Hi I am learning the basics to repainting aircraft. I was wondering if you could give me tips or help and also how do you repaint FSX aircraft because It looks a little diffrent. I will probaly be using paint.net or Microsoft Paint. ThanksPatrick

Good Luck, Patrick, learning to do FS aircraft repaints. It's a lot of fun.May I suggest studying the Aircraft Repainting Toolkit post at the top of this forum . . . but I will give you the Number-One RULE1.) Only use a paint-program that supports LAYERSRemember: You're not actually 'painting' the paintkit but rather, LAYERING paint over the paintkit.When the repaint is completed, Save-As a *.BMP file and convert it to Extended Fileformat -- I only use DXT3 (no mips) for FS9 or DDS-DXT5 (with mips) for FSX aircraft, exterior textures.As alway, thanks to Martin Wright for giving us FREE-of-charge, DXTbmp

Hi Bill & Patrick,Alltough I agree DXTBmp is a very fine freeware tool ,wich I use frequently myself ,I cannot fully agree whith you.Just an example:When we have a real paintkit existing of layered PSD files , these files also contain the alpha layers.Opening these files in a paintprogram and saving these files ,after the repaintwork,as a 24 bit BMP and converting them with DXTBmp will give us DXT3 files WITHOUT alpha layersVery many folks make this mistake and thats why there are so many repaints in de library without alpha layers..( dull and glossless paints )We all know, we can export the alpha ( from an existing repaint) with the help from DXTBmp to a BMP file and and use this alpha again by importing the alpha in our repainted bmp when saving to DXT.To do this ,we need another DXT file wich contains the correct alpha.E.g. some other repaint from the same model.As you can see , this is quiet complicated and tricky.We have to keep in mind that some alpha-layers may have been made especially for the repaint of the model in question and therefore not suitable for other repaints of the same model.What to do then?Just do NOT use DXTBmp when you have a PSD paintit with alphas.Make your repaintwork ( including editing the alpha if you like ) and save the PSD file (YES the PSD file and DO NOT save as BMP)There is a simple way to save PSD DIRECTLY to DXT or DDS including the alphas.Just use "IMAGE-TOOL".I am not sure ,Image-Tool can handle all DDS formats or not.If not , not a problem either , just convert the PSD to DXT32-888 and covert this file with DXTBmp to the desired DDS format.The alpha`s will be saved and thats all this is about.Best regardsLeen de Jagerhttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/180147.jpg

Leen, I'm afraid I have to side with Bill (OK the other Bill) on this. Martin Wright's freeware DXTBMP has an excellent way of handling alpha channels. If you have a layered original with an alpha channel, as is sometimes the case, you only need to send the blank alpha channel bitmap to your editor, copy/paste the info onto that bitmap and bring it back into DXTBMP. Voila! No information lost. PPlus you can save any aplha channel changes you make on the original layered texture file and just give it an opacity of zero for the save operation. Of course I may be a tad biased towards Martin and his creations since, a few years ago, I noticed that the buttons at the bottom left seemed a bit out of order. I sent Martin an email suggesting he rearrange the order of those buttons to follow the normal flow of work (input from disk, send to editor, retrieve from editor, save to disk) to make the operation a bit more intuitive. He graciously agreed and incorporated my suggestion. Patrick, if you need more help after reading the tutorials, contact me. I'll be glad to get you further along.

I am afraid you misunderstood what I said.The only thing I said is , the fact DXTBmp cannot handle layered PSD files directly.Imagetool however can do this.DXTBmp can handle targa files with alphas I know that for years.Working on PSD files with alpha and converting them with Imagetool is just a faster way to do the job with less danger of making mistakes.We just skip the Targa between the PSD and the DXTLeen

Here is a nice little site, Patrick. There are many helpful things in the site that can guide you along your learning path.http://www.simmerspaintshop.com/Don