Trial and error, or a lucky guess   many aircraft are textured like this, so you just need to work at it.

You could try copying the end of one part, to the beginning of the next, as a start point for any lines, text etc to follow on from.

The aircraft in my signiture picture has different parts for the front fuselage rear fsuselage, spine, wings and tail fin, so you can imagine how long it took me to line up all the green patterns!  

Since you're so fond of payware, Abacus' FS Repaint allows you to see a 3D rendering of the model.  If you use the default editor, you can "line up" the lines from one texture to another.  Basically, you can see what you're drawing as you're drawing it.

I use it to create the basic repaintable variant, and to do spot line ups, while then going to a regular paint program for the major repaint work.

Even if it were only to set up the initial repaint folders, aircraft.cfg, and texture copies, it is - for me.

The added feature that it is the only paint-editing program that allows you to see your changes on a compiled flight simulator model (inlcuding FS2004), as you're making them is the clincher.  As a paint editor itself, however, it's very basic.

You would still do the major editing in, say, Paint Shop Pro, but you can set your base texture "matchups" in FS Repaint's editor.

(An early version allowed you to use PSP7 "real time" but that wasn't compatible with Photoshop.  The current version basically "exports" a snapshot to the paint program, then updates the FS Repaint "model" when you return. I still keep the earlier version, with PSP7 in addition to the latest and PSP9).

I thought it didn't even reload the textures unless you exited the game and then started over? ???

SaVas,

here's the basic concept.

Cut the first half.. paste it on a new canvas or file.
Cut the second half.. paste it on the same canvas as the first half..

Then Align them together

When you have finish painting.. paste it back (You don't have to split them.. just paste and align and then remove the excess areas)

to get a nice alignment.. set ur fuse layer to "multiply"

Here's my opinion on FSRepaint.
I haven't tried out its painting side.. but I think I rather preview my aircraft in FS. The big difference is the lighting.. FS allows you to see how would the plane look like in the afternoon , dusk , dawn , morning..etc so you can tweak the colours accordingly.
So I would recommend a graphics editing software such as paint shop pro or photoshop or g.im.p (free)

Quote:



VAS Gold works only on the FSDS source file. 

FS Repaint is by the same developers, and works on the compiled mdl file.

Basically, FS Repaint IS VAS-Gold for MDL files.