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How To Be A Repainter Part Seven Uploading a File And Some History After The Release By Alejandro Hurtado (13 September 2006) Here is the pain and suffering. I remember something similar when I read "The Divine Comedy". Why? Because when you finish a plane and release it, the plane is no more your plane. It's just one more of thousands of files in a database, and you must rely that it will defend itself. How? Well, we will see it soon. But first, for "rookie painters", what is needed for a successful upload? First at all, the modeler's permission. It must be included for the reasons I wrote on the second part of this series. It is usually included on a file called something like "readme.txt" Second, a file name. Some web sites request that the name of the file has to be no more than 8 characters long, So you must "compress" the model and identification of your plane in such a little space. I use the first four characters for model identification: d328, b727, p51d and so on. The next two characters are "ah": Alejandro Hurtado. And the last two are just a sequential number. So, my Boeing 737-200 from Avior Airlines, the same that I boarded few years ago, is called B737AH49.ZIP. My very detailed Dornier 328 from United Express is called D328AH75.ZIP. But, if you are going to use my method, please change the "AH" by your own initials! Third, the file_id.diz file. (Full details can be found here.). It's a text file telling the plane's name, modeler, repainter, version of Flight Simulator and a brief description of the repaint. And if you want your file to be downloaded, try to do it well. It's not the same to say "Boeing 727 prototypes" as it is to say "Do you know how many and how were painted the prototypes of the Boeing 727? And where are they today?". The second is a more attractive and interesting description, and tells to the "just fly" simmers that you know what are you talking about. This description must be attractive, short and yet include all the relevant words that a simmer will search. For example, if you had made Finnair Santa Claus MD-11, include the words "special Christmas" in the text, or nobody will find it. Let's say that this is the presentation card of your artwork, or the first weapon to make this file to success. Fourth: the attached picture. It's the second weapon you must give to your file for self-defense. You must include a picture good enough to use as wallpaper, but so simple that it can be understood and liked with the small size that the web sites must use to publish it. I have a wonderful picture of a B727 flying inside mountains with an Alaskan thunderstorm, but if you reduce it, then you can't say to which airline it belongs. Fifth: Another obligatory file is the installation instructions. It changes depending if you made a "textures only" file or a "ready to fly" file. It usually is a text file called "readme.txt". You don't need to reinvent the wheel, just read the installation instructions of another plane and copy them to yours. Plus, you can include in this archive any other information you believe is important: plane handling, airline information, history of the real one, etc. Sixth, the results of your work: if you made a "textures only" file, a folder called texture.x; if you made a "ready to fly" file, include the four folders (panel, texture, sound and model) and two files (aircraft.cfg and model_of_plane.air) that the plane needs to work. Of course, there can be an effects folder, a gauges folder, and another textures folders. It's not so difficult because all these extra folders must have been included in the original plane. I'm not being more specific because, remember, there are manuals where you can read the detailed specifications. (FlightSim.Com offers tutorials on installing complete aircraft here and repaints here.) So, once you made a zip file with all the previous parts included, you can upload this. Just pick your favorite web site, hopefully www.flightsim.com and another one if you want. There are sites where your artwork can have a score, there are sites where the downloads are counted, there are national sites and there are dead sites. And here is where we the repainters begin to suffer. When you released your repaint and a flightsimmer says "beautiful plane but slow". Well, thanks for the beautiful, that's what I intended, but a PBY-5A has a "never exceed speed (Vne)" of 173 kts. It can't be supersonic! Sometimes one of your better creations receives a bad evaluation due to installation mistakes. Sometimes the web site where your file is stored suffers a crash and all the counters are reset. But not everything is bad. Many days you receive emails from people who like your creations. And from any place of the world! You can have friends from Panama, Austria, Spain, UK, Aruba... A few days ago I met an air hostess and she was interested in me! (Well, being a blond man with green eyes helps a lot.) And many of the feedback and ratings are wonderful. Thanks, thanks, thanks. Another reward you can receive is when you do a search on the Internet and find your files on other web sites. It means that someone downloaded your artwork, liked it and uploaded again to another place. Sometimes a virtual airline selects one of your planes for its fleet. It is better for me that a 10/10 rating, but not better than a email. Of course, it can happen only if you do a good job. As I said before, I am making these for joy, but once you decide to release a file, it's a matter of self esteem to do your best to release a plane as good as you can do, given the proper family, real job and time limits. Because the third and last weapon you give to your file is your reputation. Because I want that anybody who downloads one of my seventy plus files can feel that I did the best I could. It includes doing fixes when something was wrong. Sometimes, even doing your best, there is a mistake: the color of a shadowed part of the plane was different, the flight dynamics are improved... then do a fix, and release it. A fix must have the file_id.diz and the installation.txt files to help "just fly" simmers to correct the mistake. I could include many other things that you would be interested to know, but I don't include them in this series. When I start to receive feedback from you, the readers, I saw that many of you believed that the name of this series was "how to paint". But I don't want hundred of repainters using the same method. I want people trying, inventing, looking for ideas and improving the work done for many others, me included. Alejandro Hurtado dracosist@cantv.net Read other articles in this series -
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How To Be A Repainter Part Six Painting And Weathering A Plane Or Seaplane By Alejandro Hurtado (2 September 2006) At last! We are ready to do what brings us here: to paint a Flight Simulator plane. I'm supposing you are going to repaint an FS2004 (FS9) plane. In the old FSFW95 days when people didn't use things like cell phones and there were advanced devices like Betamax and music cassettes, the texture files were stored in a special format, called *.*af files. The repainting was done using TEXCON01 to convert the *.*af files to bitmaps and back again. FS2000 was easier for the repainters: its planes used normal bitmapped files, and could be modified even using Windows Paint, as did at least one repainter. Today, we use extended bitmaps with alpha channel. Alpha is the reflection channel. The metallic parts are more reflective than the tires, for example. I use the DXTBmp program to convert the files. I know you must have selected your model and the pictures of the plane you want to do. I was preparing a long discourse about the tools, steps, kind of files you must open, alpha channel and so on. But I realized that there are a lot of manuals about how to repaint that do just that, some of them on FlightSim.Com. Of course, if many of you request me to detail this part, I'll do. But I think that, reading the manuals, and knowing how your graphics editor works, the only thing you have to do is try, fail, retry and succeed. To give you a detailed example of how to do an specific repaint with specific tools, will be like Tony Vallillo (the one from Golden Hawaii and others) giving you the pre-flight checklist and tell you how to kick a tire. So, I decided that the main purpose of this series of articles is to give you ideas, motivation and clues about how to be a repainter. We are going to talk here about weathering. Weathering is the art to simulate that a virtual plane is real and has been used. To weather a new virtual plane you just must take a virtual hose... guess not. Any plane has its age, but we must take care about what age we want to show. Once I saw a plane in demonstration colors, all rusty and full of water streaks. The detail was that the demonstration planes never get rusty, because they are kept clean until they are sold to an airline. It's something like to paint cargo containers on the Titanic deck. There are four kinds of surfaces: metallic, fabric, painted metal and composites. Each one must be painted different. Fabric is perhaps the most easiest to paint. WWI planes and many of WWII were made of fabric. There were no junctions, or speed lines. And you can even simulate the ribs, painting diffused darker lines. Of course, the only way to do a perfect simulation is to look at real pictures. For example, if you find pictures of B-17, DC-3 and other American planes of WWII, the skin was metallic, but the control surfaces were fabric covered. The fabric gets cleared by the sun, but only the upper surface, of course. It's usual to paint invasion stripes on these planes, but remember that many transport and bomber crews felt that it was too easy to see and removed the upper stripes, leaving a mix on metal, camouflage and black/white areas on these zones. I said there were no speed lines, but the engines dropped oil, so we must do darker, defined lines and stripes leaving from engines, cartridge exits and carburetors and following the airflow. It means that the line is curved on the fuselage over the wings, for example. Painted metal and composite surfaces is more difficult. Usually they have no oil streaks. But any airplane, even the newer, has darker lines where the junctions are. There are very diffuse lines leaving the joining line in the airflow direction. If the plane is small, you can even paint the screws. WWII planes, fighters, regional jets, they all have screws that can be displayed following the junctions. On the wings, the area after the airbrakes has darker airflow lines than the fuselage, due to the air resistance and the water that can be stored here. And the engines near the fuselage, as is the case of DC-9 and 727, can have a long, teardrop darker zone caused by the burned fuel. In the case of military planes, the reverses creates another darker zone, as is the case of many Tornado's tails. On the seaplanes, the flotation line was green, due to algae, but the submerged surfaces were clean, because the running water removed all the dirt. And a seaplane, even in war time, spends many of its time docked, specially on rainy days. So usually there are no high speed marks, running horizontally (after all, the PBY Catalina was so slow that the crew used a calendar instead of a clock to reach the meeting points). The seaplanes had rust zones falling from windows, junctions and struts. And the places where the anchors and ropes scratched the paint had metal streaks. Many seaplanes had metal scratches on the base of the doors, due to the difficulty to board the plane. Again, be careful with the kind of plane: a CL-215 or a PBY waterbomber has no rust. They had smoke streaks, dark and diffused, running through the wing-engine junctions. Again, watch some pictures. The bare metal surfaces are the most difficult to do. You must remember that there is not a "metal" color. There are metallic colors: copper, aluminum, steel--each one has its own color, from clear grey blue to dark gold. Here is where a repainter must look closely at the original pictures and decide which base color has each part of the plane. Usually the wings and fuselage are composed of some different parts, each one with slightly different metal color: airbrakes, krueger flaps, cargo doors, wing roots. Plus, the metallic surface has junctions, sometimes has oil leaks, and very often screws. You must combine everything you have learned. And you must do something new. The metallic surfaces are never monochromatic. They always have myriads of parallel lines, each one of slightly different color from the adjacent. To simulate that, I use two methods: to copy a small piece of the original picture inside my work, file, and duplicate this bit many times, or to generate random points and distort the result into long lines. Of course, you must add the speed lines to the result. No matter than the "just fly" user never sees the plane closer to detail the work, no matter that the alpha channel emulates the metal by a high reflex, a good metallic repaint must have all this. Do you see why any repainter specializes on a few models? Because the most difficult is to find the right amount of dust, junctions and detail for each plane. Sometimes I include help files for repainters inside my creations. If you look on my Air One Boeing 737-800, you'll find a texture for a white fuselage, with all the weather marks but without any airline decoration. But I must confess that I don't follow this rule all the time. After all, it applies for aged planes, and I like to do newly painted planes. Even if you want to paint a plane as was painted in February 1985, it doesn't mean that you must put twenty years of dirt over the wings. Just paint it as was on April 1985. And remember that the main thing that brings us here is the joy of doing something beautiful and sharing it with all the flightsimmer community. Another difficult point about repainting is the use of the "cut and paste" skill. I, as many repainters, used to cut the airline logo and paste it on my work file. It happens especially on the tails. If you see, or download my Air Europa's Martini repaint, you'll see that almost all the fuselage and tail were made using the "cut and paste" method. Does it means that I just scanned the picture? Never! The pictures used to have shadows, as for example on the fuselage under the stabilizer, on the tail surface if the plane is a T tail shape and the engines if they are underwing. So, if you just copy a picture and paste it on the work file, you'll have something similar to roll a picture around a trunk: everybody sees that something is very wrong. In this case, I had to cut the pictures bit to bit, correct the distortion due to the perspective (it made the doors near the far end of the plane seem curved), adjust to the windows of the model and correct the tonality and light of the picture to match the one I selected. Plus, very frequently you must repaint over the pasted zones to homogenize the colors and remove the original reflections. And a warning: some models are not 100% accurate to the real planes: sometimes the wings have slightly different angles, the tails have slightly different shape... you don't see it until you try to make fit a cut tail image over the existing guide. I don't blame the modelers: they sometimes start to do their models with a 3D view that will be a few centimeters long. As I said in the first part of this series, I'd like to read a "how to be a modeler" article. The next and last part is how to upload the finished file and some history after the release. Alejandro Hurtado dracosist@cantv.net Read other articles in this series -
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How To Be A Repainter Part Five Drawings, Pictures And History Of The Real Plane By Alejandro Hurtado (28 August 2006) Once time long ago I bought a karate book and, immediately after the introduction, I found the next phrase: "If you are no able to run one kilometer without stop, don't keep reading this book". Well, if you are a fantasy repainter or you don't care if a plane is Swedish or Chinese, just forget this part and wait until I release the next one. I'm supposing that you have, at least, one picture of the plane. Is it enough? No, never. Almost every plane has differences between port and starboad side. And, if you can see all the fuselage paint, it means that you can't see the wings. Let's do an example with the Boeing 727. Have you noted that a well documented picture never says 727-200? It says 727-212, -2Q8 and so on. That is because every airline orders its planes with slight differences: more or less bathrooms, kitchens and seats. So, if you count the windows between the back door of the plane and the engine, they are not always the same. And the 737-800 has an air intake and two cargo doors on the starboard (right) side, but not in the port (left) side. Another reason to have more than a picture of the plane is the time and weather. Wet planes are darker that dry ones. I remember, when I was doing my Swisswings Do-328, that all pictures showed black letters and grey lines... except one. This was the only one taken on a sunny day. The others where all taken on a cloudy day. Wet planes often seems more glossy than dry ones. This is a thing you must take care when we talk about military planes. Many European fighter pictures are taken on rainy days, and even a matte Bf-110 seems to have its alpha channel high. A good place to find pictures of modern planes is www.airliners.net but remember that you can't put the pictures inside the finished file, because they are copyrighted. Of course, it's not the only web site, there are others. Another good real place is your local airport. Also, the airlines' web sites, the planes magazines, etc. Remember to check if the airline includes the register code of the plane on the wings. Some do, another don't. Some of them even paint the wings instead of leaving it bare metal. The military planes include country identification on the wings... some only two, some four. But there are Sudafrican planes that don't have any. The search for vintage aircraft is different. You can find pictures and side views on the historical sites. Sometimes also in plane magazines and old books. But another way to find information about vintage aircraft is to buy a scale plastic model. They include many paint schemes and the plane is displayed very detailed and by every side. Let's say that they did the investigative work for you. Usually you can finish with many pictures of the plane from different years, from different places. On WWII, for example, the winter camouflage was very different from the summer one, even with the same plane. Even in the same squadron each plane had different camouflage. Here is when you must choose which plane, or how many planes, you want to do. Yes, you can do more than one. One thing I like to do, when I can, is to follow a specific plane for many years, and release different repaints inside the same file for each change of paint, or each airline it served. It's funny to see that sometimes a regional plane travels all over the world in a few years. And here is when the history of the plane is important. Maybe some of you know why a particular 767 is know as "the Gimly Glider"? Or know there is actually the third prototype of the Boeing 727-100? Many of you had downloaded the "Memphis Belle", but there were two of them. The real one, and the plane of the movie. The pin-up girls were different, and the real one had dark green stripes over the wings, elevators and upper fuselage. A famous P-51D is called Cripes A'Mighty, but there was a P-47, a P-51B and two P-51D's called Cripes A'Mighty and flown by George Preddy. Also, today exist a P-51D in flying state called Cripes A'Mighty. Another good source for information is...www.flightsim.com, of course. The plane could have been done for FS5 or FS98. I never do a repaint that was already done less than six years ago, but it's always worthwhile to search for similar or older files. So, take your time and find so many pictures and history of a particular plane as you can. If don't, find pictures of similar ones. And if don't, well... do your best. Enough for now. The next part of the series is "Painting and weathering a plane or seaplane". Any question, you can send me an email. Alejandro Hurtado dracosist@cantv.net Read other articles in this series -
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How To Be A Repainter Part Four Fantasy Or Real, Newer Or Vintage By Alejandro Hurtado (23 August 2006) Well, at last we are closing to the part that bring us here: to repaint a model! On this part we are going to select the plane that we want to repaint, and how. Usually many of us select a picture of a real plane and "just" start to do the best transformation of this picture into the virtual world (me included). But a few of us do a fantasy painting, a kind of "how will I paint this real plane if I were a rich man?" It depends of the imagination skills of everyone and our artistic orientation. Doing fantasy models allows us to commit mistakes without problem. If you don't put the national markings in a fantasy military plane, it does not matter. In the other hand, you need to have decoration skills! By the way, if you think that the included white, blue and red 727 (right) is a fantasy plane, it's not. It's one of the Braniff planes painted by Alexander Calder. To paint a real plane requires you to find pictures of both sides of the real thing, and sometimes up and down ones to see the wings. This plane had up, down, left and right wings totally different. But we will talk about it on the next part. The repainter who wants to make a "real" plane, must take care of the details. He has no invention needs, but must know about weathering, shadows and sometimes he has to figure a missing part if it is not displayed on any picture. Newer or vintage planes? Well, I do both. Each one has pros and cons. The newer planes have plenty of documentation, sometimes you just need do to a trip to the nearest airport to find the real one. But many times they are already done. That's why I always do a search on the web before start a project. For example, I was thinking to do an MD-11 from Citybird. I searched, and found one already repainted that was really good. So I downloaded it and started to search another to do. I'll want to propose something: If you are member of a virtual airline, do first the planes of your airline. If not, do the planes of your country's airlines. Take a look: how many planes can you see in your nearest airport that are not made for Flight Simulator? About 18% of my repaints are Spanish planes, and 8% are Venezuelan ones, my two countries. Another 8% belongs to South American ones. If you don't live in USA, help the rest of us to know your country. Of course, the finished files will have less downloads, but we are not doing that for money, but for joy. On the other hand, the older planes have less repaints. That's for two reasons: there is less documentation, and there are less models to paint over. Where can you find a freeware model of a B-26 with less than 20 MB, or a Lancastrian? Or an O-400, passenger version? If you want to do vintage planes, and find a model with permission to repaint and release as "ready to fly", it's a gift! Tell me! About the documentation, I have two or three tricks to find it, but I'll tell you on the next part. The vintage planes, just because there are difficult to find, have the charm of old things. Not just to fly it, but to see how the old things were done. Of course, there are some planes that are new and old at the same time: the museum machines, especially the flying ones. One of my repaints is the P-51D that flew in the movies "The Empire Of The Sun" and "Memphis Belle". It's an old or a new one? Or one PBY-5A Catalina that was converted to a water bomber and was being sold on the Internet the last time I checked it. Of course, you are not obligated to paint your planes in the standard, always the same airline colors. Sometimes, especially on an anniversary, or Christmas time, the airlines change the decoration of their planes. It happens too with the military ones: almost every air festival or Tiger Meet the planes wear special decorations that never repeat again. And sometimes, when an airline rents a plane to another, the resulting painting is a mix of both decorations. Really, it does not matter what kind of repaint you want to do as long as you must have done your selection by now, and you must be eager to start to put colors on the screen of your computer. We are almost there, because the next part is to find drawings, pictures and history of the real plane. Alejandro Hurtado dracosist@cantv.net Read other articles in this series -
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How To Be A Repainter Part Three "Ready To Fly" Files Against "Textures Only" By Alejandro Hurtado (17 August 2006) Let's start with definitions: For "just fly" simmers, "Ready to Fly" means a file that you can just unzip into the ..\aircraft directory and the next time you load Flight Simulator, the plane is in the list. Even easier, there are utilities like FSAOM that can automatically install this kind of file. "Textures Only" is a file that must be assembled, or added, to the original plane. You must find the file ("base model") released by the modeler (and that's not always simple), install, copy the textures folder inside the original plane folder, modify the "aircraft.cfg" file, change the textures folder name and pray for the result to work. [Please note that there are tutorials to help with this sort of thing.] There are two good reasons and two bad reasons for "Textures Only" repaints. The good ones are: the resulting file is smaller, so you can upload and download it more easily and quickly, and for a modeler, the final user must download the original base model file, so his work becomes well known and very often downloaded. The bad ones are: if you are a "just fly" simmer, and you don't know about folders, notepad, aircraft.cfg editing, renaming and another niceties, you'll never fly this plane. The second one is that sometimes the original plane can't be found. I have downloaded "Textures Only" files with the legend such as: "for the model of John Doe", but it doesn't say where to get this model or its file name. Sometimes it says: "the model is in the www.plane.plane.plane.com address", so you open Explorer, insert the address and get a beautiful "error 404: page not found". I'm sure that you are now believers of the "Ready to Fly" option. I am too. But it has two problems: the first one, its size. Usually a ten megabyte model has only two or three megabytes of textures. But that's not the real drawback. The real problem is that sometimes the modeler feels that his work is not appreciated, that his original file and texture are not always known. There is at least one file where the repainter put the name of the real modeler but with my email address--I protested immediately. But the truth is that a modeler who releases his files with including permission to repaint better known than the other modeler who does not. Because each repaint with his name says that he is so good that we, the repainters, want to work with him. That a model of Mike Stone, Kevin Trinkle or SGA is so good that you can download it and start to repaint without fear of finding some big mistakes in the plane that your work is lost. And for the "just fly" simmers, sooner or later they, as us, will learn who does really good models, and in this moment he will recognize a good modeler by his name no matter if the repainter included the name or not. And, please, don't refuse the joy of a "ready to fly" file to all these simmers. We, the repainters, are aware of the great need that the virtual world has of you, and we will give you proper acknowledgement of your work. And that's why I put on my knees every night praying that the modelers keep releasing planes giving the permission to publish repaints with the model, panel and everything included. Because the idea of all this is that the many of you, "just fly" simmers, can download and fly these beautiful planes. We, the expert simmers who know how to correct a missing gauge problem, or change a pointer from a bad panel to some favorite one, we can live with "textures only" files. But the ones who are starting to enjoy this world, the ones who will make the future of the modelers and repainters, they can't do it yet. Well, enough for now. In the next part, we will talk about what's better: fantasy or real planes, newer or vintage ones. Alejandro Hurtado dracosist@cantv.net Read other articles in this series -
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How To Be A Repainter Part Two Pick Your Model And Request Permission To Repaint By Alejandro Hurtado (12 August 2006) What does it mean that you should pick your model before you find a picture of the plane? Aren't you supposed to first find the pictures and later find the model? Well, no. To find first the documentation is like the joke of the bride who is testing her wedding dress and says: I have the dress, I have the church reserved, I rented the party house, I just need to find the man. But first of all: what is a model? And what is a repainter? For "just fly" simmers, a model is the totally blank plane, without colors. Have you seen when you load a complex plane that before you see the colored plane sometimes appears a white form of the plane? That's the model. It is the form of the plane, its weight, its power, fuel, speed, everything except the colors. When a modeler releases a plane, he includes one or two basic paint schemes, usually of a big airline or a big country air force, if a military one. A repainter is someone who takes this model and adds another color scheme to the plane. Let's take one of my favorite modelers, Mike Stone. He released his Boeing 727-200 plane with the colors of Air France, Alitalia, Condor, Eastern and Piedmont. I have released repaints of this model in seventeen colors, from the very well known Alaska Airlines to the almost unknown Pride Air. By the way, I just discovered recently that Mike only allows "ready to fly" planes for virtual airlines. The rest of us must conform with texture only repaints, but we will talk more detailed about this in the next part of this series. In a perfect world you can find any model of any plane you want. But in the real one, some flightsim plane models just don't exist. I'm still searching for a good CN-235 freeware model to repaint. Freeware? What's that? Well, there are two different kinds of models: payware and freeware. The first one must be bought, and its repainting is limited; as you can't distribute a payware model for free, you are limited to the people who have bought the package and liked it and see your repaint and know how to download and install it. The second group, freeware: it's free, OK, but the modelers not always want someone else to do anything with their work. They, as authors of the plane, can authorize or not to other people to make repaints. Let's say that each model is like a child of its author: you can't go to a father and tell him: "I just met your daughter today and I want to take her to the beach this weekend". The list goes from Shigueru Tanaka, who does not let anybody make repaints without written permission, to iDFG or Robert Versluys, who include a written authorization for repainting their planes. And, of course, not all the models are good. I know at least one model which is so badly made, that you can draw a straight line, and the line is displayed like an "S". That's why you must search first the model, and later think, with this model, which plane can you paint. And request permission? Very important. Some models don't specify if the author allows repaints or not. So, you must send an email requesting permission, and must include the permission with the finished plane you release. If not, the modeler can write to the web site where you uploaded your job, and request to remove it. And worst, if he gets upset, he will never release another model. So, if not directly specified, PLEASE request permission. Many of them will give it to you. Another kind of permission you must have is the one from some airlines, as American Airlines. You can't release a repaint of its planes without informing the company and without a notification telling that you have nothing to do with the company. Well, enough for now. In the next part, we will talk about "Ready to Fly" files against "Textures Only" ones. Alejandro Hurtado dracosist@cantv.net Read other articles in this series -
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How To Be A Repainter Part One By Alejandro Hurtado (9 August 2006) As a daily reader of the FlightSim.Com news page, I get to know about the history of pilots comparing real and simulated world, new scenaries, new payware planes and new computer information. I enjoy it, and every day I check for new articles to read. But I feel that there are some parts of the flight simulator world that aren't reflected. One is the modelers area. Another is the repainters area. The scenery makers area was recently covered, and there was a recent triad of articles about the plane modeler Mike Stone. But in general these parts of the flight simulator world are dark ones. Maybe you, the "just fly" simmers, believe that to make a plane is just to take a 3 view drawing and scan it to obtain a fully flyable plane. And to paint a plane, you just need to take your scanner, go to the airport and apply it over the real plane. As a long time repainter, I feel I can give you some impressions about the art of converting a small picture in a magazine into an "almost real" flight simulator plane. I have planned a series of articles, with this being the first, about how to repaint a plane. The next ones will be: Pick your model and request permission to repaint "Ready to Fly" files against "Textures Only" Fantasy or real, newer or vintage Drawings, pictures and history of the real plane Painting and weathering a plane or seaplane Uploading the file and some history after the release/li> Of course, I have mentioned above three areas without cover. I'll be happy if some modeler and some scenery maker agrees with me and releases another series of articles about his part of the hobby. And maybe there are others areas that you, the "just fly" simmers, or another repainters, want to know. Alejandro Hurtado dracosist@cantv.net Read other articles in this series -
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