Basic Tools

last update 4th September 2001

This section introduces some of the basic tools you'll need to effectively repaint an aircraft, and explains some of the reasoning behind the choices.

The items mentioned here are not absolute requirements, and it is possible to produce a good repaint without the use of them, but you're going to find it a lot harder to change things and produce good results without them.

Layers

First off, you'll ideally need a graphics application (paint program to the rest of us) that can handle layers. Layers allow you to stack up many different components of the aircraft so that you're not always painting over the top of things...

This screenshot shows the layers used for my standard blank aircraft - you can ignore the "web layer" in this case (it's a program specific feature).

You'll see that I have the "paintjob" overlaying the blank body but underneath permanent items such as fuselage lines, doors, windows and dirt. By using items on different layers, you can save yourself a lot of work later on...

If your paint program doesn't use layers, you're not totally ruined, but you will need to take a lot of care when painting to ensure that you don't wipe out existing features of the aircraft body.

Vector Tools

Although not an essential part of an aircraft repaint, it helps if your paint program has the facility to use vector components as part of the graphic. These are basically things such as boxes, circles, lines etc. that can be edited and moved around even after they're placed onto the image. Having the ability to use such vector tools means that, for example, you can set an area of your repaint to be a blue triangle and later, if necessary, you can change the colour, size, shape and location to fit in with the rest of your work. If you don't have vector tools but you do have layers, you can use seperate layers for some shapes so that they remain independent from the rest of the aircraft body.

It's fairly important that your paint program can handle text, so that you can move it around and format it - sometimes aircraft logos are best used as simple graphics, but occasionally it's more effective to recreate them using a good set of text tools...

Pallettes

Make sure that your graphics application can handle pallettes correctly. If your program alters the colours in the image every time you load it (to optimise it) you may have problems. It's most useful if you can edit the pallette directly, and have a selection of standard colours to pick from. Most paint programs nowadays feature fairly good pallette control, so this shouldn't be a major problem.

If you do have problems with a constantly shifting colour pallette, you can usually sort this out later on when you come to putting your file into FS2000 itself. (See the file formats + testing section).

Recommendations (What would I recommend and what do I use?)

This tutorial was produced using Macromedia Fireworks 2 although version 4 is now available and is a significant improvement. Although it's mainly a web graphics application, its use of vectors and bitmaps together at the pixel level makes it ideal for FS2000 repaints. Everything in Fireworks remains editable all the time, so updating or tweaking your repaints is possible at any point. Fireworks isn't as expensive as Photoshop but it's still not the cheapest program for the casual user. You can download a 30-day trial version from Macromedia if you'd like to try it out.

Adobe Photoshop is currently on version 6 and is certainly an excellent program for repaints. Fireworks does have the edge when it comes to vector tools (and maintaining a fully editable graphic) but Photoshop has many more bitmap tools. Unfortunately, you really have to be either a graphics professional, a very dedicated repainter or just simply a software pirate to afford this package, so it's probably too expensive to recommend here (depending on what your feelings about software piracy are!). See Adobe's website for more information or to download a save-disabled tryout version.

The latest version of Paintshop Pro is version 7 and has a vast array of bitmap and vector tools. This is reasonably priced and certainly does a very good job with repaints. It's not quite as useful as Photoshop, though, and you may be put off by its slightly quirky interface, but it's probably worth downloading the shareware version and trying it out for 30 days to see what you think. Paintshop Pro is available from Jasc Software.

Getting even cheaper, you might also consider PhotoPlus 6 from Serif. This is basically a scaled-down Photoshop clone and certainly represents good value for the price. It features all the tools you might need for repainting, although some are a little limited and you may not find it as easy to use as some of the above products. It is considerably cheaper, though, so well worth a look. You can find out more at Serif's website, where you can also download PhotoPlus 5 (the previous version) for free. PhotoPlus 5 could be a useful starting point if you're on a really limited budge, as it does feature layers and is capable of producing very reasonable results (not bad for nothing!).

You can actually use totally vector-based graphics applications for FS2000 repaints, although this is by no means simple. As long as the application can export as a bitmap, then you could set up a template and work on that. Examples are things like Corel Draw (currently version 10, and which also includes PhotoPaint 10 - a rather good Photoshop-like graphics program. Possibly worth checking out just individually!), Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand.