Rivet question - different colors?

[Von Grantoven]

I am pretty new to skinning and have been using a fairly simple technique for my rivets.
I use a 2pt light gray for the basic rivet, then a add a 2 pt black with 1 pixel gaussian blur underneath for a shadow. I usually do the base skin at 2048x2048 and then resize to to 1024, so I thought this looked alright.

Problem is, I am working on a Ki84 skin and wanted to do a full metal and light earth color variant also(the base skin is green) .
With the lighter colors the rivets almost disappear or look funny.

Should I be using different color combos for different base colors?

Any comments or suggestions on the color issue or my techniques would be most welcome.

Von G

[Serval]

I use white and black for rivets and lines. Each color on seperate layers.
Then I set a tansparency that fits with the colorscheme.

This tutorial shows what I mean, besides a lot more:
http://www.simmerspaintshop.com/foru...ed-effect.html

[BLOWHARD]

Yep, that's the way to do it Plus, I suggest you clear the rivet space on your rivet shadow layer. Then you can adjust the opacity of the rivets and shadows to pick up the base color without having the shadow dulling your light colored rivets.

[adlabs6]

Yes, good tip Blowhard. Otherwise the interaction of the two layers just gets in the way.

[e-b-o-]

I'm using layer effects on the rivets

Very easy: paint white rivets, enable "outer glow" on the layer effects, set it to a darker color and multiply. After this set the complete layer to overlay or soft light much easier and additional you don't have any light direction in your rivets (because of this there're no problems with a concave or convex appereance)

[Serval]

That's the easy way indeed.
But especially people who want to give away their template to otherss don't do this for a reason:
PSP and GIMP (depending on versions) do not support all layer effects that Photoshop has. So, loading the PSD in those programs will cause an error.

[e-b-o-]

well, it isn't a problem since you can delete the layer effects. from my experience you've to clean up your original files anyway, since they're almost way to big from the filesize for publishing them.
(I guess the average size on my files are about 150mb... before I'd give them away I reduce them to 4 or 5 layers, without any effects.)

[Serval]

Well, the person downloading the file cannot. And many PS users are not aware that PSP and GIMP do not support all functions. That is why I added the warning.
And I think the advanced panellines are one of the main reasons of people to download templates.

Take a look at Jesters IL-2 templates here, they are up to 22 MB and quite complete.

[e-b-o-]

Sounds like a missunderstanding

As a PS user you can use this trick, but if you prepare your template (as the original builder) you have to disable the layer effects anyways if you want to publish it. May it be for filesize reasons or compatibility. that's all I was saying.

[Von Grantoven]

Terrific suggestions guys!
I'm afraid I am pretty new to this and I am going to have to work my way through these to get my head around them.
I am sure I will have some similarly noobish follow up questions as I learn more.
Here is a quick snap of the kite in question that I am looking at doing the multiple skins for (joe_daddys Ki-84 from CFS3):