Texture size in the aircraft

[Roca 0]

Hello all,I've been repainting aircrafts for a long time, using CLS planes LevelD PMDG... but I never tried one technique that I will explain.Usually when you resize a texture you can get a loss of quality and better performance, but what will happen when you make a double bigger size? It is supposed to have an improved and detailed texture as also a bigger file size. I've made a repaint for the PMDG747 with the Virgin Atlantic colours. I used their own paint kit, and doubled the size, then I worked with the bigger paint kit, so at first, in the game it should have a better quality.So finally the parts of the fuse and the tail where from 1024 to 2048 exported with DXTbmp in .DDS format DXT5. (Not resized after the paint job, first I resized the paint kit which may have a loss of quality and then I worked with bigger resolution pictures to make photoreal)My surprise was that the quality wasn't that big I expected... for example the windows are dotted when you zoom in, but on the photoshop at the view of 100% the repaint looks perfect, so I asume when I zoom on FSX you can see those windows like I see on photoshop. Even with a texture of 4096 I don't see any difference.What can cause this? Maybe the bump or specular maps are too small? Anyway I will post a picture of the progress in order to show you how it's going.

[Roca 0]

Hi again,It seems that I've found the solution. I will explain it soon and also will post pictures.Bye.

[Roca 0]

The problem was that I forgot to uncheck the box of Mip map and also saving textures and making a new bump maps as 32 bit imageHere is the WIP

[Guest lgvpilot1]

That is very Impressive :( And looking at your posts it only took you 40mins to work it out That's good , very good Mark

[Roca 0]

Thank you very much Mark,I had issues with the mip maping a long time ago, but this time I didn't realised that the box of that option was checked. Also I was exporting the textures as DXT5 and not 32 bit which is one of the options that shows the DXTbmp.I just want to tell from this post, to anyone who is repainting, that you can also make high resolution repaints, by just changing the size of the paint kit. I saw a lot of times, that is common to resize some textures like the trees in order to improve the frame rate, so at that point, I knew that it was also available do the same but at reverse, from smaller to bigger but never think about doing it to an airplane since I downloaded the 757 American Airlines from McPhat Studios. At that moment I opened the texture in DXTbmp to see the quality and I saw that the texture was bigger than the usual (Also PMDG is doing a bigger textures for their 747-8i and 8F) I went to open a stock texture of the 757 from CS and the differences in size were obvious.So what I want to say by telling this, by resizing the paintkit of the aircraft you will get a blurry textures because you are enlarging the texture from 1024 to 2048 (or even more) but if you have a source like airliners.net or jetphotos.net by using big resolution photos you can make good photoreal airplanes. It's also hard to find the perfect picture to modify it and put it over the paint kit, so at this point you can admire the work of these artists at McPhat Studios who made the textures without using photoreal ones. I always though that a good combination of photorealism and hand made is perfect, but looking at the work from McPhat Studios, the drawing and painting techniques are the most important.Now talking about the Pretty Woman 747 I just have to modify some points that aren't correct and it will be ready to fly. I'm thinking to make soon another repaint for the PMDG 747 this time trying to improve this.Bye bye!Roca.

[TerrenceK 0]

It's also hard to find the perfect picture to modify it and put it over the paint kit, so at this point you can admire the work of these artists at McPhat Studios who made the textures without using photoreal ones. I always though that a good combination of photorealism and hand made is perfect, but looking at the work from McPhat Studios, the drawing and painting techniques are the most important.

I don't think you will see any HD photo-cut-and-paste paints anytime soon. Unless people have access to planes, real up close, to make really large, extremely detailed photos. Good job on the 747!!!

[Guest gauramohana]

Holy c$$p that looks really good! how did you do it? (i understand you resized the textures, but did you do anything else?) could you treach me how to make repaints like that? (i do know how to make normal repaints already)

[Roca 0]

Thank you guys,Actually the repaint is stopped but I just have to finish some details and then make the night textures. I want to concentrate this time with the leveld 767 too.To obtain the best quality you have to resize to bigger resolution, but of course you need more detailed details ( :( ) . I hope that in my next paint I will use photoreal only in some places like the windows but all other things must be done by hand, like the rivets.It is hard for me too because I only have made photoreal textures but never tried hand paint, of course I've also played with alpha layer and a little bit with bump maps, not yet spec maps.Bye!!

[Kyle94 0]

Is this available for download if so can someone please tell me where.

[Guest anthony31fs]

I'll just add a bit of explanation about the larger texture sizes (let's call them HD textures and they are either 2048 or 4096 in size , ie greater than 1024 pixels ) which I recently found out about myself.As Roca noticed if you have HD textures with mipmaps then they will not appear at full resolution. Remove the mipmaps and FSX will draw the HD textures.This is because of the texture_max_load line in the FSX.cfg file which defaults to 1024. If FSX loads a HD texture with mipmaps then it will only use the 1024 mipmap (or one of the smaller mipmaps depending on the distance you are from the aircraft). If FSX loads a HD texture without mipmaps then it is forced to use the higher resolution as it is the only resolution available (regardless of your texture_max_load setting).If you would like to have HD textures with mipmaps (and there may be times you do, I find bump maps can sometimes get ugly with mipmaps, depends on the bumpmap) then you will need to change the texture_max_load line in the [Graphics] section of your FSX.CFG fileChange it to either TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=2048orTEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=4096Note that this setting will automatically return again to 1024 if you make any changes to the graphics settings within FSX which is a real PITA.

[Leen3131cs 107]

Hi guys,On top of the paintersforum there is a post called: High resolution textures - how to get them to show You really should have read this before..http://forum.avsim.net/topic/318017-high-resolution-textures-how-to-get-them-to-show/I agree with TerrenceK.It`s not very likely we will see any HD photo-cut-and-paste paints anytime soon.If we want to show extreme details , we must have access to extreme close-ups showing the plane , wich is not impossible, but these pictures are very hard to get.The big problem wich stays is how to paste all these pictures on the texturesheet and building them seamless together.I am really convinced ( in fact I simply know ) doing that will almost be as difficult as painting the whole thing by hand.And if we succeed we end up with one livery without corresponding bumpmap and speculars and still are not having a paintkit to make another livery.In other words we`ll have to make a customised HD-Paintkit including bumpmaps and speculars , first.Keep in mind , painting at HD shows every mistake a painter might make.The tail above shows a Virgin logo ,wich is at first glance ,not so smooth as we usually see on low res paints.BUT this logo is not smooth in reality too!!Well done!!Leen

[EagleSkinner 36]

Nicely done there! At first I thought I was looking at a McPhat Studios paintjob.Personally I prefer to use dds dxt5 textures and simply paint on 4096 pixel squares for highest detail. 32 bit increases a texture's filesize by a factor of 4 and the image quality gain is not worth this. Rather than have 32 bit 1024 pixel textures make dxt5 textures at 2048. You get more pixels that way and it's pixels that count more than texture format.Which is what McPhat do....

[Leen3131cs 107]

Nicely done there! At first I thought I was looking at a McPhat Studios paintjob.

I agree ,the paint looks good (at first sight)There is however a big difference with the procedure McPhat uses. (I assume Chris already knows what I am telling here)Roca enlarged the paintkit and painted on that.This means lines and pixels as present on the paintkit will be the same on the final paint.( less sharp and distorted as I`ll explain )This implicates lines and rivets to stay to wide and fat.On almost all normal resolution paints rivets and lines are to heavy.We simply cannot draw a line nor make dot less than one pixel wide.When we have a texture of 1024x1024 with a sharp one pixel wide line ( without AntiAliasing ) and enlarge that texture to 2048 we end up with a line wich is 3 pixels wide ( kind of double sided AA line )When we enlare the 1024x1024 with the sharp one pixel line up to 4096 this line will be approx.7 (PaintshopPro 7 and Photoshop 8 ) pixels wide and very vage. ( we expect it to be 4 pixels wide , wich is quiet logic )In other words simply blowing up a paintkit will not do the trick and the result is only worse.Doing so it will bring us possibly great artwork on a vague and distorted paintkit based background ( aircraft ).The only way to achieve real high resolution is to redo the paintkit as well.As the same goes for the bumpmapping it takes the guys at McPhatStudios several months before they are actually ready to start painting the first livery.For McPhatstudios the paintwork itself is the easiest part of the job.( not saying their paintjobs are easy )RegardsLeen de JagerExampleText : Copyright (8pnt) and a sharp one pixel line (no AA ) on a 1024x1024 texture enlarged to 4096x4096.Text below: Same text (32pnt) and one pixel line made on the actual 4096 texture.I used the same font (Arial) in both cases, as you can see the distortion is so huge it almost looks like a complete different font (especially the O )the second picture shows the use of a blown-up (to 4096x4096) paintkit used for a high res paint, only the exit-text is high res the rest is worse than it was on 1024.

[EagleSkinner 36]

Yes - McPhat start big in the first place and have better artists than me ;)As Leen says - it's all about detail - don't blow up small textures unless you have to. A pixel is a pixel is a pixel. Once an image has been set to "size A" jpg, you simply cannot put pixels in where none exist. You just get computer "guesswork" that blurs and blends the gaps between pixels.

[Leen3131cs 107]

This is a rare moment.Why??This time a totally disagree with you ,Chris , wich is something almost never happens.When you say " and have better artists than me ;) " you are absolutely wrong.McPhat painters are top-painters no doubt about ,but so are you.As you said, they start big and they only can do that because they start from scratch building their own paintkit ,custom bumpmaps and peculars.When you have such a base its a matter of sliding in the liveries.OK that liveries must be of high quality but I am sure you are skilled enough to make that quality too.I think the McPhat secret lies in "teamwork" dividing tasks , splitting up the job, filtering out mistakes collegues make.Once in a while members of the McPhat-team (e.g. Dave Sweetman) publish private paints on the internet (AVSIM)They use the defeault paintkit wich comes with the model as a base.http://library.avsim.net/esearch.php?DLID=&Name=&FileName=&Author=sweetman&CatID=rootPersonally I prefer painting small stuff , as you do.Once ( years ago ) I did 25 liveries for the Fokker F28 by Project Fokker Jetline ( including the release liveries )they asked me for the job.I did not turn down their request , after completing the project ,I was completely done with those things (speaking in painting terms), I never painted a jetliner since.Small stuff is really fun.At the moment I am working on Carenado`s Mooney .Its a big challenge to make bare metal in X-Plane.Alltough X-Plane allows us to use 2048 textures this bird is limited to 1024 per texturesheet.I am adding specularity to the textures and I am changing the normal-mapping.This might become the first X-Plane-skin wearing the McPhat-logo(freeware) whenever it passes QC. http://www.dutchfs.com/crew/leen/X-Plane/greymooney.pngBest regardsLeen