3D Painting - thoughts verging on madness

[EagleSkinner 36]

I recently shared a youtube link (in another post here) to a video tutorial for painting directly onto the 3D model - here's another one which basically tells you the same but is slightly more useful in that you can scroll over the timeline and navigate to whatever part takes your fancy by reading the titles on the timeline.

3D painting tutorial

What does become apparent, however, is that if you are unfamiliar with Blender, you can miss a lot of different ways  to do certain things. In the tute above the guy shows you how to hide all unselected parts of the model. This is really great, so how do you unhide? He doesn't mention it - so for an old knacker like me you might be left wondering. Actually you need to click on the "scene collection" checkbox in the list of model parts in the upper right docker window. Twice. Then all the individual model bits are visible again. All great stuff, but it does show that there is a steep learning curve for us repainters if we want to use blender to produce appropriately pre drawn texture sheets that you can layer over your model's masters.

When you have a lot of items in that list, it's hard to know what you want - another tip I can offer is for you her is to go about selecting the bits you want to paint in a different way - hide everything (shift h) and then use that drop down to select one item at a time until you find the relevant ones you want and use Blender's "join" function (select multiple items and right click - it's in the menu) to make multiple items paintable. Bits that stay purple (Blender's standard colour for the base model items) are basically not joinable because they are on different texture sheets. don't worry about it. Paint what you can, save that new paint texture sheet and then start over for the other items.

Greek? Yes, I know, but as we can only share images from the web and not our PCs I can't show you - I don't have my own web storage and Photobucket is now too commercial). Just bear my suggestions in mind when you are following that tutorial above.

Blender is also full of little goodies like creating wireframe textures. (UV maps). You can also use Blender for much much more so I suggest taking some time out (maybe a lot - if you're 3D modelling challenged like me)

On the other hand, you aren't going to escape from needing programs like  photoshop and illustrator, photopaint and Draw, GIMP, paint.net and co for various different parts of your repaint - each software has different aspects and no one program does it all 100%. Then you also need to understand the science of lighting and colour mixing (I have had to adapt my realworld knowledge - perhaps you can). Oh, and then there's specular, emissive and normal maps... still valid in msfs.

Today's painter needs to be as skilled in this field as a 3D modeller is in his. It's not going to be easier for you, but persevere and have fun.

Edited October 27, 2020 by EagleSkinner
typo

[Stoopy 1,571]

Taking the link that you provided, I got started on a few Blender tutorials and now know enough to be semi-dangerous (and make a passable doughnut as well as a fully textured, flaming 3D potato) but I then realized, other than seeing in real-time exactly where on the model your stripes and colors are really going to land, there isn't a lot to be gained by texture painting in Blender - since, as you say, you're going to need to rely on your 2D drawing  program in the end anyway.  Since the result of painting within Blender is that you are generating flat DDS files.  And there are UV templates out there now that make it much easier to see the texture mapping layout while painting in 2D.

I was, and still am, under some hope of being able to use Blender to actually adjust and re-draw the livery stripes that are baked into the 3D model, which are listed in the parts list for the model, and can be selected and manipulated.  This may be advantageous in generating a much cleaner line that the graphics engine can more accurately produce (I never see "jaggies" on these default-style livery stripes), and be able to assign material properties in Blender to provide metallic effects and other results that we rely on Alpha layer manipulation to achieve.  So instead of distributing a new TEXTURE.x folder for a livery, we distribute a new model.x folder along with a small DDS file in a matching TEXTURE,x folder for the livery color assignments.  I guess while we're at it, also throw in a new panel.x folder and panel.cfg for the registration text size and color.

But this would not only be a new workstream that will take time and effort to learn, it also assumes that it will be possible to export the modified model from Blender back into MFS format.  I haven't cracked the SDK open yet to see if that could be covered, but the plugin to import MFS models into blender only does just that - import, not export.  But if it can be done, it may yield superior results and take advantage of the native capabilities of the new graphics engine, which is a step forward. 

 

Edited October 27, 2020 by Stoopy

[EagleSkinner 36]

The only way I know of how to affect the default given livery decals  is to completely hide them - find any "decal" texture, make it a white colour sheet with a black alpha channel. But you still need "decals" - to do this try the Blender "stencil" brush method.

First you will need your livery pattern saved as a PNG with transparent background. Then you can load this into Blender and "paint" it onto the 3D model. Then save the Blender

This link is the best (subjective) YouTube tut on the subject of painting on 3D models:  Blender paint tutorial.

Watch the whole tutorial first - the guy also gives a lot of good hints for working with paint programs (in this case GIMP, but the commands are repeatable in Photoshop)