survey, doing thunderstorm research. This repaint requires Cliff Presley's re-packaged simTECH Flight Design's freeware Beech 18 which you can find here. Repaint by Joshua B. Nyhus. -
Version 1.1
446 downloads
FS2002 North American P-51 "Black Magic". A fictional air racer repaint. Requires the Reno Air Racing P-51 package by Roger Dial and associates, which can be found here. Repaint by Joshua B. Nyhus.-
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- north american
- p-51
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Version 1.0.a
43 downloads
This is the nd in a serious of repaints for countries that flew the North American T-28 in their military. Ten T-28As were ordered by the Batista regime but were never delivered owing to an arms embargo, although at least one T-28 seems to have been acquired at some stage which was put on display at a museum at Playa Girón. This version represents that aircraft. T28 Cuba AF.zip -
Version 1.0.0
45 downloads
After extensive enhancement work on the paint kit I present this repaint for the Mike Cronin Aero Commander 500S AI model - 4_ga_aero_commander_500s.zip see readme for file information. I did not develop a lightmap for this file. For FS2004. -
Hello amazing repainters, I would absolutely love if someone could do the following repaints for the following airlines' and aircraft for FSX; - Vistara B737-800 (for Default FSX B737-800) - Spicejet/9W Hybrid (for Default FSX B737-800) https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.flightradar24.com%2Fdata%2Faircraft%2Fvt-sys&psig=AOvVaw1xzw7mZWEOFDEC2HsdFmFC&ust=1616853296841000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAIQjRxqFwoTCKjf5YWOzu8CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAI - Air India A321 (for Default FSX A321) N.B - Could the respective repainter please also paint the default FSX A321's IAE styled engines with the livery's engine paintjob too to the best of their capabilities? Thanks! And if someone could please repaint the Nepal Airlines A330-200, that would be amazing! (for the FSX Tom Ruth A330-200) I know I'm asking for a lot but if anyone could do any of these repaints I would be absolutely grateful. Thank you in advance! :cool:
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How To Create Your Own MSFS 2020 Liveries by vLegion_ Introduction Past versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator have had vast numbers of freeware repaints created for them, and there's now no reason to think that MSFS 2020 will be any different. However, the techniques for creating liveries/skins are new and will have to be learned by those interested. vLegion_ has created several videos to help you get started and has allowed us to present them here. Hopefully this will get your creativity going. Please remember to share your repaints with us though the FlightSim.Com file library. MSFS Livery Tutorial Hi guys, I have made a video on how to create your own liveries in MSFS 2020. This has been a highly requested video in my discord so here it is. I kept it as short as possible. Please comment if I can assist further, I will try my best to assist. Download Template (Does not include DDS editor) Download NVIDIA Texture Tools Download Liveries Pack (Official Pack Download) How To Installation: Open the downloaded file Extract to a location of your choosing Open your game files folder Default Locations are: Steam // %appdata%\Roaming\Microsoft Flight Simulator\Packages\Community\ Microsoft / Game Pass: Go to %localappdata% (search using windows search), then Packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_RANDOMLETTERS\LocalCache\Packages\Community Install the files from the GAME READY Folder into the Community folder. If you have already installed the mega pack, then you will need to update your Layout.json // Located in AppData\Roaming\Microsoft Flight Simulator\Packages\Community\liveries-a320 && Aircraft.cfg // Located in AppData\Roaming\Microsoft Flight Simulator\Packages\Community\liveries-a320\SimObjects\Airplanes\Asobo_A320_NEOas explained in the video. Full readme available in download, too long for description. Editing Install DDS Editor if you're using Photoshop(available here). Open the four provided PSD's Alter Image / Colors as Required To Change color click the panel in the right that says PAINT HERE Use the provided guidelines to assist with the creation of your skin, make sure to hide them when you're finished so they're not in your final export. Save file to the directory of your template as DDS using Ctrl + Shift + S Launch Game Enjoy your new skin! vLegion_ My Youtube Channel My Discord MSFS Livery Mega Pack Discord -
Does anyone know if there is a 29 (BATUS) flight Army Air Corps repaint (Green,sand/hemp and dayglo scheme) for the UKMIL Gazelle AH1? If not anyone fancy doing one?
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Quite a simple repaint but that's what I needed to get back into it. And yes, it's another freighter screenshot post from me. Sorry!:D I hope you like it. I shall probably upload it to the library soon. It's for the Vistaliners B734. Happy flying!!
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Hi guys, Was just wondering if anyone would be kind enough and interested in doing a Congo Airways repaint for the PA CFM A320. I have attached a photo which is not my own:). Many thanks.
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Repainting in Microsoft Flight Simulator - Part Three By JanKees Blom Part Three... In the last chapter of the previous tutorial, we finished completing all the paintwork, which was relatively easy. Our next task though, is how we go about making our new repaint into something we can fly around with in FSX (or P3D). As I explained in the previous tutorial, all the texture folders contain four different texture files, called; C47_1_T.dds, C-47_1_T_Spec.dds, C47_2_T.dds and lastly, C-47_2_T_Spec.dds, with each one consisting of a 'normal' and 'alpha' part. The paint we have so far, corresponds to the normal part of both C47_1_T and C47_2_T, combined in one file. This combination effect is a peculiarity of this model (you do find it in a few others, but usually each different texture file has its own paint kit file). Here we will have to separate the two, but that will come later. First, we need to produce the spec and respective alpha textures. To do this, I use a relatively simple method, that takes very little time. If you look in the paint kit, you'll see there is already a layer called 'alpha'. Most good paint kits will come with both, base alpha and spec textures, sometimes within one file, sometimes though, developers (e.g. A2A) use separate files. Can you remember what the alpha of the normal file is used for? That's right; it controls the amount of reflections! So, bare, shiny aluminum will have strong reflections, while matte camouflage paint will have (preferably) no reflections; everything else sits between the two. Strong reflections need to be dark, no reflections, white. Image 1 below shows the alpha layer visible. Image 1 As you can see, there are lots of dark textures. These will be for the shiny bare aluminum parts of the repaint, while all the white part will be dull. So, what parts of the repaint need to be dull? Well, the wheels obviously, but also the majority of our new paintwork. However, look at the wings; our aircraft doesn't have deicer boots on the leading edges, so we will need to make those dark! To get rid of them, I've used the magic wand tool to select the white parts on the deicing boots; copied them into a new layer, and then gave that layer a dark overlay, so the leading edges of the tail and wings will shiny. As for our paintwork, I gave that group an overlay as well, making it white, and I made the layers with the wheel textures, etc. invisible (Image 2): Image 2 The result of this is that the white parts will be dull in the sim, and the dark parts will be shiny. When performing this technique, I usually use the same alpha for the spec file as well. There the alpha controls the sharpness of the reflections, with black being sharp reflections (for the metal), and white giving blurry reflections (for the paint). All we need now are the spec files. These control the colors of the reflections. You can experiment a lot with this, as some people prefer just gray-scales, while others go for brighter colors. The fact is the possibilities are truly endless. For the C-47, I have used a toned down version of the basic textures and the paint I applied. However, I have also added a metal-like texture, which to my mind enhances the nature of the bare metal, and set this to about 25% transparency. For the base layer and also the paint layer, I play around with the transparency of the overlay I used for the alpha. This I usually set between 45 and 30%. Once done, I then try to set the layers up in such a way that I can change between normal, alpha and spec, with just a few mouse clicks. The end result should then look like the image below (Image 3): Image 3 Now we can start saving the textures as bmp files. With this particular model (where you still have to divide between #1 and #2 texture files) the best way is by making the canvas size smaller. Go to the top menu bar of your editor, click on 'image' and in the drop-down menu you'll see 'canvas size'. Select this option and once done, you'll see a menu where you can adjust the canvas. Set your canvas to 2048x2048 pixels, and click on the arrow pointing to the left, so as to select only the front half of the texture (Image 4). Image 4 If you want to select the other half, you would simply click on the right arrow. Click 'OK' in the dialogue box and you'll notice that you've ended up with only the left half of the textures corresponding to C-47_1_T . You can now save three textures, the normal as C-47_1_T.bmp, the spec as C-47_1_spec_T.bmp and the alpha as C47_1_alpha.bmp (Image 5). Image 5 Once you have saved the first batch, go back to the original textures by changing the canvas size to 4096x2048 (while clicking on the left arrow), and repeat everything you did for the other half of the textures, naming those files C-47_2_T etc. You should now have six bmp files; two for the normal, two for the spec, and two for the alpha. Now we need to combine these files and turn them into a DDS format. For this we use DXTBmp a handy little freeware program: http://www.mwgfx.co.uk/programs/dxtbmp.htm With DXTBmp open, I can load up the file C-47_1_T, and in the top right corner, add the alpha, by clicking on the 'import alpha channel' button. Image 6 shows the effect. Image 6 If you look carefully at the image above, you'll notice that the normal texture is present in the main window, while the alpha is shown the top right window pane. Please note, that just below the alpha, you'll also see two clickable buttons below the title 'Mipmaps'. These should NOT be checked! If they are, then it will lead to blurry textures in the sim. OK, before we can save everything as a DDS file, there is one more thing to do; we need to flip the DDS files so they are upside down in respect to the BMP files (this is a peculiarity of using dds files, if you use bmp files, as in FS2004, they have to remain right-side up). For this, there is a very convenient button at the bottom left corner, with arrows pointing vertically. By clicking this button, both the normal and alpha are flipped vertically. With this done, we can finally save the file as a DDS file: 'file/save as/DDS texture', and save it as a DXT5 texture. Do the same for the spec (using the same alpha) and the #2 textures. If everything is done correctly, you should end up with four DDS files. These will all go into the final texture folder. Now go to your FSX location in Windows Explorer and find the C-47 folder under 'Aircraft' just like you would when installing a repaint. On a side note, I usually make a copy of the texture folders, so that I also have the texture.cfg folder copied. Rename the folder to, in this case: texture.JK_Adastra_VH-AGU, and drop the new files into it, overwriting whatever were there. With this done, all we need to do now is adapt the aircraft.cfg file, adding our new paint with something like this (changes from other entries in italics): [fltsim.26] Title = Douglas C-47 - Adastra Sim = Douglas_DC3_V1.4 Model = C47_2 Panel = Sound = Texture = JK_Adastra_VH-AGU kb_checklists = C-47_check kb_reference = C-47_ref atc_id = VH-AGU ui_manufacturer = DOUGLAS ui_type = C-47 ui_variation = VH-AGU ui_typerole = Twin Engine Prop ui_createdby = Microsoft Corporation description = whatever you want here And that, as they say, is that! We can now go flying! Here's the result with some earlier Adastra repaints I made a while ago (Image 7): Image 7 And again, this time airborne over central Australia (Image 8): Image 8 Read other articles in this series -
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Repainting in Microsoft Flight Simulator - Part Two By JanKees Blom Part Two... In the previous tutorial I mentioned we needed to pick a C-47 to paint. The good thing about the C-47, is that they built about a zillion of the things, and they lasted forever, so in that respect, we're rather spoilt for choice. Since the object of this article is to explain most of the ins and outs of repainting, I suggest we try our hand at something that is not too difficult. If you remember, in Part One, I mentioned that I am a geologist, and in the past, have worked quite extensively in Australia, which still has a profound effect on me, as I prefer to do my sim-flying in Oz. OK, yes, I do go to other places at times, but my preferred 'go to' place has always been Australia. I have always worked on the ground, but geological research is often done from the air as well. Several companies perform aerial survey work (the French Geological Survey operated a fleet of B-17's!), one Australian company, which flew a wide variety of aircraft was Adastra Aerial Surveys. You could say this brings three of my passions together: geology, aviation and Australia. These aircraft were used to explore the vast open areas of Australia, and really earned their money! One such aircraft was a C-47 with the registration VH-AGU. Image 1 Looks simple enough to paint, right? Well, we'll see. In the past, I have created repaints for other aircraft flown by Adastra Aerial Surveys. These include the Hudson and Catalina, and if I add the C-47, that makes a nice trio! The first thing I always do when I begin a project, is to collect as many photographs, plus other pieces of information as I can on the subject. In the case of VH-AGU, I had well over a dozen pictures, in both color and black and white, plus a fair bit of background information, obtained from the web site aussieairliners.org. This was more than enough to make a decent repaint! One problem though is the tail boom, used for aeromagnetic surveys, as seen in the image above, but since the model I'm using does not have a boom like that, it will have to be omitted. Let's study the aircraft for a moment. The aircraft is mainly bare metal, but that's the base color in the paint kit, so that is fine. What else do we see? A black anti-glare panel in front of the cockpit, a red outline to the door, and the text, 'Adastra Aerial Surveys' and the registration VH-AGU on both sides of the fuselage. In all, not too complicated, although the font for those texts is not very straightforward. For weird fonts, one can try sites like dafont, or whatthefont, to see if you can find the right font, or one that is close. Unfortunately I was unsuccessful at both these sites for the Adastra text. When this happens, it usually means you have to draw the letters yourself. This might seem like a daunting prospect, but if you have a good example, it's not that hard (one of the reasons why you should collect as many images as possible on your chosen subject!) Ideally, you want your image to be as perpendicular to the text as possibly. Image 2 With your image chosen, open the image in Photoshop (or similar), cut the part with the registration out, rotate it so it becomes horizontal, and make it as large as you can or need. Here's what it looks like in PS (Image 3). As you can see, in this example, I've added a white rectangle, which works like a ruler and gives me a straight line as a reference point. The next step is to go through your available fonts, and luckily enough, I was able to find one which was quite close; a WW2 RAF font that I downloaded in the past. The only thing that's different in this font, is the hyphen and part of the cross bar of the letter G. To rectify this, I made the changes with rectangles, in the same color as the rest of the registration. Personally I found this was close enough, as the differences are very small. If you look closely in the layers menu, you'll see what I mean, as it now consists of three layers; the letters and two rectangles. Tip: Usually I create a group with the drop-down menu to the right of 'paths' and park those layers in there so I can use them as one item. I do not rasterize these layers and make them into one, because like this, I can still scale the registration without any loss of resolution. Image 3 So, the registration was easy to do; but what about the 'Adastra' lettering? Unfortunately, I was not able to find a good font for the lettering, so this meant I had to try other means. I suppose if I had wanted to make life hard for myself, I could have used the letters on the image above, but they weren't really ideal as they were not large enough. So what did I do? Well, do you remember I said to collect as much information on your subject as possible? If you look at the first page of the Adastra site, you'll see a beautiful example of the text we're after, and if you right-click on the text, you will see it's a very nice GIF image. I was in luck as I could use the image directly! With the paint kit opened, I created a group for our paint job, and pasted the GIF image in (Image 4). In the original GIF and on the photos, we can see that the main text has actually two shadows; one in white and below that, one in grey. If we want to use the GIF, we will have to get rid of the white rectangle around the text, but keep the white shadow. In Photoshop, I know of two ways in which to lose the white: The first is to set the layer to 'multiply' in the layer menu, but if we use this method, we lose the white shadow as well (no good). The other method is to use the eraser. If you use the 'magic' eraser, you lose the shadow, and with the normal eraser, you have to trace all of the letters. To make matters worse, the GIF is relatively small, so the result would probably not have been very satisfactory. Having tried both methods, and unhappy with the results, I decided it was easier to simply draw the letters myself, with the GIF as an example. This may sound like a lot of work, but in reality it's not that bad. One advantage to doing it this way, is that you end up with a vector image, not a raster, which you can scale as much as you like, and can make copies in different colors for the shadows. Image 4 Having enlarged the GIF to the size required, I set it to multiply (gets rid of the white) and started drawing the black letters with the pen tool. Straight corners were made with a simple click of the mouse, rounded corners by clicking and holding the mouse button while stretching the corner (you can always adjust later with the white arrow tool). A useful thing to remember, is that zooming in on the pixel scale, makes it much easier to draw the letters. One thing to take into account is that if you have to make letters with an opening in the them, like the A, D and R for instance, you draw them in two parts, otherwise the letters will be completely massive and closed. So in the case of the A for example, I first draw A and then add the cross bar in a different layer. I'm sure there are other ways, but this works for me. Image 5 Once all the letters have been drawn in black, they are grouped again. Make a copy of that group and give that group a white color. Next, place the white layer below the black one, and move it one pixel down and one to the left. You now have a white shadow. Do the same for the grey shadow (Image 6). Not too bad, don't you agree? In all this took me about 45 minutes, so it's not too bad to draw your own letters. So what else? Ah yes, the outline for the door. For outlines like this I use a simple trick. Again using the pen tool, I draw the inner edge of the outline which will give me a massive form (Image 6). Image 6 Here I have clicked on the layer, in the layer menu on the right, which in turn, gives me a new menu to edit this layer. I clicked on the 'Stroke',option and this allows me to give an outline to my original drawing, in this case 5 pixels wide, and in red, just like I want it. You can then get rid of the blue by clicking on 'OK' in the submenu, and setting the 'fill' for the layer to 0%. This will then only show the red outline. That leaves just the anti-glare panel on the nose. Luckily, that is already included in the paint kit, so that is easy. Of course, I still need to paint the other side of the fuselage, and add registrations on the wings, but that is all relatively simple, just a few mouse clicks. For the other side, you simply copy the paintwork for the side you've already done. This is achieved by copying the layers ('duplicate layers' in the layers drop-down menu), and flipping them horizontally in the 'edit' drop down list on the top menu bar. You can do the same for the registration on the wings. If you need to scale them, you can also do this by using the 'edit/free transform path'. If you then place your paintwork in the right spot, it will look like this: Image 7 Black anti-glare panel, registrations on the fuselage and the wings, Adastra text above the windows on both sides, that's it for this paint! Of course, other repaints may take far more work, especially those with more complex paintwork, but the principle remains the same. You just add different layers until you reach the desired result. This is a relative simple repaint, for a model that is also relatively easy to paint. Not all repaints for the C-47 are this easy though. Something like the camouflage repaint (Image is a bit more complicated, if only because the camouflage has to line up correctly. So our painting is done! Next up, we'll make texture files, including alpha and spec files, and we'll see how this paint looks in the sim...stay tuned! Read other articles in this series -
Repainting in Microsoft Flight Simulator By JanKees Blom Repainting for FSX, is that difficult? Well, no, not really. I've been doing it for almost 10 years now, and although my first attempts gave me lots of headaches and took forever, I have now reached a stage where I do it purely for entertainment, and can still produce acceptable repaints very quickly. In these last 10 years I have produced well over a 1000 repaints, for nearly all kinds of aircraft, from GA via tubeliners and jets to my favorite subject, WW2 vintage aircraft. Recently I was asked if I would be interested in writing an article for FlightSim.Com, explaining some of the ins and outs of what it takes to produce repaints, and I thought, why not? I invented the wheel myself when it comes to repainting, so why not explain the principles and some tricks to others? Who knows, they might be inspired to start repainting themselves, and discover that it can be fun flying around with something you created yourself for the sim. Let's start with a bit of a background: My name is JanKees Blom, and I'm a Dutchman living in Belgium. I teach geology at a university in the Netherlands, so I tend to be on the road a lot between Belgium and the Netherlands, and elsewhere in Europe for field trips with my students. However, I do find myself sitting in front of a computer on a regular basis to paint aircraft, although I admit it is slowing down a bit. I started repainting when I was cleaning out my house, back in 2007, and found a box containing a plastic model of a Mustang (anyone else built the 1/24 Airfix kit?) and thought that it would be nice to fly that aircraft in MSFS. I had at that time just bought the Shockwave (now A2A) P-51D for FS2004. It took me a few weeks, discovering everything more or less myself, but in the end I was flying 'Ridge Runner' in the simulator, and felt very proud. Needless to say, I didn't stop there, but continued painting more P-51's and over time diversified to other aircraft. I started uploading them on various sites, before settling on OZx, and that is where you will find the bulk of my paints (well over a 1000 at the last count). Clearly, it can't be that difficult if even I, a geologist with a full time job, and who travels a lot, can produce so many. So how do I do it? Well first you need the right software, and second, you need to know what you are doing. So let's start with the software: you will need a graphics program, like Photoshop, PaintShop Pro, or the freeware Gimp, but even Illustrator can be very useful. Actually, I think I created my first 500 paints with Illustrator before discovering Photoshop (PS). Now I know that most people can't afford to purchase Photoshop, so believe me when I say, PaintShop Pro or Gimp work perfectly well too. What you need is a program which works with layers, and both of these programs do. Another piece of software I use is DXTBMP, a very handy little freeware tool which you can download here: http://www.mwgfx.co.uk/programs/dxtbmp.htm I use it to convert my textures to the dds files FSX understands, and to combine the normal and alpha textures (more on those later). That's it software-wise, so, with these two freeware programs, there's no reason why you shouldn't get started and begin repainting! So on to the second part: knowing what you are doing Now, I don't want to turn this into a Photoshop manual, so I'll limit myself to making textures for FSX, and assume that you will find your way around the graphics program yourself (though you will see some techniques and tricks in this article). I thought the best way to explain the whole process was by giving you an example, and for this, I have chosen a freeware model that I really like, which is the C-47 by Manfred Jahn. If you don't have the latest version, with the vintage cockpit, download it here (douglas_c-47_v3_12_beta.zip). It is a masterpiece, payware quality for free (who can resist that). When it comes to repainting aircraft, there are basically three ways to go: By adapting the original textures (can be done, but is really hard, let's not go there now) By using white textures (Carenado and Alabeo aircraft, maybe we'll talk about that later) By using a paint kit (by far the easiest way, which we will do here) If a paint kit is available (the original textures are available in a file containing layers for the different parts of the textures), it makes it relatively easy to create new paints. The idea is that, in your graphics program (I'll refer to it PS from now on), you can place certain layers BELOW the paintwork, and others ABOVE. For instance, you could have the metal colors below your paintwork, but the panel lines and rivets above. This is why working with layers is so important. Most paint kits come with a series of PSD files (Photoshop extension), but both Gimp and PaintShop Pro can open these too. For Manfred's C-47, there is an excellent paint kit available by Gordon Madison and if you open it in PS, it looks like this: You can clearly recognize the shape of both sides of the fuselage and other bits and pieces like the wings and engines. Other models may have a far more complicated layout of the textures, or use multiple files, making life a lot more difficult. Aerosoft and Carenado are notoriously difficult in this respect; A2A though, produces nice and easy layouts in their paint kits. This is why I wanted to start with this C-47 (paint kits don't come much easier than this). If you look closely, you'll notice the different layers in the bottom right corner, including some containing paints I created earlier (RAAF FD-D to VH-BAA). Below those, you see a layer called 'spec', and two marked 'Service skin', giving you two types of metal skin. The top one shows two more layers, one marked 'alpha' and one marked 'texture'. The one called 'texture' is what you see; those are the metal colors. Above my paints, you will see things like 'rivets and panels', 'details', 'wear' and 'mesh'. These are layers that contain the artwork for, yes, rivets, and details like prop blades, the interior, and the dirt you'll see. The layer 'mesh', which is now not visible, will show you the exact layout of the textures and is a very useful layer! So what is this layer 'spec' and 'alpha' I hear you say? For this I suggest you take a look in any of the texture folders of the C-47 (simobjects/aircraft). Every texture folder contains something like this: There are four DDS texture files, all with similar names, but as you can see, there are two versions, such as: C47_1_T and C-47_1_T_Spec. The C-47_1_T contains the textures, while the spec file controls the color and the type of reflections. Strictly speaking, you don't need them for a repaint (FS2004 did not have them), but they give an extra depth to your repaint, and they are not difficult to make, so keep them in the back of your mind. What about the color of the reflections and where do the reflections come from? Well, they are caused by what we call the alpha channel, which is part of the main textures. If you have DXTBMP installed, open one of the C47_1_T textures and you'll see something like this: The main image is part of the textures, as you can see from above, although upside down (we'll come to that later), but do you notice the little image in the top right corner? That is the alpha channel, which contains information about which part of the texture should be shiny (the black parts) and which are not (the white parts). So if we want to make a paint of an aircraft with partly shiny bare metal, and part matte paint, the metal parts should be dark in the alpha channel and the painted parts light. This too is NOT difficult to make as I will show you (BTW, the spec file also has an alpha channel that controls the sharpness of the reflections). So, in order to create a repaint, for each texture file, we need to create the following: The 'normal': the actual textures that you will see. The alpha: which parts are reflective and which are not. The spec file: a file that determines the colors of the reflections. The spec alpha: which parts are fuzzy (painted areas, light), and which ones are sharp reflections (metal areas, dark). For the C-47, with two different textures, this means eight files in all (unless you don't care about spec files, then only four). The main effort will be for the normal files, the rest is easy...I promise! Now all we need to decide is which C-47 we want to paint. To be continued in Part 2... Read other articles in this series -
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