I hope that you all know how to select and copy one texture into another. That's exactly what we will be doing here. Select the crj-mid0.bmp, copy it and paste it right on top of the crj-mid0_LL.bmp. Save them both and there we have it. Two textures for the price of one. Now you see why it is important to look at all your bitmaps early on. Saved you a bit of work didn't it. Don't forget to do this again when you have finished painting.

Didn't I say we were going to do some painting. Oh yes, here we go then. I want to add the name "Celtic World Airways" to the side of the aircraft for my own Virtual Airline. I know the font I want and the size. You choose your own or use my settings. Either way you cannot mess it up. Why can't I? because we will be using layers. Boy, it's those layer things coming up again. They must be important.

Point to note: From now on all our work will be on the PSP file and the only time we will save it as a BMP file is to transfer it to the aircraft.

Remember, think of a layer as a sheet of transparent paper and you can stack as many as you want one on top of the other. The open texture is going to be our base or background layer. First step then. Go into Paint Shop Pro, after opening our texture, of course, and select the Text Icon 'A' You did you remember to convert the colours to 16 million (24 bit) earlier? If you didn't then you will not have the 'antialias' option. That's the one that softens the edges of the text. Yes you do want to do that, trust me on this one.

Click anywhere on the texture. This will bring up the text options window. You can choose the font, colour, size etc. I am using the following,: Font, Celtic Gaelige. Size: 12. Colour: Green. Antialies ticked and create as 'vector' selected. All these options are in the Text Options window. Options shown on the right. Make all your changes, type in your text and click on ok You should have a layers palette that looks like this one below.

You started out with just a single raster layer and have added a vector layer. Layer1 will be renamed to Text. You can do this by right clicking on 'Layer1' and choose 'properties' The sub layer is the text string that you typed in. In my case the text says "Celtic World Airways" Notice the small squares around the text and the different shape in the layer palette for a vector layer. Shown on the left.

 

See below for the Layer Properties window.

The only important thing here is the name. The button with the tick mark at the bottom just means it will be visible from the start. This can be changed at any time. Name this layer "text-right". Not as shown in the diagrams. (I will be correcting these shortly)

You need to view the layers palette (see FAQ page if not sure how). This will show you all the layers you currently have. At the moment there is only two. The background layer - raster and the text layer - vector with one sub layer. See the '+' symbol. Click on that and it will show you the sub layer(s). The glasses icon is used to allow the layer to be visible or not. As both of these glasses are shown then both layers are visible.

Last thing to note here is that we need to use another Icon. This time it is the Vector Object Selection Icon. Shown on the right. You need to use this when dealing with the vector text. Remember you added the text as a vector layer and not a raster layer.

What is the difference between using a Raster layer and a Vector layer. Notice I use the word using. If we use a raster layer and add the text then the only way to resize it is to delete it and change the size then add it back. With Vectors we just grab a corner and treat it like a resizable window. If you look in the middle of the text box (above) you should find a small square - use that to drag the vector around. You can flip it around etc same as a raster image but is so much easier to change. Notice also that your text looks nice and smooth. That's the antialias coming into effect.

This may seem like a lot of work at the moment but it really is easy to do and if you get stuck or confused then drop me an e-mail and I will either mail you directly or change the web page.

Adding the Airline name

We have added a new vector layer to our original image and called it text-right.

Select the vector layer called 'text-right' and go to the 'image' menu item. Choose rotate or CTRL+R, 90 degrees right. Then menu item 'image', Choose the 'flip' option or CTRL+I. This will give you the image for the right of the Texture. Move it into position.

Points to note: You did not have to add a new vector layer yourself. By adding vector text it Paint Shop Pro did it for you. Important: You need to go into the 'layers' menu item and select 'new vector layer'. Rename it "text right" If you do not add this layer then all your text will be on the same vector layer. If you find you are having a problem placing your text correctly it is better having it on seperate layers. One for the left text and one for the right.

Make sure the you have selected 'text-left' and add your text as before. This time you only need to do a right rotate 90 degrees. Place the text as before.

You should now have the image - partly shown - on the left.

 

 

 

How do I put the text in the correct place?

Use the magnifying glass and zoom in close. To get the top of the image lined up I just make sure that the pixels are exactly on the top of the texture with no space showing. For the left to right alignment, choose a letter you can use to position the text. I chose the letter A in "Airways". Set one of the texture blocks in place and measure the distance from the very last pixel in the left hand A to the exact middle of that pixel. Count the pixels by viewing the numbers in the bottom left of PSP. I measured 16 pixels and I am happy with the placement. Using the backwards letter A in text-left take the right hand block and, using PSP., as my counter, move the block until it is also 16 pixels distance from the edge of the texture.

Saving your work

If you didn't follow the steps above then I want you to follow this next step exactly. Before you blow away your bitmap for good SAVE THE IMAGE AS A PSP. IMAGE FORMAT. Do this BEFORE you save it as a bitmap. If you save it only as an 8 bit bitmap all the layers will be merged and you will be stuck with a single layer image again. If you do this then all you need to do is CTRL+Z, this will revert the image back to the PSP format and do a save from there. When you save your texture as a PSP. Image then when you reload it you will have all your layers still in place. . Use the "Save as" option and keep the name the same just choose PSP. as the file extension. I keep all my PSP. files in case I need to change anything at a later date.

If you save as a BMP and still have the colour depth set to 24 bit then the layers will still be intact but you can't fly this texture. If you change it to 8 bit and save it you will loose all your layers completely. That's why you should always have a PSP file as your working file.

Recap

Layers are like having lots of transparent sheets to draw, scribble, mess around with. Save your file as a PSP. image and always keep the PSP. image files. When you want to test it on the aircraft save it as the original 256 x 256 x 256 colour format Bitmap. If it is not right go into the PSP. image, change it and save it again.

Play around with PSP. and your layers menu. Keep the options as shown for the time being but next time we will be adding our colour scheme and making the night textures in one fell swoop. No lighting at this stage, well, OK. then maybe.

I think I want Raster Text instead of Vector Text

Ok, why? You can do everything with a vector image and more than you can do with a raster image. You have the added bonus of being able to stretch or shrink the text anytime you want. Using Raster text is very easy and all you do is make sure you don't select vector in the 'create as' box as shown above.

Until next time good luck and good painting.

Jim Oates