Hi all,

 

I'm trying my hand at my first ever repaint for FSX. I'm in the process of repainting the JustFlight DC-3 to a Flying Tiger Lines livery.

 

 

 

 

This one

 

Reference #1

 

Reference #2

 

I have done the fuselage correct;y, but am so far unable to come to grips with the IMO horrible paintkit, specifically regarding the sharkmouth. I have done the sideparts ok, but the undernose DDS keeps getting messed up. Somehow the model is mirroring the undernose part and scaling is way off. I can't get the lines to connect together, so as to get a connecting and alligning sharkmouth under the nose.

 

I have read about the old Abacus fsxrepaint tool, but that won't run on my Win7-64 rig.

I use DXTbmp and paint.net.

 

Can anyone help? I can post the DDS files if necessary.

 

Edit: Sorry, doublepost, please close or delete.

Edited April 23, 201214 yr by Tobus

I just took a look at the paintkit. Umm... "interesting". Wireframes would help.

 

There is a useful pair of tools called UVmapper and ModelconverterX. I shan't say more (other than Google or FSDeveloper.com)

 

The reason why I say this is that technically speaking, you aren't allowed to fiddle with the copyrighted mdl file without the owners permission. BUT... if you do have permissions, you can use these tools to create your own wireframe textures - and that helps a lot when trying to align bits of texture.

Hmm, permissions aside, I'm very new in repainting. Re modelling is way out of my league (I think).

It's not actually modelling, just creating wireframes textures... here's one I have permission for - just as an example:

 

 

 

 

 

As you can see - if you now made a texture called "wireframes" for example, and then a new texture folder and entry in the aircraft.cfg in fsx, you could have a wireframe model in FSX to look at

Hmm, I think I understand. What I've done now is add markers every 5 pixels, with the 5th a different color, to get my bearing and paint in the outlines of mouth and teeth on the various DDS files and their incorporated texture parts. This gives me help and had helped me to at least make and allign the bottom part of the mouth from left to right. Tonight I'm planning on doing the upper part via the same technique.

 

When all is done, I'll magic wand all the correct outlines without the markers into a fresh copy of the DDS to negate all the texture degradation because of saving for the 1000th time, then color them in. This at least works, although it is of course very time consuming (edit, save, save dds, reload a/c in FSX, check, re-edit, save, save dds, reload, etc etc etc).