Im not all that new the the repainting department of FS. But there is one thing I dont know how to do, the SHine effect.

The A/C has already a dynamic shine effect on it from the designer, but I cant make hte shine come to life when I try and repaint it. I was told something about adding a greyscal on it and when I did the whole A/C went grey.lol. I saved the file before doing this because knowing something bad will happen at somepoint. How can I obtain the shine that I want?

~Brett

If you don't have it yet, download DTXBmp (it's free).  Open up your texture within it and then do the following:

- Click on Alpha from the menu at the top and then choose Send Alpha To Editor.
- This will open up your bitmap editor (mine is MS Paint), within that window you apply the greyscale.  The lighter the grey, the less shiny or more opaque; the darker, the more shiny or transparent.
- Save this greyscale (just do file/save) and then go back to your texture opened in DTXBmp's main window.  Click on Alpha once again, this time select Apply Alpha To Image.  
- Save your texture as Extended Bitmap > DTX3 format.  This will ensure you have reflectivity/transparency in the texture.  

Note that with DTXBmp (as far as I have found) you can only alter the transparency of a texture, not the "shine".  To accomplish this you need to ensure your project has reflective parts enabled.  I work with FSDS-v2 and whatever parts need to be reflective are designated as such in the project design phase, by ticking a checkbox in the part properties dialogue box.  Then, if an alpha channel is applied to such a part, it becomes "shiny" rather than transparent.  You mentioned your project had reflectivity added already but thought to mention this as it can be confusing if doing it for yourself when new at the game.  If there is a way to do this directly in DTXBmp hopefully someone more knowledgeable can help.  

OOps-didn't see the above post, will leave this here in case it is of any assistance as well...

That's not what they mean but a similar thing can happen if you you inadvertently resave your work in the wrong color-bit. In your case, you may be losing a channel in the save.
I've been working with CFS1 so it has to be saved in 256-color;if it's resaved in less there is major color loss.
If you don't mind spending a million years of time as I originally did, shines can be applied by individually lightening pixel by pixel. More recently I've found I can make a light grayscale printout (1st attempt was to hand draw the whole thing) with a graphics program, hand color it -- including shine effects and such -- and scan it back into a bitmap file (since my graphics program can reformat to the 256-color, I save it in 16M-color). Of course, since the sim doesn't apply textures evenly (by how the sim model is done) I still find it difficult to exactly match section for section.

HAHAAAA, I got it! Thanks guys Ill post all 10 repaints in a package. Its for a Dassault Flacon 2000!

Brett

What's that, A chrome Falcon 2000. I could do that as a request along with the package I am realesing.

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Yeah just like CAFedm said, download DXTBmp then learn the alpha channel. As useing black you make a chrome, then if you just want a shine you use a lite gray. then export the alphachannel as a DX3 and the texture that you painted as a DX3 format. Also, if you get the program you will be able to open textures that didn't show up.