Gimp, alpha channel and tail.psd

[Crankpin 15]

Could someone using GIMP help me with getting the apha channel transparency working with the tail.psd.I have the rest of my first repaint all set to go, just the night lighting of the tail is defeating me at the moment. At night the vert. tail and inner engine cowlings appear 'fully lit' rather than shaded.I followed the same steps with the tail that I'd successfully used for all the other textures to add my paint then convert to .dds, but is there something different that I have to do with the tail to cope with the alpha channel it's using that the others didn't ?I can see the alpha in GIMP ok ... but it's shaded red rather than the black/white I'd have naively expected... whats happening there ? TIAJohn

[NM5K 1]

Dunno.. I used GIMP to repaint one of mine, and no problems here with any of thetextures and the alpha channel. But.. what is "tail.psd"? I know of no files by that name.All of my alpha channel bmp's were gray scale, including the tail. I suspect that you seered is part of the problem. How are you extracting the alpha channel? Are you usingdxtbmp, or gimp itself? In my case, I used dxtbmp to extract the alpha channels, whichI sent to gimp for resizing only, and I extracted 32 bit bmp's from dxtbmp to gimp forpaint tweaking and resizing. Then I used dxtbmp to put em back together again, andno problems. I've tweaked my Southwest version yet again since the first time..And... further lightened the blue just a tad more.. I'm anal about that shade of"canyon blue".. :/ I'm still not 100% satisfied, but I'm getting closer with each tweak.The thing about the canyon blue on those jets is that with bright lighting, they tendto look lighter than the shade might look with less light, or say in a hanger..The blue is quite reflective, and in the daytime it reflects a lot of light, including theblue sky, clouds, etc.. Which tends to make it look lighter. So I'm trying to find theperfect balance between bright day, and lower light levels. I'm getting there..I'll probably tweak it once or twice more before I'm perfectly satisfied. :/But so far, no problem with the alpha channels on the tail. I see the aimed logolighting as normal. And all my windows look normal, and can be seen through.

[Crankpin 15]

Ah sorry with the filename, careless of me, it's pmdg_737NGX_tail.psd that I'm using from the NGX \PSDFiles folder.I'm using GIMP from start to finish no other utilities. I see the alpha channel by going to the 'channels' page of the layers/channels dialogue then making it visible with the 'eye' visibilty button, thats how/where I see it as 'red' when I make it visible.I'm missing something here all the other textures worked just fine, but the tail is different in using an alpha channel whereas the others use a seperate night texture file....

[Crankpin 15]

Well, I did find the easy answer, use Photoshop

[Guest]

John, I had the same problem with the red alpha channels and the whole of tail lit at night. Here's how I fixed it. OPEN your painted tail psd using any PSD editor. In the channels, you will notice the Alpha. DUPLICATE or COPY this layer and save as a new image with the following properties - transparent background, BMP with a 8 bit alpha. Save this file as tail alpha or similar.Now Merge and Flatten layers in your psd tail file. Close psd editor. OPEN DxtBmp and open your saved, merged and flattened psd tail file. In the Alpha menu at the top of the screen, select import Alpha. Import the Alpha BMP you created previously. The alpha channel should now display at the top right of the screen. If you haven't already done so, flip Image and alpha, making sure both files have the same orientation, save as DDS TEXTURE, DXT5 FILE NAME- pmdg_737NGX_tail. Finished - place in your appropriate 737NGX texture folder. Hope this helps. steve

[Crankpin 15]

hmm thanks for that Steve, while I'd got over/around the original issue, your fix here gives me more understanding of why. Really it was the multiple uses of the alpha channel that had me confused at that stage.