On 9/5/2020 at 2:36 AM, styckx said:

The textures for the default aircraft that are required for painting are completely nonsensical blobs that look like they were exported through MS Paint.  There is no logical, or illogical way to correctly paint anything.

That's normal with PBR textures exported from PBR paint programs ( like Substance Painter ) 

- Albedo textures looks very flat, which is correct, since they shouldn't include any lighting/shadows/occlusion information, since those will be included in the relevant channels of the other textures.

- Mapping looks confusing, because an infinite DILATION ( or Edge Padding ) has been applied when exporting. It means every pixel along the UV shell borders has been expanded to fill up "void" areas up to the texture edges, to minimize mip-mapping issues across UV seams.

This is an example of a typical Albedo texture:

However, even if they are not easy to look at, because it's difficult to make out the various parts ( fuselage, wings, engines, etc. ), because of the dilation, they are STILL linked to the original model UV, it's just the additional pixel that are in place of what used to be either transparent or white or black, are confusing.

Of course, the UV layout *itself* might not be the easiest to understand too, because most of the time, UVs are also generated automatically, to obtain the maximum packing efficiency, which might not ( it almost invariably doesn't ) result in easy repainting.

 

1 minute ago, virtuali said:

That's normal with PBR textures exported from PBR paint programs ( like Substance Painter ) 

- Albedo textures looks very flat, which is correct, since they shouldn't include any lighting/shadows/occlusion information, since those will be included in the relevant channels of the other textures.

- Mapping looks confusing, because an infinite DILATION ( or Edge Padding ) has been applied when exporting. It means every pixel along the UV shell borders has been expanded to fill up "void" areas up to the texture edges, to minimize mip-mapping issues across UV seams.

This is an example of a typical Albedo texture:

[image removed to safe space in quoting]

However, even if they are not easy to look at, because it's difficult to make out the various parts ( fuselage, wings, engines, etc. ), because of the dilation, they are STILL linked to the original model UV, it's just the additional pixel that are in place of what used to be either transparent or white or black, are confusing.

Of course, the UV layout *itself* might not be the easiest to understand too, because most of the time, UVs are also generated automatically, to obtain the maximum packing efficiency, which might not ( it almost invariably doesn't ) result in easy repainting.

 

 

3 pages later and someone FINALLY explains what's going on here in a detailed explanation! Thank you! It makes complete sense. Appreciate you taking the time to break this down into plain english so I have a better understanding of what's going on there. 

To add to my post - when you look at a package it may seems a bit overly complicated with json files with timestamps etc but that is because we are looking at the output meta data which is used by  the package installer.   It is like seeing some of the internals of a wise installer.

Asobo use the project function in the dev tools.   That has a build process  which constructs what we see.  So it writes out all the json files.  Looking at the samples  for textures it takes in PNGs and so will create the DDS including I imagine the mipmaps as well.

Having said that I have so far failed to create a project for a variation as it tell me the aircraft.cfg is invalid!

Over the past few days, I've been trying a fairly new method where one uses Blender and a free plugin provided by this developer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZCe_x-V9co ) to import fuselage, wings, rudder, ailerons, etc., and then re-paint the plane and export the "blob" paint file as a .png.dds file using Gimp (or PS with nVidia plugin or Nvidia stand-alone).  Lord knows I couldn't paint that blob without these plugins, and I have 30+ years experience using Photoshop too!

This fella (https://discord.gg/megapack ) then offers template files of various airplanes where all one has to do is change the "template" wording in the .cfg and .json files to the name of your choosing, and the pack can be saved into your Community directory (that's after you create and save your custom paint job/livery). I think corrections are made both .cfg and .json files, but not sure... that's my homework assignment for today.

It may be easy for some people, but I spent about 20+ hours over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend trying to figure this out. But, the time was well worth it as I'm 95% there and got to this point of creating this custom Pacman livery. Now I'm thinking Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, and other livery themes based around historical musical groups and artists. Albeit this was time consuming, it was a nice sense of accomplishment. Cheers!