Check out my new toy.....CF-18 painted in the colours of my favorite hockey team, The Calgary Flames....









BTW, I saved the texures as a basic DTTS file with no Alpha before I realised you could change those settings. Can someone explain the differences, pros / cons?

A repaint shold have an all new alpha not a clone of an exisiting

There are the areas like markings etc that need taking out of the alpha.

An alpha really needs to be specific to a paint.

todayshorse wrote on Sep 9^th, 2011 at 11:01pm:

No need for all that messing about. You can use the main texture as Alpha in DXTBmp. Alpha > Import Alpha. It will be automatically converted to 8-bit Grey Scale. You can then tweak it to get the effects you want.

Awesome Job!  You kept the nuts an bolts and even scratches and stuff on the flaps!
The only thing I found a bit strange was the canada flag on the tail.  Wasn't Canada's flag red with white instead of black with red?
But amazing paint!





And about the alphas, if you don't want to go around making you're own but still one a quite close one, you can copy the alpha from any default just plain white one and do this:
1.  Open the default white one in DXTbmp
2.  In the little upper left-hand corner it will
    show the image of the alpha, and then some
    small little icons right underneath.  Roll your
    mouse over them until you find the one
    that's called Export Alpha.  Then save the
    alpha.
3.  Open your new texture, and then on the top bar of the screen hit Alpha, and then find the one called Import Alpha.  Then click okay to all that 256x256 and grayscale blabber.  Then select the image you saved as an alpha.  Then, save as a DXT bmp or DDS or whatever you're going to save the image as.

Well maybe i spend too much time on them then!!! But i do like to faff about with it, down to individual panels and various parts. I dunno, its just how i like to work

I agree with Todayshorse. I spend quite some time on alphas because they do more for a model than most realize. I get out of them what I put into them.

Layering is the key to repainting. If the main texture file is set up with layering to your liking - including layers specifically for the alpha - then the alpha file can be created from the texture file. Open the texture file, convert to grayscale, then turn on and off specific layers depending on how you set things up to make life easier. I have a checklist for each model I do, and presets of "brightness/contrast" for specific layers. It IS a quick easy job once the texture file is set up right.

I use the "negative" method as the foundation of my alphas. By changing a texture file to grayscale, you can then negative the image, inverting the lightness. Most objects in a texture require the opposite light value in the alpha. There are numerous exceptions to this rule, but it's a good place to start for experimentation.

Many secrets can be found by experimenting with alpha channels. You'll get out of it what time you put into it.

garryrussell wrote on Sep 8^th, 2011 at 8:56am:

Garry, I did not say clone for the repaint. I said clone for the palette shift. There is a huge difference. A palette shift is the exact same pattern, except for colors and it works fine.

For the repaints, I often make a copy of the texture I'm working on and then alter the light/dark/contrast for the alpha.

BLAZE wrote on Feb 14^th, 2012 at 6:30pm:

Probably the wrong filetype.  Did you make sure to save it as a DXT3 extended bitmap in DXTbmp before putting it in?

andy190 wrote on Feb 14^th, 2012 at 8:40pm:

My goodness!  How did I not remember making that?!?  bah!  Well thanks for taking the time to dig it up, cause even if I had managed to remember, I doubt I'd remeber which folder and topic it was in.

BLAZE wrote on Feb 17^th, 2012 at 4:22pm:

I highly doubt the Acrosoft one will have DXT3, and I KNOW the defualt paint program doesn't.  You MUST do it as a DXT1 or DXT3. (I'm not sure about DXT5, never tried it before, and I've heard you have to do other things for .dds, so just go with DXT3.  that way you can add the shiny stuff )
Here's a link to how to download DXTbmp. The actual download button is at the VERY BOTTOM of the page, and I'm pretty sure you can figure out how to do the install.

Hi Blaze, you don't have to buy Paint Shop to repaint planes for FS. You can get one of the free ones. The two best ones are Paint.NET & GIMP. I recommend Paint.NET because it's easier to use.

If you need any help just start a new topic & Club & will try and help.

Bah!  I forgot to actually include the link!!!
http://www.btinternet.com/~mnwright/programs/dxtbmp.htm

LOL That's funny 508.  Thank you for the hookup Hey!..I had a ''BAD'' thing that turned out to be a ''GOOD'' thing happen to me last night, Check this out, I tryed to better my virtual memory so I could Sim alittle better. WELL!..I clicked something I should'nt have and POOF! no more computer! The funny thing is, when that happend, the only thing I was worryed about was loosing ''ALL'' the work I did to the planes. Cause I do alot of cleaning up the gauges and moding. the sounds and stuff like that. It's just something I like to do. You know "Tweeking".  You know how long that stuff takes! BUT..luck would have it that I parked FS9 and all the other files for FS9 on the Drive ''D'' partition, I only chose to recover Drive ''C'' where the goof happend. THANK GOD I MADE THAT 10 DISK WIDOWS BACKUP!!! so..short story long..the ''GOOD'' part is now Windows is running Tip-Top and I chose to ''Take The RED Pill Instead Of The BLUE One'' And the memory is as Tip-Top as it can get.  Oh yeah...On the .DXT thing I downloaded 'Paintshop Pro' X4 the other day and it did'nt include the .DXT option in the save window   What Gives?

Hey..Thanks for all your help on this gentlemen. Yeah thats a good hookup there 508. thanks man!