Hi Folks.

 

I'm fairly new to designing my own panels, and I seem to have come up against something that has stopped me dead in my tracks. I really hope that someone can help me, or at least help me stop banging my head against my desk!

 

I'm trying to create a 2D main panel using a photograph for the background. (Panel is for the Virtavia Martin Mars - really love the plane, really hate the existing VC & 2D panels.) I've been fairly successful in most aspects & it almost looks great.

 

Except the background bitmap. While in FSX, it appears to have colour banding or posterization of the image, no matter what I do. It also doesn't match colourwise to what I see when I open the bitmap outside of FSX. I'm creating the bitmap in Photoshop CS5, and I've tried saving it as every single possibility of a bitmap I can think of.

 

My FSX graphics settings are set at 32 bit, and I don't see any other banding or colour issues in the sky or scenery. But it seems like it's displaying the 2D panel in 16 bit, regardless of what I've created the background bitmap as. I haven't been successful in searching out anything on this topic that confirms this for me, or even anything that confirms that others have had this issue.

 

So, is this a known problem? Is there a fix? Or am I simply (and quite possibly) doing something wrong?

 

And last, if this is a 'FSX thing', then how do others manage to make such great looking photorealistic 2D panels?

I create my panels as 24 bit BMP files, and they look fine in FS.

Okay, well, I did another few tests tonight and had an idea to test this out:

 

I simply filled a 1920 x 1200 panel with a black to white gradient and saved it as a 24 bit BMP file. The bitmap looks exactly as it should inside photoshop, very smooth transition from black to white with no discernible banding. I then used it as a background for the main panel (I tried this on a few planes actually, just to rule out it being something with this particular plane) and saved the panel.cfg. Start FSX, load the 2D cockpit, and yep, banding from top to bottom, identical to the effect of saving the image as a 16 bit BMP file.

 

So, now I'm really wondering, is this just my version of FSX that does this & perhaps something is messed up?

 

If anyone could take a moment to try the same test as I did, it would be greatly appreciated.

Its not your FSX, its just FSX, and FS9.. :-(

Internally it seems to convert to 16 bit.

Search this forum on the banding, interresting read.

Thanks for the confirmation, Johan. Late last night I had found a few more references to the issue. The photographs I've seen for the cockpit panels in this plane show it as being painted almost a flat black, and i suspect that this banding issue is affecting me worse than most just because of how noticeable it becomes when you are using very dark colors. The light areas in the photo I'm using are barely affected.

 

I'll just have to work around it. The engineers station in this plane is extremely neat, My goal is to recreate that as a panel as well.