Night Light Alpha Maps

[adlabs6]

If you've got any aircrafts in FS2004 that have lightmaps, then you may have noticed that sometimes the cabin windown lights will turn off when you turn off the landing lights. This most commonly happens with airliners, and can be annoying especially if you're taking screenshots and don't want the landing lights on along with the cabin lights during cruise.

This is easy to fix, taking less than 5 minutes. I used Photoshop Elements 2, and Imagetool for this article. Let's get started.

Firstly, locate the lightmap file for the plane in question. Make a backup of this file BEFORE editing incase there's a mistake! This file will be in either a standard .bmp format or a DTX3 compressed .bmp format. You can tell the difference in Windows explorer by looking for the thumbnail icon. If its not showing a preview, then it's probably a DTX format. To start this project, you'll need to convert the file to 32-bit mode using Imagetool (or DTXbmp) and save.

For information on color depth and conversion see this article.

Now the lightmap should open in your image editor, here's mine in Photoshop:



Pretty basic, the white areas will be lit up at night when the landing lights are on. In FS2004, any area of a lightmap that's in an alpha channel will be lit up when the PANEL lights are on! So once you get up to cruise, you can still see the cabin window lights, WITHOUT the landing light shines as long as the instrument panel lights are on.

To put the cabin windows in an alpha channel, lets drag a marquee selection around all the parts we want to show when the panel lights are on...



Ok, very easy. Now to save it, just use the normal "Save as..." command, and choose .bmp format while the marquee selection is still showing selected as above. You should be prompted for what color depth you'd like to save in, just choose 32-bit and save. The 32 bit format contains 24 bits of color data like any other image file, while the additional 8 bits of data store the alpha channel (which is defined by a selection marquee).

Now, this new file still needs to be compressed to DTX3 format, so I opened up Imagetool, and selected "DTX3" as the new format. Save and ready to test in FS2004.



And the results... panel lights switch ON and we have cabin lights inside:



And with the landing lights switch on, we have both cabin, and landing lights:



Hope this helps!
-adlabs6

[Col7777]

Thank you very much for this tip, I am fairly new to repainting and I'm using FS Repaint v2, but recently I had a problem with an aircraft not showing the cabin lights on during darkness.
Using your tip got it to work, I just need to touch it up slightly now for it to look OK, I just did it quick to try it and had to come back to say thanks.

Col.

[Col7777]

Is it possible to create a light-map if an aircraft hasn't got one, I played around last night but couldn't get anything to work?

Col.

[adlabs6]

Hi there, I am not sure if it is possible. It has been a long time since I worked wth the FS2004 development kit. If your proceedures work on a plane which you know allows the light map, and not on another, then I would assume the answer is no.

[AGNT_Matt]

if theres a file appending with _l its usually a light map, if its just black its a free canvas for night lighting, i have added glow slime to A320's in the past, and the same principal applies as above just having to edit the night bitmaps, easy way to guarantee light is in the right place open the night file and the day of the same one, overlay one over the other in the same window in a new layer, take the opacity down and draw the bits on.

[gareth]

Im REALY new to this so just a query. I understand the whole process however, does this work for FSX versions as well as I have noted some of ther stock aircraft having the same issue - lights off when landing lights switched off??

Gareth

[Baron von Blutwurst]

The light maps in FS9 are applied in the modeling stage. When the compile is done, all materials are assigned to thier respective coordinates. If the light map has not been included in the materials, then it will not be there regardless of what a texture is named. The _L is for lightmaps though and if it is present,there is a ton of fun you can have with your planes. If you do not have a light map with a particular aircraft, you can just paint simulated lights for an extra texture set and use it for screenies.

FSX is a whole different approach to materials. It has a funtional Specular map as well as Diffuse mapping and Bump mapping. FSX has a propensity to collapse any Un-Mapped parts to the 0 coordinate in-game. If you model in FSx,make sure you map every polygon or you will get a real mess.

[gareth]

Many thanks for the info - yes some have the _L associated so fun time ahead - more than that thanks for heads up on the problems with fooling with FSX and the co ords'.

Gareth

[mycah808]

I tried doing this using Paint shor Pro 7 but nothing happened. Can Someone help me?