I'm trying to finish up my first repaint for the POSKY 757-200WL but I'm having problems with how it looks at night. I've tried a bunch of different lightmaps from various repaints but the windows never seem to line up. So I was wondering if there are any tutorials out there that teach you how to create your own lightmaps for repaints, are there any?Andy

Download the original Posky lightmaps.Add these to your repaint and it should be OK.If not you might have changed the position of the windows on your texturesheets during the paintingproces.If so ,use the lightmapfile , as a low opacity-layer over your texturefile and reposition your windows using the overlay as a guideline.Editing lightmaps is not very common in repainting.Most repainters just edit the diffuse-files wich actually give the aircraft its colors.Editing lightfiles comes in after changing a window layout (e.g. when making a freighter instead of an passenger livery)Morgan Dainows excellent painting tutorial does not give any information about lightfile-editing. http://members.lycos.co.uk/mcwdainowIn a nutshell :Lightfiles also exits of two layers of wich one is an alpha.This alpha-layer is not creating gloss but creating light instead.Making lightfile-alphas is about the same trick as making gloss-alphas. See Morgans Tutorial.Not all lightfiles work the same way depending on how the mdl was created.Opening some lightsfiles and some experimenting will make all clear.This all goes also for lightfiles in FSX but we must keep in mind the fact that some lighteffects on fuselage and wings are created by effects instead of a lightmap.Once I have been looking for a lightmap to edit a lighteffect and did not find any for this lighteffect.Now I know why and at this point I am not so happy with FSX.Leen

Is there a download link for the original lightmaps? It didn't come with the paintkit and since I can't access the Avsim Library, I can't find the correct ones on FlightSim. (There's an alternative paintkit download there but that lightmap doesn't work for me.)

http://www.projectopensky.com/downloads-index.php

Always nice to get a polite "thanks" after being helpfull.Leen de Jager

I Have to admit that my first thought was that the OP had not responded due to the Avsim outage , but I guess I was wrong on that point .I may be out of line here but it really gets to me that some people will ask for help, and when it is given they do not take the time to reply.There are many reasons to reply , the first being good old fashion manners, even if the solution proposed was not the one you were looking for.Secondly , many people use the search engine for their problems , and one persons solution can be the same for many .lastly there are some very talented people who frequent these boards , and they give their time and knowledge .I for one am always keen to read the posts from people like Leen and Morgan , I have learnt a lot just by reading their advice to others.I would not like to think that they would no longer be interested in helping those of us who are still on the long learning curve of mastering repainting ,due to the lack of respect shown by a minority that cannot even be bothered to reply to help given , though I would understand if they did .So in the absence of the OP I would like to say thank you Leen and to all those who make the effort to try to help us improve our repainting skills Mark

Thanks Mark , its fine this way.I am very pleased to have "our" forum back.A big thank you to Tom and his great crew.Leen

Yes I agree that the lack of a response when advice/assistance is given is about as rude as it gets. Another thing that irritates the hell out of me is how a thread/question can go unanswered for days, but as soon as you take pity on the poor sap and post a reply, the "experts" swarm in almost immediately to point out every little insignificant error, usually due to oversimplification, that may have inadvertantly crept into your reply regardless of whether it has anything to do with the original question or not.These are the reasons I rarely post on these or any other flightsim forums nowdays and also the basic reasoning behind my decision to discontinue the development and finance of my personal FS site, humble and useless as it may be. When negative comments and critisisms outnumber positive comments 10:1 that's a pretty good indication that it's time to stop beating your head against the wall and move on :) .Perhaps we should have a new forum or some type of user rating system where we can post usernames of the offenders and a link to the thread in which the incident occured. Then a person could do a quick search prior to wasting half an hour researching and typing a response that will ultimately go unapreciated.Naa... Probably easier to simply treat the forums as "read only".For the record Leen, I've always regarded your knowledge and assistance in the paint forums as invaluable.Jim