Hello all,I am trying to edit an existing paint into something slightly different and I am using paint.net to go about it. The paint textures are .dds files. My question is, how are these 2d drawings interpreted by FSX as 3d? What exactly is the process? I would like to understand the inner works of how FSX uses these .dds files.

The 2d drawings are not interpreted as 3d.The graphic engine in FSX ( and all other sorts of 3D animations) just uses the graphic files to "dress" the 3d objects.You can find a lot of information about how 3d animations work on the internet.This is not exclusive for flightsimulators like FSX.It goes for all 3d animations available. ( games , instructions, commercials etc.)Leen de Jager

If I may be so bold...Photoshop and Corel Draw suite may be too expensive perhaps, but you might consider editing your graphics with GIMP - it has everything Photoshop has (well, sort of). You might appreciate the extra possibilities GIMP offers over paint.net - if you can stay on the learning curve that is. I confess I don't use GIMP, but what I have seen looks good - it' just that I have used the Corel programs for almost 20 years now at a guess...

Thank you for the responses. I have opened a few .dds files and I can see the paint for the fuselage and the tail, but the strange thing is you can only see a portion of it and the rest kind of phases out into white. Any reasons behind this?

I guess that first of all it depends which aircraft and which textures you mean.To help - and to add a bit to your first post - imagine looking at a real plane and taking a photo of it. The plane's fuselage is (just as an example) 10 ft in diameter and round. On the photo the fuselage is flat and uses scaled image that is 10 (scale) feet high. A texture is like a photo - flat - and this is taken by the computer and stretched on to the 3d model fuselage. So the bits facing you will appear well drawn, but as the texture gets stretched over the top of the plane, those parts will stretch. Hard to imagine without a sketch, but it is a case of stretching a flat image over a curved surface - the bits that touch the curve first are displayed as shown, but the bits that belong at the top and bottom get horribly stretched.This is not caused by FSX though. It is how the model maker "maps" his texture to his plane. Some create four views of the model (top, both sides and underneath), some distort the image by stretching the texture. So perhaps the texture fades to white because that particular model would otherwise have stretch marks? Only the very best model makers pay attention to how they "unwrap" their 3D model for painting. Many make a great 3D model and absolutely kill it for repainters by creating poor texture maps. If you look closely at some of the FSX models' textures, you will see that the Microsoft team's painters stretch the textures to get as much detail in as little space as possible.So the summary answer would be to look at as many different makers' textures and see as many different methods as possible to see ho others have done it. Repainting shouldn't be rocket science, but you do need to think a little bit about the physics of transferring 2D onto 3D.