This section continues from part 2 into painting the engines of the aircraft and finishing off the model...

Finishing the job off...Painting the engines

Seeing as we've already painted the nose section of the aircraft, we've done most of the hardest bit of the job...

Taking a quick look at our photographs, we can see that the engines of the Delta Airlines jet look very similar to the nose. In fact, we'll use the textures from the nose on the engines. With the default 737-400 model in FS2000, there's only one engine texture, so naturally it's going to be mirrored on one side of each engine. With the Delta this isn't going to be a problem, but when we have textures using text on engines, we've got to take the same kind of decision we took about the tailplane and the central body section.

Here you can see the finished engine texture - all I've done is to copy the nose textures, rotate them and do any resizing necessary to make them fit. I've also cut off the excess and tweaked the shape where necessary.

You should also notice the red line culminating in the red spot, which is a common feature of the 737's engines, so I actually have this little feature as another file to paste in whenever appropriate. However, it's pretty easy to draw in - if you can draw a line and a filled circle, you've just about got it! The burgundy red colour of the engine near the outlet isn't accurate for all aircraft, and indeed the Delta's we've seen in the photographs don't have this colour.

It's a simple case to fix this, and it's something you can do for any of the basic aircraft components. Here I've selected the red engine exhaust cone from the original background (using a marquee selection tool) and copied it to the clipboard. I've then pasted it to the paintjob layer, and applied a monochrome filter to it. (You can also pull the saturation down to zero in a Hue/Saturation menu). It now covers over the previous image and we can simply delete it if we decide we prefer the red in the end.

Of course, changing the hue or saturation makes no difference to the background black... it's black and contains no colour anyway!

You can, of course, change the colour of other aircraft components, such as the inside of the cockpit in this way, but I'd always recommend copying the image onto another layer before editing the colour - don't edit your original bitmap texture directly, as you'll never know when it might come in useful for something...

I've actually slightly darkened the wings using this method on this texture - it's because the wings don't appear to be painted on the Delta jet, so they ought to be grey rather than white.

Anything else?

By this point, you should have a fairly complete Delta AirLines 737-400 texture. If everything goes smoothly, doing a paintjob like this from scratch shouldn't take more than about half an hour... That's if you've got your blank properly done and your layers sorted out in advance... otherwise you're looking at a lot of work!

Now it's time to check over your aircraft and see if there's anything obvious that needs changing. If so - change it! Now's the time when you should make your dirt layer visible if you haven't had it on for a while (you might have noticed i've worked without it being shown - it makes it easier to see what you're doing but is by no means necessary!).

We've also left out the American flag so now's the time to go get it and put it in the right place. I've been lucky here that I've got good enough aircraft photos to work from that I can copy and paste the flag from the photo onto my texture - it's about the right size so I'll just stick it in.

If you can't find a good flag to copy, it's not hard to draw one or pull one off the internet and resize it (there's no shortage on the net!). Don't worry about the flag being mirrored on the other side - even the real jet has the flag backwards on the starboard side...

Some other points to make...

Okay... just some bits and pieces. You can see if you look at the model produced here that I don't have any sharp edges. Each edge is anti-aliased by my graphics program (Fireworks). For lines and most shapes, I've had to select "soft" or "anti-aliased" if the option was available (usually it's the default.) If you've found that all your shapes have hard or jagged edges, try looking to see if it's possible to use softer edges on them.

If you can't use anti-aliased edges on your shapes, a good trick is to select that shape or area and use a blur filter on it... just enough to make some of the pixels smooth out. You need to be careful with this, but a Gaussian Blur filter with radius of 1 pixel is usually pretty good. If you've got a smudge tool, you might also want to use this (carefully!) on some of the edges. Anti-aliasing the eges by whatever means increases the apparent resolution of your paintjob without actually making it any more detailed.

You should also note that not every 737-400 series is identical... If you're going to represent a specific aircraft, you should check the window placements and where the panels fit - you may need to tweak things a little.