my online P-40 skin

[GrumpyBadger]

hey all,

I've been having a blast with the tutorials and such on here and my goal was to contribute with my own pseudo-historical P-40 skin and get advice and criticism and such from all of you as I work on it.

UF_Zargos gave me his awesome P-40E/M template for me to play with. And I gotta say I'm really excited.

For the reason of simplicity, I decided to start with the P-40E/M. To put it plainly, I can actually see where all the panels are and what they are

right now, I'm working on the textures and paint of the skin.
I have rivets and lines set at 100%
I used the ANA codes for the green, red, brown, and grey

and I think personally considering where I'm at with it (about 10% done) I'm really quite happy with it.

Here's what I've got so far, please feel free to critique this, as I'm really looking for everyone's input with it


basically, one of the things i'm working on is her "nose" and her shark's mouth at the moment. I want to get that shark's mouth all lined up, and then I'll copy it over to the other side as well.

and in that, I was going to put this into the game and take a look at it all

I was lucky enough to find this thread:
Mission4Today ForumsPro IL-2 Sturmovik Skinning Discussion Forum Skin Question?
about using "Bright" by itself, since I am a GIMP user.

There's no plugin for Bright, but you can use the stand-alone version no matter what painting program you have.

1. Download Bright M4T download page

2. Download or create a batch file to make it easier to use. Nothing special here, just create a text file with Notepad or whatever, paste "bright *.bmp -o -bmp" (without the quotes) into it and save the file as Bright.bat. Put it in the same folder as your 3Mb skins and the bright.exe file and double-click bright.bat to convert.

Did everything as said, and was shocked and ecstatic that the image reduced to the required 1MB size! This is HUGE for me, I've never done any kind of "code" before and to me that's all hokus-pokus lol

BUT
yeah for some reason, it's not exactly liking the color "red"


yep.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm excited as all get out, but yeah, I really need to figure this stuff out, and there's no way I know how to by myself.

so, please let me know what you think of my P-40E/M and if you have any advice to fix the coloring issues, I'm all ears!

also, I'm thinking it may not be the "code" that I typed into notepad following JaRink's advice. I tried changing the image just using the "Bright" program after deleting the "code .txt .bat thingy" and it still came out with the same colors :roll:

lol I also tried this tutorial:
All-Aircraft-Simulations • View topic - [TUTORIAL] Planemad's Skinning with GIMP 2.6 Tutorial by planemad as well, and still no joy lol

now, on the plus side, planemad's tutorial is super easy to follow.
It got my image down to 1MB, .bmp, and 1024x1024, and all the colors were correct at least

I tried adding it to my P-40E folder, and still no joy in game. It doesn't show up. I've downloaded some of planemad's skins, RONNCO's, Chameleon's, a bunch I'm kinda skin-crazy and they all show up in the game, same with the defaults and the .void.

however, any template I setup, doesn't load...

also, the file location is:
c:\gog games\Il2 Sturmovik 1946\Paintschemes\skins\P-40E

ummm I have no idea how to find a screen-capture. I can get screenshots from the game no problem, but using prtscrn on the windows page isn't exactly working out lol

but here are the properties of the image wether I use GIMP's indexing or BRIGHT
Dimensions 1024x1024
Width 1024 pixels
Height 1024 pixels
Bit Depth 8
File Name GB's P40E (GB's P40E SNAFU for the BRIGHT version )
type bitmap image

[GrumpyBadger]

*update*

well lol the BRIGHT version loaded into the game now.

no idea why it works now, versus before. Everything is the same. However, it's still all SNAFU as far as the colors are concerned.

So, here's where I'm at:
BRIGHT version - works in game, but the colors are SNAFU
GIMP's version - all the colors are good, but it won't load in the game even though everything in the properties is the same as the one from BRIGHT!

good news is the texture appears to be working well. And yeah, any help would be appreciated, those colors ARE NOT what I want! Very Happy lol