My first FS9 repaint: Eric Cantu's 737. and still questions

[Simplex]

Hello.. as some of you might already have seen at ubi I managed to finish my first paintjob for Fs9, a 3 in 1 to be honest.I skinned 3 liveries of Casino Express, an small airline flying 732s and a friend is working for them.

I finished the daylight textures and am really satisfied with the results so far. Mainframe from Screenshotprints.com helped me with the airliner weathering (seems after skinning my heabily worn warbirds i can not apply slight weathering anymore ) and supah from the very same page showed my on one fuselage section to draw my 1st very first panellines ever .. took wings and engines of the paintkit that came with cantu'S plane.





andfinally a weathering detail:
[img=http://img81.imageshack.us/img81/7318/yafss0014zn.th.jpg]

What do you think?

Now my problem, I contacted Adlabs already at SSA, thanks mate, and his replies worked.. so i was able to use night textures of the same size as the daylight textures, helping a lot in proper alinging them...

Now i got the lights. problem 2 was that when i turned off the landing gear lights even the cabin lights are off... What the..

again a google trip that brought me to the awareness that it is possible to use night textures with 2 channels too.. main channel for "landing light + panellight" and alpha channel for "panel lights only".. ahaaaaaaaa!! so that alpha layer is the one i need now as i am flying around with panel lights onnly and want to see the neat cabin lights there..

so far so good.. made both channels and saved the file with DXTbmp as.. well.. yeah.. DXT1 i guess.. done. setting up a night flight and no light at all..



gentlemen.. i need your advice now.. any ideas?! How can i have both night texture channels working?!?!?

[Osram]

Looks great!

Have you tried DXT3 or DXT5 for the texture with alpha?

[RAF_Loke]

Looks really great Carsten.
Been thinking of doing some repaint in FS9 as well. But to be honest I don't have a clue how to.

[Vigilante]

Sorry I can't help with the technical questions, I've never tried skinning for FS. I just wanted to say that your skins look wonderful, very professional. I love the King of Diamonds design on that Casino Express model!

[adlabs6]

Just off the top of my head... for the dual mode lights, try saving the file in 32-bit mode. This should save the main black/white image in the 24-bit area, and the alpha channel in the remaining 8-bit area.

Just save the same way as adding reflectace to the livery textures and see if it'll work. Those are very nice work I think, clean and realistic.

BTW, I've been flying the Kittyhawk 732 extensively this past week, and love it. I noticed the cabin lights are off as well when my landing lights are off but didn't know how to solve it. Also, the freeware PSPanels classic is great with this plane I think.

[Simplex]

Yes adlabs.. and you cannot keep the cabin lights on by using the landing lights because the main gear lightbeam breaks through the fuselage when it is retracted.

Thanks for your nice comments on the skins itself!!

I'll go on and try further saving in different modes. I just realized the whole file turns black when saved as dxt1 with alpha both channels just pitch black..

I REALLY WANT those neat looking windows when cruising in the darkness.. makes a great difference in screenshots

[Simplex]

why does the PSPanel look like that on my machine?! What did I wrong?
Looks like it is rendered with a too small height.. a config problem?

[Osram]

From the BoB2 Skinner's Pack docs:

The DDS format contains several "subformat". For us of interest are those that compress the picture.
The are called DXT and numbered. For BoB(2) use DXT1 for a texture without alpha and DXT5 for one with.
The compression is lossy. So, there can be artefacts, but the good news is the texture stays compressed even in VRAM.

When saving use compression DXT1 or, if the image has alpha (transparency), use DXT5. Keep in mind this is a lossy compression,
so use these formats for the final save. To save temporary files that you will later open in GIMP again for further tweaking, use an uncompressed format.

Like I said above, DXT3 (not used in BoB2) contains alpha as well IIRC.

[Osram]

why does the PSPanel look like that on my machine?! What did I wrong?
Looks like it is rendered with a too small height.. a config problem?

Is it possible to input the so called "(screen) aspect ratio" somewhere in the gfx settings?

[adlabs6]

Yes, I had that problem with the pspanel too, just put the mouse on the top edge (a double arrow mouse will appear) and stretch it upwards and it'll work. My panel stopped doing that, but I can't remember why... in fact I don't even recall taking any steps to fix it! Every time I load the plane it's fine now.

You might try the freeware forum at the pspanel site and see if they have an answer.

And do try saving in the 32-bit .bmp mode for the lights. Put the window lights (and tail light if wanted) on the alpha layer when you save.