Hey guys, I recently got back into FSX and repainting, but I would still love to learn the techniques of the great painters. Now when I first got into repainting, I quickly mastered slapping paint onto an aircraft, giving it a simple "matt" look. Like this: http://www.flightsim...+ADV.jpg&idx=20(not my repaint btw, so no offence to who's ever it is)Then I learnt about Dirt, Shine e.t.c and my repaints improved from the "matt" look to something better, (no screenshot i'm afraid as I have lost all my old repaints)But I am really interested in learning the techniques to make repaints similar to POSKY quality. I'm not sure but POSKY repaints seem to be semi-photoreal, but I'm not sure if thats right? i.e. they have shine that isn't created with the alpha layer, it looks like a photo but high quality.http://img215.images...s744bodylt.png/ (It is clearly visible on the tail here)That effect is also on these repaint and many more: http://www.freeskypr...ysian-airlines/I have experimented with gradients and can get a similar effect, but not quite what I want. Am I on the right lines with gradients or not? Thanks, Connor

Try this tutorial by Bill Womack:Follow this linkThat should help you on your way. In fact it should cover all your needs initially to get the highlight/shade effects you want. That's the short answer. On the other hand, the FSX engine adds light, shade and highlights automatically. Most people have "Light Bloom" switched off in FSX because all too often the effect is ghastly or eats FPS. So many developers "paint" this directly onto their models (as in the tutorial). If you have Light Bloom on and observe the FSX default aircraft, you'll see this. With Bloom off, you'll then see why some developers add this effect to their textures - it's a relic of FS9 and earlier models where the FS engine was unable to add light and shade to aircraft. Remember - all lighting effects in FS9 and earlier are static, i.e. painted on to the texture. In FSX these effects are dynamic and you shouldn't need to paint any on the texture sheets. The FSX lighting and shading is occasionally not enough for some painters so they paint "Bloom off" model textures, but the effect is there and a good base texture will show this - you just have to look at the FSX default aircraft textures to realise this. But if you want to go deeper, you have to consider modifying the specualar textures. The "coloured" part is, at its simplest, a copy of the normal "diffuse" texture where the "Hue" has been colour-shifted through 180° (think 'colour wheel' when you look at sliders in your paint program). Then desaturate and lighten that specular. This is usually done in a sub-menu or window called "HSB" for Hue Saturation BrightnessNext stumbling block is the specular alpha channel. This controls the so-called 'falloff' of the highlights. Dark is soft, light is sharp, more intensified. Of course that only works on mdls that have been exported using the ACES suggestions and methods in the SDK. There are some clever-dicky developers who use the specular channel and specular alpha to control shine (which should be a function of the diffuse texture sheet alpha). Two quotes here from the SDK:

The Diffuse map is the base RGBA texture. If Reflection, Specular and Bump maps are all disabled in the Display options dialogue in Flight Simulator X, this texture will still be visible. For aircraft the Alpha channel in the Diffuse texture is used as the Reflection map. For a Reflection map, grayscale values in the Alpha channel define how reflective a surface will be. Flight Simulator X uses the same grayscale range as previous versions; in other words in the Reflection map, white would be defined as completely unreflective and black would be defined as completely reflective.

The specular map controls the specular characteristics on a model’s surface. There are two components to the map; the RGB and the Alpha. The RGB component defines the color and brightness of the specular highlights and the Alpha channel defines the falloff for those specular highlights. Falloff refers to the sharpness of the highlight. A light value in the specular Alpha channel will result in a sharper highlight, where a dark value results in a broader, softer-edged highlight. Combining the RGB and Alpha values in various ways will result in a wide range of surface specular characteristics.

So if the developer has followed these guidelines, you can also add a great deal of effect by adusting the specular and its alpha channel.But I should add that there are quite a few developers who do not follow SDK conventions and still make their FSX models to FS9 methods. So... the simplest - but hardest - answer of all is that you have to treat each model differently when using its paint kit. Experiment, experiment, experiment. Get to know each different developer's quirks.

Thanks for the advice my friend, it was very useful. I suppose I'll just keep experimenting until I get it right :)Thanks,