Question about fonts on panels

[flewpastu]

Im redoing a panel (Aerosoft Jayhawk). The fonts on the pedestal and overhead are very blurry. My question is what type of font is used on most panels that make them NOT blurry ? Im using photoshop 6 I think, I just cant get the fonts to be as sharp and not blurry as Ive seen on other panels. Is there a secret or method ?

Bill

[Tako_Kichi]

If it's a 1024x1024 texture sheet with a lot of small text they can be very difficult to keep sharp regardless of font. The font I like to use for US aircraft is 'AmarilloUSAF' which is almost identical to the one used by the USAF. It's a free font and easily found via Google.

One trick a lot of texture artists use is to keep all their text layers as text layers in the PSD file, i.e. do not rasterize the layer(s) as that will make them pixelated. This can increase the file size of course, I currently have a PSD file for an overhead panel that has a LOT of text and the file contains more than 150 layers and is 51+Mb in size (but it is a 4096x4096 sheet too).

[flewpastu]

hum ok, I converted the file to 2048x2048 from 1028x1028, but that didn't seem to work all that good, I have the type of font you mentioned my only problem is that its still blurry no matter what I do. I usually keep them in their org form and do not rasterize them, I also keep them in a higher priority above the rest of the files.

Bill

[hairyspin]

Just resizing the original texture up to 2048x2048 isn't going to make it much clearer unless you redo the text over the original, but if the mapping is at too large a scale you're not going to improve the text much.

[UncleTgt]

I echo the other comments, sometimes the pixel definition won't allow you to do what you want.

However, there are different methods you can use to resize files, with varying results.

Most graphics packages resize using pixel resize algorithms. I don't have Photoshop 6, but you might be able to change the resize method to "bicubic" instead of "pixel resize". You should find this retains detail sharpness better, but even that has it's limits.

Also, in the older sims you sometimes found the settings in the panel.cfg put artificial limits on instrument clarity( the panel.cfg forces the sim to downsize even large, clear bitmaps). You might look at the panel.cfg & change the pixel size info to try to improve the definition.

[flewpastu]

Humm interesting points, ill check the resizeing in photoshop and go from there . Thanks for the info shipmates

Bill