Okay.  Lets say you're trying to repaint an aircraft to match the image below.



First, you'll need a paint program that can use layers.  If you don't know what that is, check the link "Aircraft Repainting" in my signature.

Next, start by making all the areas that are going to be bare metal a shade of gray.  Something sort of dark (say around 150, 150, 150 or less).  Then paint all the other colors on.  If you look closely, you can see that there is a part of the tail that doesn't have any reflection on it.  That you will need to paint something like 200, 200, 200 or even 225, 225, 225.

After you finish painting all the colors on, save the image as a regular BMP.  Now convert it to a grayscale image.  This will be where you make your alpha channel.  Notice how the painted colors are slightly less reflective than the bare metal in the image.  Good use of the alpha channel can mimmic this.

Alpha channels work by overlaying a reflection over the regular BMP.  FS recognizes pure black (0,0,0) as mirror-like reflection, and white (255,255,255) as no reflection.  For bare metal, I tend to use about 128 as the alpha.  For reflective paint, 192 or 200 works fairly well.  Experiment with it a little and you'll get a good idea of what works well for you.

Anymore troubles, come back and see us . . .

Travis

ok did you leave anysteps out here? i did everything correctly ok i think so anyway i converted it to gray scale but i all lost all the color i black and white plane, anyways then i added the alpha cahnnel and now the whoe plane is see through, i have never seen a see though plane its liek i ghost image o something What did i do work here?

WOW a new stealth!

I've had invisible parts to planes using Alpha, so it could be that the aircraft is not set up to use an alpha layer for reflective textures (bare metal)

Just to check:

The way i get my bare metal is:

Create base bmp of the part to be make reflective and save

Mark on same bmp where to be reflective and fill black (or a gray shade for part reflective), make rest white, then save as A DIFFERENT file, eg texture_alpha.bmp

This alpha picture should look like a greyscale version of just the parts to be made reflective.

Load DXTbmp, open base bmp (not alpha)

in DXTbmp find Import alpha layer and select the Alpha leyer bmp I made before.

Save as the correct aircraft texture file.

Repeat for all textures to be reflective.

Go fly!


From your screenshot it looks like you'r not being selective over which parts are being made reflective. Though it may be that the aircraft does not support reflective textures.

Hope this helps

Inigo,

the plane will appear transparent because it does not support reflections(as mentioned above)

So, all planes which are FS2000 and below(FSDS models) will appear transparent if you apply an alpha layer

Don't know how much help this will be, but if using FS Design Studio, you can try texturing the necessary aircraft parts - create a texture file, BMP format, 256 x 256 pixels, in a neutral gray colour, and save it in your FS Texture folder.  Then, in FSDS, texture the aircraft parts accordingly.  To create the chrome effect click on "File" and then "Make Transparent Texture".  Open the texture file you've just created, you will then be presented with the Texture Viewer window.  This is where you adjust the alpha channel as mentioned above.  Move the slider bar between "Clear" and "Solid" until you reach the value of 128.  The closer to 0 you go, the more transparent the result - around 128 is the listed setting for bare metal finishes.  You will note the panels adjust between dark & light depending on how the alpha value is adjusted, with bare metal [128] resulting in a neutral gray shading.  To accept this setting click on the "Set All" button and "OK".  Doing so will change the appearance of all textures using the same name; if you want to add some dull sections or other contrast simply create another gray texture tile with a different name (so as not to overwrite your main bare metal finish) and repeat the same steps as above (but adjust the slider setting to say around 135 or 140, for a slightly duller finish).  Of course if not working with FSDS this is all for naught, but it permitted me to get some nice detail for bare-metal actuating parts.  I can't seem to attach .jpg files here but if you want to see the result I can e-mail them to you.