Researching Your Repaint

last update 4th September 2001

This section suggests some simple ways to research your aircraft repaints, to make sure that you get the best possible accuracy.

Finding reference photographs

If you've got to start somewhere, you might as well start at the largest aviation photo database available...

www.airliners.net has a huge photo archive of material available that's invaluable for getting your aircraft repaints exactly right.

In this screenshot, I'm using the main search engine to simply find Delta Airlines 737's. This is the repaint we're going to work through in the basic tutorial (as I've been requested to produce an updated version!).

By doing this particular repaint, we'll come across most of the basic techniques useful for any repaint, but we'll avoid sticky areas that may trip you up when it comes to joining textures across many sections. We'll meet that issue when we move on to paint the LearJet 45 (in the advanced tutorial section)

For now, we're simply interested in finding a good picture of our desired Delta Airlines jet from various angles, covering all the components we want to paint.

Here we've performed our search and we have a list of images that we can work from.

All the images in airliners.net are copyright material, so if you're planning on uploading your finished repaint with an example of the actual photographic material you worked from, you'll need to contact them first.

Images and sections of images I've included here are purely for reference and to show how you might use a photo - I've deliberately not reproduced any of the actual full photos here - you'll have to download them yourself from airliners.net if you're interested in seeing them.

As well as getting photographs from airliners.net, you should always visit the homepage of the airline you're planning to paint - very often they'll have photographs of their jets, and they may well have their correct logos and other images you can work from. It's useful to visit these sites in order to get the correct colours, too - some photos of jets have very different appearances depending on light level and how they were scanned.

Using your reference material

Now we've found some photographs and we know the correct colour scheme, we've got a good point of reference to start our repaint. You'll need to make sure you have a good image of the airline's logo (as above), and a clear image of where it is. You can see on the first image here that we can place our logo onto our texture by positioning relative to the windows. It's also sometimes possible (if you've got a good enough image) to simply cut and paste the graphic from the photo to the texture. Only do this if your graphic really is very clear... otherwise you'll end up with a mess!

You also want to pay close attention to things like doors and hatches, and where the windows are placed relative to these... you need to get an idea of which parts of the aircraft are painted, and which are blank. Sometimes you'll want to use several photos to get a clearer idea of what's going on in this parcitular paint scheme, and to perhaps get some more interesting angles to see underneath the wings or around the back of the aircraft. There are many apects of an aircraft's paint scheme that you'll need to address - is the aircraft symmetrical, are the engines painted the same both sides, is this repaint even possible in FS2000?

You can see straight away from this photograph of the aircraft's tail that we've got a problem when it comes to repainting the 737 included with FS2000... The default model mirrors the tail image from one side to the other, so that putting text the right way onto the tail results in mirrored text on the other side. There are a couple of ways to handle this - we can either put up with it and only ever view the aircraft from one side or we can (oh no!) leave out the text from the tail... This reduces the accuracy, but does mean that our aircraft will look like a real jet, and not some painting accident... It's up to you!

When you've got a good idea of how to lay out your aircraft's paint scheme, you're ready to get down to it and actually do the job you set out to do...