Hey all,
a short question from me.

I'm busy painting the Just Flight C152, but there is no specular layer in the paintkit.

My question is what exactly should I do in the paint to make the "specular" shine?

In the original specular paint, there are white lines wherever there was red in the livery (and dark grey lines in the alpha), but I can't use it because then I have these lines shine, which doesn't fit the livery I'm currently working on.


Thanks in advance!

Check the alpha channel of the diffuse texture, see if there are variations in the shades of grey that match up with the shiny lines. That is one of the ways to specify the shininess, but it has to have been set in the model during building.

Is it a payware aircraft?

Give me a few mins then fella, and I'll check it out for you.

Oh, before I forget... the diffuse texture is what forms the basis for the plane's colour. That Bushy Tail repaint we did, you were editing the diffuse texture there.

Ok, there are two things you will need to work on.

If you have DXTBmp, load in C152_T1.dds and notice that in the Alpha Channel window, there are some pale grey shapes against a white background. That is the image you need to edit to affect how reflective the aircraft is. Black = very reflective, White = not reflective.

As well as that, there is also C152_T1_specular.dds. This texture controls how shiny the aircraft is. Note, reflective and shiny are not the same thing with the textures, that's the confusing part.

Reflectivity controls the reflection of the environment map, shininess controls the highlights on the aircraft.

So in theory, you could have paint that reflects a lot but doesn't show any defined highlights. It's the balance of these two textures that is the key to it looking convincing.

In the C152, they've done what appears to be a quite common technique for the specular texture, desaturate the main texture and invert it to create the different levels of specularity.

The danger with that is that it can create false levels of specularity. In reality, you should consider what materials you are representing in your texture, and then set a specularity level to match. Rubber would be very low, so would be dark, glossy paint would be quite shiny, so would be pale grey, or even white.

I've seen a few aircraft that are made less reflective/shiny underneath because they used that technique, which is fine until you fly the plane upside down, and then it all goes wrong.

I would suggest, make a copy of the texture folder and call it texture.repaint (or similar) create a new version of the aircraft in the aircraft.cfg and point it at the new texture folder. Then just lay blocks of varying levels of black to white on the textures (even black, mid-grey and white will be enough). On one side, do the specular texture, and then the other side, do the alpha channel of the diffuse texture. That way, you can see each effect on it's own.

I'll keep checking back on here over the next 2 or 3 hours, if you have any more problems, shout up and I'll help if I can.

Make sure you only invert the painted panels, otherwise, you may end up with highly shiny wheels and things. 

patchz wrote on Mar 21^st, 2010 at 1:20pm:

patchz, I don't think my knowledge of repainting is up to the standard yet to be worthy of a tutorial, it's just an examination of the textures and some trial and error experimentation that told me all that. Some of the techniques are quite different to the more standard game techniques, but they're similar enough for me to get a reasonable grasp of them.

If I get chance to spend more time with the model building and texturing, then I'll be happy to do so. Unfortunatley, with developing 2 games at the moment on my own, time is in short supply.

If I don't know what something does, I paint big blocks of black and white on there and then go and look at the results. But not every aircraft is the same. You might find one that uses the alpha channel for transparency, or simply doesn't use any effects whatsoever.

It's certainly not restricted to payware. It's all down to the model builder to either choose to add the effects or not. (assuming of course, that they understand them enough to add them). Going off some of the texture sets I have looked at, a lot of people don't add them.

And payware doesn't guarantee you textures that people have spent the proper time on either. The Carenado I repainted for specter177 recently, had many imperfections in them. But they looked miles better than a lot of the freeware out there, so it makes them appear to be worth the money, as the quality is definitely higher... but it could be better.

JoBee,
Thanks for adding that... I only have FSX, so I didn't want to comment on FS9. Would rather say nothing than something wrong. 

Some of those repaints on that site are real nice... and they highlight a point I was trying to make to someone else in another repaint thread, good texturing = good repaints.

If only every model was mapped well enough to allow that level of detail on everything eh? 

LeeC wrote on Mar 21^st, 2010 at 4:04pm:

LeeC wrote on Mar 21^st, 2010 at 5:51pm:

patchz wrote on Mar 22^nd, 2010 at 9:16am:

Knowledge is free and I have no problem sharing anything I know, if it helps.

The beauty of working in game dev teams is the sharing of knowledge to increase the skills of the whole team. I feel the same way about community creativity. The more knowledge that gets shared, the better the whole community becomes... and that can only be good for the people who are part of that community surely.

LeeC wrote on Mar 22^nd, 2010 at 9:28am: