Well, I am trying to add some textures to my plane and came across a problem.

First, to make the texture, I made a 2048x2048 palette of just plain red in Photoshop.  I am just playing around right now and wanted to figure out what I was doing before going any further with painting...

Then I saved that as a Bitmap, opened it in Imagetool and saved it as a .dds file.

Then I went into Max and set that as a Flightsim X texture and applied it to the plane.  Then I used UVW unwrap to map the plane to it.

I have been using the Extra as a donor plane, to test my model, so I went into the texture.1 folder and replaced the extra300s_T file with my own and renamed it to match.

Now what I get is a black plane, and for some reason the planes for the reference images are showing up as well, even though I set them to not render...

--- I'll add more ..


Extended bitmaps (DXT) don't show up in Gmax, and regular bitmaps don't show up (as you know now) in FSX.

Gmax seems to be able to sort out files of the same name, but with differrent extensions.. FSX isn't so smart ..lol

In other words.. A regular bitmap,  can be used in Gmax.. but has to be converted to an extended bitmap (DXT) to work in FSX. Since the file names are identical, you cannot keep them both in the texture folder..

Here's my flow-chart   

All editing done in PSP.. including layers for specs and alphas. The  '5_'  prefix keeps the filenames from conflicting.. and reminds me to save them as DXT5 in DxtBmp.

I use PSP 9, and I was able to get the Nvidia DDS plug-in to work. When I want to get a texture into FSX I just flatten all the layers, flip it, and save it as a .dds texture 

Noting that you have Photoshop, the plug-in should work well for you as it was actually designed for Photoshop 

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/photoshop_dds_plugins.html

I'm not sure about the differences/similarites bewtewee Max and Gmax, but they've gotta be pretty close.


N2056's method is probably a "better" way to do it.. When you get to where you're managing several bitmaps, and making spec maps, and tweaking all the alpha channels.. the big key is to be disciplined and methodic. I like using DxtBmp because you can send the bitmap (or the alpha) directly to an editor when you're experimenting... and to date, it has given me flawless, error-free DXT compression. You can remove the ImageTool/DDS step until your completely finished, because DXT5 works fine in FSX. DDS is supposed to be more efficient for in-game-rendering, but that's not a concern when you're editing. I keep ALL the information (diffuse-layers, diffuse-alpha, spec, and spec-alpha) in one PSP file. So either way is about the same, step-wise. You'll eventually come up with your own methods and naming conventions.

As for mapping. Using an 'Un-wrap' can be tricky... but necessary for fuselages so that things like rivets don't get stretched.  For wings and such, a nornal planar UVW is fine.

For a fuselage... create a reference layer in your layered file, that consists of screen-shots of just the part your mapping... and several, colored reference points. It takes a little work to get it scaled properly.. then it gives something easier to work with in Gmax.

The first shot here, is what the diffuse bitmap looks like.. underneath it is my reference layer. There are several Gmax screen-shots in there, as weel as colored reference points. Like the blue line under the fuselage. That's dead-center for the bottom on the fuselage. All the other blue lines (and dots) are the outer edges for other parts.. and the blue line going through both tails is to make sure logos line up. For the engine nacelle, I even took a screen shot of the UVW-unwrap. That wasn't necessary for the fuselage, as I had doors and windows for reference,, AND the fuelage unwrap does not include the forward-most, nor aft-most polygons. I mapped them seperately (planar from the front for the nose (the reference that looks like a bullseye), and planar from the side for the tail (only place on the fuselage where both sides use the same texture), because unwrap mapping gets goofy when everything converges to one point.





This will help you to get it mapped properly.. then I prefer to do the fine tuning in the image editor. If you tweak the mapping, you change EVERYTHING.. but you can move and edit just one area in the image editor. Once I get a map "close".. That's it.. it's carved in stone.. I make the bitmap fit the mapping.