ABC123 of making textures texturing

[Guest]

My Dig camera is capable of 6MP and I have been entertaining the thought of producing custom textures for some FSDS2 project I would like to do in the future.My question is there a tutorial out there that explains how to take a image with a dig camscanner and convert that image into a usable texture in a simple 123ABC format using PSP 7.04 and FSDS 1 or 2.Thanks http://www.flightsimnetwork.com/dcforum/Us...9d503cc53ab.jpg

[Guest]

dunno about 123abc, but any photo you take can be converted to a texture quite easily. Once you start doing this you'll figure out a million ways to make the results better and better. Redoing my fs2000 textures for upgrade to 2002 has taught me a lot about my own subtle learning that has been going on. Message is, don't try to be perfect first thing.General guidelines, traditional textures are square, and in later revs of the sim you can use rectangle shapes. The sides always must be sized to N*2^x with 32 being the smallest I think....so we're talking about 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024 pixels.I have gone back to 256x256 as my standard for 2002, although for 2000 I found 512x512 very pleasing for buildings.I take my dig pix, and make a selection of 256x256 and eyeball if the image I want fits already. If not, I'll be scaling it down but not yet...that's the last step. If my image starts as a 800x600jpg, first I'll make the canvas 800x800 just to begin a square format thing going. This also is a big space to use as my sandbox during the edit process.Normally I design structures, so my big challenge is to remove perspective. You will always have some, and I think you can get better results if you undo perspective in your graphics tool than letting the mapping attempt to acheive the same results. In corel photopaint, and adobe photoshop, this is easy with a "distort" transform. Its also easy to construct horizontal and vertical guidelines to assist in your transform. Don't have PSP, so I don't know if it has this tool or not, probably does.The other challenge can be painting out images of cars or other distractions that may be in the photo, which is where some artistry comes in...practice makes perfect...use selections with feathering, cut and paste from nearby places, clone tool is useful sometimes..Once you like your image, then I crop the image to just include it. Then I'll resample the image down to the final texture size. If you want transparency, I create an alpha chanel by copying the image to a new file, and paint pure black where its transparent and pure white everywhere else, then save this. Now open dxtbmp and open the main texture. Then import the new black/white file as an "alpha" channel. Save as dxt1+alpha for fs2002. Save as extended bmp for fs2000.Composition of the texture can be another area to think about. My first textures had lots of unused space. The sim works best with the fewest number of textures, so you'll want to think about using empty texture space for other texture elements. Then again, during modelling it will likely be easier to organize your project if you have an easy way to know which texture was used in each object. Have fun!Bob Bernstein

[NWATech 95]

Check out this link. Hope it helps.

http://www.hovercontrol.com/tutorials/phototextures/Jay

[toprob 105]

Take a look here:http://www.windowlight.co.nz/ontarget/gmaxt30.htmlThis mainly relates to GMAX, but the textures would be the same. The other GMAX tutorials have some texture coverage.