I'm stumped when it comes to getting a metallic gleam on my paintjobs. Not bare metal, but metallic paint, like you would have on a car. I've been trying to study pictures and look for the gradients, but the reflection is always different depending on the viewpoint. Even with alpha I haven't been able to achieve the look that I want. Anyone have some tips on how to do this?Thanks,Carl

I am afraid this answer is a simple no.Painting programs enable us to make all sorts of textures exept for metallic ones.Metallic paint on a car is made of tiny particles of metal floating in a transparent colored coating.The changing angle under wich light comes in makes the glittering effect.We cannot make a that on a virtual plane for flightsim.When you make a high resolution-high quality photograph of a metallic car.The photo will not reproduce the metallic effect either.RegardsLeen

You could try adding fine, light grain on the alpha channel. It's nowhere near realistic, but it's better than nothing I think.

I figured as much. So I suppose the only way is to paint the gleam on top. I'll give that a shot and see if I can't do anything with it. Adding a noise filter to the alpha might not be a bad idea either, I'm just concerned that it will just look pixelated since the alpha bmps are so small..Thanks guys!

Possible, all the way. That is, if we're talking about FSX, and in high definition. FS9 or FSX normal definition : not so possible. You add a light grain on the specular, and match it on the specular alpha. You're going to need to do it HD though, cause you need the high contrast, high definition in order for this to work. We use the technique in a slightly different form on our UHDT for the Super 80 and CS 757...

Yeah, I imagine it is much more possible in FSX. Sadly, my poor old Macbook can only handle FS9 with good addons.

Possible, all the way. (TerrenceK said)Terrence is an optimist ( surprisingly often his dreams come true, I must admit)Yes when we are talking about extreme high resolutions and extreme skilled painters we might get extreme close to it.Nevertheless we will have something wich only comes close.We will not have thousands of metal fragments reflect under thousends of different angles.For that we need ten times as much pixels/per meter at least.Lets hope for the miracle.RegardsLeen

You want a metalflake metallic? Or maybe gold-plate? Or a Dupont "Chromalusion"?Or a Flip-Flop? Or mother-of-pearl white with bronze appliquéNo problem. Except of course as mentioned before - FSX only and the metalflake looks better, the larger your textures get. Most of the effects need in-depth artwork on the specular and spec-alpha channels. Some need a new cubic environment map and in some cases you need to create a new bumpmap.

Also worth mentioning here is that a lot of surface effect for netallics and for bare metals can also be greatly affected by the cubic environment map (i.e. the terrain that is reflected by the polished surface) I the example below, I have used the global environment created by Icarus (you might remember the Pitts they bought out a couple of years ago?) note that the polished aluminium is highly reflective - that is an alpha channel function and the painted areas are flatter.Now here's the same plane with a more temperate zone cubic environment map (one I created, based on the area around Plum Island):If you look closely, you may recognise the chase plane reflected in "Eleen and Jerry's" spinner....and here is the default FSX envmapSo you can see - not only do the textures themselves play a role, you may also effect the aircraft paint by changing the world in which she flies. Which is very time consuming as default FSX allows only one environment map at any one time. Some developers may consider this and create specific environments for specific areas of the plane, but these would only be highly specialised developements and would need the extra file specially mapped on the mdl.

Yes when we are talking about extreme high resolutions and extreme skilled painters we might get extreme close to it. I said before.Yes this was really what I was thinking of saying that.Very impressive.RegardsLeen