Help With Aircraft Texture

[BonanzaDude 3]

I am looking to repaint a freeware aircraft that I downloaded. After looking through the tutorial listed on the lycos website, I am running into a problem. I am trying to load the .bmp's into PhotoShop and it is saying that the files isn't recognized. Is the aircraft's oroginal painter somehow locking the file so that noone can repaint it? If that is the case, how do I go about getting the outlines of the plane to start my repainting.Thanks,John

[mcwdainow 0]

Sounds like the bmp is in a format unsupported by the program.. likely to be DXT3. Open the bmp up in to DXTBmp (google it if you don't have it.. will become invaluable). Resave the bmp as either a 32bit or 24bit, it should then open up in the program. If you continue to have problems feel free to post back here.. theres usually someone who can help :)

[EagleSkinner 36]

Yep, the problem is indeed the image format - bmp is not equal to bmp. What happens is that bitmaps are generally rather large, and games programmers need to compress images more. JPG is far too 'lossy' for this so different compression formats are used. There are several formats that FS understands. DXT 1, 3 and 5 are the usual. Then you can use '32 bit 888' (just another compression "type" and there are longer winded explanations around)You need to convert images using a freeware program called DXTbmp. You can get this free from http://www.mnwright.btinternet.co.uk/ (you will also need mwgfx.dll for certain operations - read the details on the MNWright website)Another choice - go to the microsoft flightsim pages and download the freeware program Imagetool. Use of these is fairly intuitive. Load your "unreadable" image and "save as" 24 bit windows bitmap. Then go ahead and repaint your textures and save again as windows bitmap......and use DXTbmp or Imagetool to convert back to FS-readable bitmap.Now comes the Caveat!FSX prefers a different format called DDS. Don't ask me why, but this now means that images need to be flipped vertically during the conversion from windows bitmap to DDS. "Imagetool" from microsoft does this for you without any input from yourself. Just save as DDS. If you're using DXTbmp, I think you have to manually select "flip" image and alpha from the options menu.There is more for you to learn as well. FS also makes optional use of "mipmaps". I don't understand the meaning of the term properly, but what these are are a series of smaller and smaller copies of the original texture image. The further away you are from an object, the less image data you need to load and FS does this by loading the appropriate mipmap according to distance. Thing is, mipmaps sometimes cause "blurries" because of FS loading the wrong one... You'll find that most repainters switch "save mipmaps" options off. You can read about these more in other forums and tutorials, this was just intended as an intro.