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EagleSkinner

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Everything posted by EagleSkinner

  1. I have had a couple of successes at repainting the Waco, I like it. But... When I create a package for the community folder I don't get the pilot's body to show, nor does the knee pad function other than show and hide. Any advice please?
  2. @Kenjiro75 - There are indeed plenty of "Paint Kits" around - So far the best come from IRIS and FoxTecho (Jabiru, LongEZ and MB339). Go to flightsim.to and you can find bare template bits that you can drop into community "as is" and they will give you a basic livery pack which you can play around with. These are usually just a couple of wireframe texture sheets unfortunately, so you have to open the dds images of one of the other aircraft liveries for that model and save as a basic colour texture that you will have to edit with a painting software. But most of the templates on flightsim.to will need work on your part. separate layers for dirt, shade, colour, wear and weathering. The best way to create a unique texture sheet is to use Blender - You can physically paint on a 3D model of the aircraft you want to create a texture for and extract that texture to a paint program for further work. With Blender you can also create great wireframe texture sheets and save these to your graphics editor. For painting on these 2D texture there are a few choices - Photoshop, Paint.net, GIMP are the most common although I use the Corel Draw suite. (Have been since it first came out and I find it the most intuitive art software (personal choice and opinion - make your own mind up please). For creating the dds textures so that the sim can read these at runtime they need to be converted to DDS format. There is dxtBMP from http://www.mwgfx.co.uk/ this is an older tool and has limitations in msfs 2020, but works for most. GIMP and Photoshop convert textures to dds too. The best conversions can be done with these and the nvidia export plugin. I don't know if this works with gimp, but as I also have the cheapest possible subscription to photoshop, I can say from experience that the nvidia tool plugin to PS is really the best converter going. I don't know how much in depth knowledge you have of graphics work, but there are plenty of good folk here who provide teaching tips. I am now more or less out of the scene now, but if you go to the paintshop threads here at Avsim, you will find many of the greats who have written their own tips and guides.
  3. Yep, it was a moment of awe for me too - I finally reconnected my first generation Oculus rift and had a "wow" moment like not meany I have hade before. In fact my exclamation was so "forceful" I even got a wowowowowowowowowowow from my dogs - who didn't have a clue what I was on about... 😄 ...and then I discovered you don't even have to be satisfied wth default VR graphics settings. My new 3090 graphics card took all the alterations in its stride and allowed me a whole slew of "Ultra" settings for display. I didn't blanket everything with ultra - some you don't really need. OK, so the Rift still leaves those mouseover tooltips unreadable - er, actually I found out that if you lean close in, you can even read the very small print on the cockpit decals as well. But best of all - you don't need to use those clutzy Rift controllers - just tune your joysticks, quadrants, yokes, HOTAS and put all the needed commands at your fingertips. Well impressed!
  4. oh yes - I have been in touch with Martin Wright (author of dxtBMP) and he is aware of these quirks. He's not overly active with dxtBMP because apparently it is no longer absolutely necessary to use all those older DDS formats. I will allow myself one small quote from him: "Currently it is a messy business adding liveries. Asobo are looking at making it more practical." He also remarks that things like the need for JSON files also possibly an awkard thing. But he is aware of our worries, but as I mentioned earlier - PS or GIMP help.
  5. DXTbmp does work with some msfs texture files - try the ***ALBD.PNG.DDS textures. Forget about editing the alpha channels though - the standard albedo textures don't need them. on the other hand - the decals can use alphas: all black actually makes the decal transparent. Er, sometimes... And then, msfs also uses TIF compression on some of them, so you will need the ability to save as TIF. It's a mess still and I am having fun too. Then there's the "comp" textures - you edit those to change shine, reflection and surface - but these don't use alphas either - you edit the separate RGB channels for these. Yes - PITA Another thing becomes noticeable if you have a thumbnail viewer codec in your Windowssoftware - when you look at some of the msfs textures they appear to be transparent and odd. That's because msfs does indeed use a different dds format to what you would have used in dxtBMP. So while dxtBMP does work (for some msfs aircraft and most of the addons), Asobo has basically forced users to go the photoshop way and that means you can then save your dds images in the nVidia dds exporter plugin. You can also use GIMP to edit the images and export. There is a reasonably priced subscription for Photoshop at around $20 a month. GIMP is free and I think you can add the nVidia exporter too. (Someone correct me please) Anyway, to recap: ALBD are the standard reflected textures and don't seem to use alphas COMP textures are for material behaviour - use colour channels to change as follows Red channel - occlusion Green channel - roughness Blue channel - is for metal (No alphas used) The NORM is normal map - i.e. direction of reflections
  6. Perhaps I voiced my anger a bit too - errrrmmmm - vocally? Vociferously? I have had a post blocked on the forum, and my retraction, though it got a fair few few likes and supportive agreements, also go a few returns from admin. I am not worried, after all I have also posted a fair few compliments on the msfs forum. After all - it really does have a lot going for it. I was just miffed that each update means up to two days to investigate to find out which addon in community was breaking the game this time. But the most apparent problem is that livery mods are the most likely cause of many failures. The AP glitches are by their own admissiion something they are looking into. Oh... hang on - just starting msfs again and got a message popup "1020.45 mib update" must go and see what it's all about.
  7. I bought this one too - really a no brainer. But I personally think the flight dynamics were set to "kill" you as soon as you leave the ground. The aileron animation is very close to being either max or neutral and the throttle response is rather impossible - move the lever and nothing happens for a long while, then the sound goes "loud". It seems like you have to fight this little baby all the way from take off to landing - and it doesn't forgive slightly off angle of approach landings, leaving the model below the surface. Not that I dislike this model in any way. It is fun! But definitely in great need of gentle handling.
  8. One reason I don't like flying tubes is that even if you get a perfect approach, flare and contact, the dam thing calls you a "Retard"...
  9. I can only agree 100% on the eye candy. As for functionality, we still have a few months (years? I do hope not) to go. First off - I do not fly large airliners (or even small ones). I am dedicated to GA, Bush, fast and low, ignoring civil aviation rules (I fly under anything if I find it - I am still looking for barns open at both ends to take a Piper Cub through 😇) There are still many things that don't feel right - flight dynamics leave a lot to be desired. I am a glider pilot and I have 3-400+ hours "you have" stick time in military fixed wing (piston engined) and light helicopters as an engineer. msfs is getting close but none of the predecessor sims were this buggy out of the box. I am even beginning to like glass cockpits - mainly because there are so few "steam" planes around. Certainly the sim has me lusting for a 3090 RTX graphics card, but I do get great smooth video around most places. Yep. at 67 I do get cranky about sim performance, but I am falling in love with this one, despite the numbers of reports and suggestions I keep writing to Asob/Zendesk about.
  10. 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)
  11. Coming along nicely folks! I have now added the use of Blender to my repertoire - very useful! Painting directly onto the 3D model is easy - even if it requires some practice to get positioning of elements just right.
  12. Tip: Get Blender, if only for two funcions. Blender is a 3D modelling tool and apparently great at its job. I am not really into modelling, but the two functions I refer to are: 1. Extracting UV Maps, i.e. convert the wireframe model to a series of 2D textures and save to your PC. 2. Painting directly onto the 3D model. i.e. paint a dab of colour on the bit you are looking for - this is then instantly displayed onscreen on a 2D image that you can save to your PC. The beauty is that you can literally find the things you are trying to paint in real time, so even if you don't want to extract full textures (yet) you can identify where that elusive part is while you work in your paint program of choice. There are plenty of tutorials on YouTube. P.S. Oh, I see you are using Photoshop. Get to know masking tools - a freehand mask is great for outlining the area to be painted. Then create a new object by filling the mask with your colour of choice
  13. [Tongue in cheek mode on] Another update... sigh - I have just fixed the problem I was having with a livery on 1.10.7 and.8
  14. 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.
  15. Let me see now... Livery stripes... Usually these are "flood filled" from the texture sheet that looks like a 2 x 2 checkerboard. There can be (apparently) any number of squares here - 2x2, 4x4. Something like that - 2x2 is relatively normal. On the C172 you'll see two vertical bands of colour, on the Extra the split is diagonal. But the common factor is the name - it'll be something like C172SP_AIRFRAME_LIVERYCOLOR_ALBD.PNG.DDS So how to kill? Relatively easy: make the colour all white and give it a 100% black alpha channel. save as a DDS with alpha. For the Extra I still have to find a way of hiding the Extra company logos yet. For some reason Asobo made these from TIF images. It'll come in the end. There's also a great video on YouTube that shows how to paint directly onto the 3D model. Still learning that one though, but it does look really useful. Link There is a growing number of video tutes appearing on YT now - many hours worth.
  16. When all is said and done, msfs shows a lot of promise, but fails to deliver. Yet. There's a whole gamut of issues that appear with each update - so much so that after the last update we had to either manually edit the manifest.json files or remove the community liveries completely for now. The texturing makes truly authentic livery repainting extremely difficult, as does the "decal" system. There are also more than just a few handling issues with almost each aircraft giving one or the other user grief - like when you pause, the physics keep "flying" the aircraft and you get into real problems on unpausing because the AP has been trying to keep that stationary aircraft flying. I don't think Asobo took on enough realworld aviators for a thorough betatesting and those who were there quite often weren't taken seriously enough. Certainly, I get the feeling that msfs is only in a paid late alpha stage still. After all - two very essential items are missing - gliders and helicopters. FSX came with it's own share of problems, but looking back through some of the early comments, there was not such a level of anger and frustration about FSX. Even that epic fail "Flight!" was not shouted at as much as Asobo are getting. Yet having said all that, I do think msfs shows great promise. I have started to collect a lot of comparisons to flights over places I do know from the air, day, night, IFR, VFR... and the eye-candy is living up to expectations. It might take a year for most of the issues to get sorted, but if we keep our cool, we could be onto a winner - if Asobo listens.
  17. I am currently running msfs 2020 on three 32" monitors - windowed or full screen, no difference. And I still have my oculus VR connected. I also believe someone has an iPad app out to display some of the cockpit items on. I must be one of the luckier ones - even if my graphics card is "only" a 1070 dual card.
  18. Yep - I just made black texture / black alpha dds files. Problem solved! I was still thinking FSX where the alpha is shininess... So now I need to persuade Asobo to create a second wing texture sheet - I hate mirroring of textures! I wonder if I could edit the model in Blender? For those who are 3D modelers, it's a piece of cake to create a second texture, rename it to texture-sheet-2 (or whatever) and copy paste that name into the anchor points on the model. Takes just a short while. OK, you might waste a bit of texture sheet, but hey - they should have done it right first time. LIC gave me a second set of wings and a new mdl file for their Christen Eagle in just a couple of hours. But otherwise, the first problem is solved with the decals. All I need to do now is the same for the Extra company logos. Yep - there are some out there without the makers logo on.
  19. Everytime I open a different aircraft to try making a different texture I get a new problem. The image below shows my dilemma on the Extra 330. I've solved the matter of hiding the aircraft registration decal, but despite blanking out the decal albedo texture (as you can do on the C172) I still get the main airframe paint decal forced upon me by the model. Those grey areas are in fact mirror-like when you have the sun shining at them and, more to the point, they physically overlay any user desired paintscheme. The two small white patches (nose and tail fin) are the Extra logos - and before you tell me these MUST be there, I could point you at realworld versions that do not have these. Does anyone have any idea where these decals can be edited, made transparent or even deleted?
  20. OK, a couple of weeks in now and I am slowly getting the hang of creating msfs repaints avoiding the decals. Mostly you can find decals through their names: the first kind seem to be the dds texturess with "decal" in their names and these are usually part of the cockpit textures. So we can edit the "ALBD" sheets and fiddle around with the cockpit... On the outsides, the convention seems to be the use of the word "livery" in the texture name - for instance: C172SP_AIRFRAME_LIVERY_ALBD.PNG.DDS Now we really get to the annoying part played by ASOBO in this tale of woe - you CAN paint onto the normal fuselage textures and create liveries the way we are used to. But when it comes to the coloured stripes, we either have to use the fixed liveries dictated to us by ASOBO - viz a viz the ONE "Cessna Stripe" pattern or we have to fiddle around chopping up images in our graphics program and patchworking these onto our base fuselage texture. These trademark stripes are coloured by the simple expediency of a livery colour sheet that looks like a 2 x 2 checkerboard of colours. ASOBO takes the relevant colour for the fuselage stripe from this checkerboard - on the C172, though, there are only two colours: black and grey, but on other models you'l see more colours. So a lot of the current flood of paints have basically been created by simply editing the coulour fills. Pretty boring and limited unless you are happy with a white C172 that only has different stripe colours. You may also have noticed by now, that the registration numbers along the sides of the fuselage are cut off ant an angle because the ASGSX decal overlaps between the fuselage side and lower trextures. We cant edit these decal boxes that easily unfortunately. Oh, we can change the registration size and position the letters in the top left of the decal box, but changing the size of that decal box also changes the zero position for the lettering on the airframe - a long story and subject for another debate. You can actually hide the registration number fixed by ASOBO - there are two textblocks in the panel.cfg where you can set the size of the registration decals to zero. The thing is, ASOBO really fouled up with the use of decals for aircraft registrations etc. Each separate airworthiness authority around the globe uses different coding systems - just taking the two largest first - FAA and EASA. The FAA system is N followed by numerals and maybe extra letters. In Europe, the requirement demands a country code (G for UK, D for Germany, F for France etc...) and often the second letter indicates a weight category of the aircraft. or numbers if it is a glider... Anyway, it's convoluted and if a repainter wants to create realism he MUST be able to use the correct registration conventions. Oh of course you can define these numbers yourself by addin the reg when you set up a flight. ASOBO will place this on the model somewhere. Will it be on the authentic position though? Some authorities require a marking on the underside of the port wing or on the vertical tailplane. Again - this is a subject for long debates elsewhere. One of my main issues with repainting according to ASOBO is that it is so restrictive. Your average hack can repaint these models easy enough by using single colours but to get really authentic the dedicated repainter needs to work a lot harder. now if we could remove all the decal textures, that would make things easier. But... (yes, there is always "but") some model devs at Asobo have coded various features using DRM coding to prevent us editing certain parts of the plane and its textures. It's a slow process, but I am sure we will see the workarounds turning up as the "game" grows up. Oh and by the way - ASOBO are still using mirrored textures so what you do on one wing will appear on the other one - mirrored! Yeuch! This is sooo easy to cure by the person who did the model mapping (just a couple of hours tops - a fact I know with great certainty), but noooo... ASOBO have not learned. Plane in question - The Extra 330 so I won't be able to do Patty Wagstaff's asymetric wing livery on her 2015 black/silver livery. Nor any military camo (not that they will ever do a military paint in real life for an Extra. Or...??) Ah well.
  21. I went to the dentist today and had two extractions - that was certainly more fun than painting the default C172... but progress is being made
  22. After much pain and agony, I am starting to understand the texture layout of the msfs 2020 default C172 When this is finished, I hope it'll look like the one I did for the A2A C182
  23. Been here long? Well fancy that! I just browsed through my additions to the library and discovered that I uploaded my first repaint fifteen years ago for FS2004. That was for the Long Island Classics Christen Eagle and I still have more hours and paints on that bird than any other single aircraft - somewhere around fifty to sixty different textures on both the LIC version and the later IRIS one. All in all I created at least five paints for each of the (at least) 120 models I had in my hanger - quite often I exceeded twenty on some of my more favourite planes. Not all were uploaded as some liveries were subject to copyrights and others just failed to please me. Quite a few even ended up in payware model packs (and also delivered with some some freeware models). In FSX I learned to create almost any kind of paint from recreating the Dupont flip-flop paints (costing $135 per ounce in the real world) through metallics, high gloss and mirror finish to anything you could imagine. Certainly, if it had been done in the real world, I could recreate it for a sim texture. I more or less stopped around four years ago because the challenges were disappearing. This coincided with real life retirement. Then came msfs 2020, I've commented quite negatively on the way Asobo have thrown logic to the winds and made painting so awkward for your average painter. There are more limitations on repainting now than ever before. There are also more Fluff Ups as to how the new sim accesses different pieces to assemble a new aircraft. Painters following the subject will know that it is not turning out as easy as promised. Sure - simple flood fill techniques and colour swatches exist and there are loads of new "paint jobs" appearing daily. They even look good. But I go further than just tipping a bucket of paint onto a plane (not really an aircraft if you can't give it a custom livery 😁 ) Now we get to fiddle with norm, comp and emis texture sheets and our old "skin" with easy to remember short name is now an albedo hiding in a file structure that is longer than the London Underground central line. MSFS was promised to be easier to create content for. Misnomer? Ah but such is life - "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose" - so when you see me posting grompy old fart posts complaining about this that or the other - bear with me, because I haven't stopped learning new tricks yet. How is everyone else coping with the nitty gritties of really working under the hood of this new flight sim?
  24. OK, great... Five pages in to a pretty straghtforward comment that didn't beg for answers or comments. I merely offered my own point of view. Plain and simple. I am not offended by the many misinterpreted readings that have caused so many responses. I am not even surprised by the vitriol of some of them. I've been around the Avsim forums for years now and I know that even saying "Hi" will get some pretty heated responses. Anyway - humble pie time. I have only used FSX3 times and I even offloaded XPlane. (I really only installed that to try out VR and to compare it with FSX anyway). Besides, having invested well into four digits on addons for FSX, I had a pretty good looking setup running. However... I have spent more time in msfs 2020 and although it's a pig-example of how not to program something, it works. Despite the lack of true intuitiveness and the puddle-footed way you have to do things from inside the cockpit, I am slowly getting used to its quirks. Default sceneries are good, an improvement over FSX even, but FSX has a lot going for it when you get a couple of million square miles of improved terrain up and rtunning, and the orbx sceneries, airports and cityscapes are still challenging what msfs can do from the box. More to the point Orbx have met the challenge and their new sceneries are really an improvement. Careful folks, the "pig-example" comment doesn't mean the sim is terrible. It just means they (MS / Asobo / Blackshark / whoever) promised to make the sim easier to add things to and extend. (Not my theory but given fact on public record). The poor support or lack of time they gave to the hardware peripheral makers (notably Logitech) to get their drivers fixed. The need to learn java scripting to write thousands of characters and words just to create addon liveries. The missing aircraft.cfg files, the missing or locked files that freeware third parties need to access... No, things are not easier in msfs 2020... I know it will be the freeware, freelance devs that will come up with the most useful tweaks and improvements. ...and yet... well, it is kind of growing on me. I know you "hate-protesters" and "nay-sayers" out there will find reasons to slag this post of mine, but you cannot deny you are reacting (this is growing to be one of the longer threads here 🙂 ) to my humble opinion of msfs - and that opinion is changing - slowly. I can wait a while for the really important aircraft to come out (important to me - not necessarily you. Diversity yay!). Drops mic and leaves exit stage left...
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