Repaint tutorial?

[flyingip]

Hey guy's
As I see all these mustang paints I would love to do them by my self.
So are there any good tutorials to do them? :mixedsmi:

Cheers.
Philippe

[Dangerousdave26]

Yes here is a good tutorial on repainting aircraft

Also home to some great repaints

http://www.gjsmith.net/Tutorial/tutorials.htm

One of the first things you will need to do is decide which repaint program you are going to use.

Garry's tutorial is for Paintshop Pro and he is promoting Abacus Repaint. I do not have Abacus repaint but I have heard from many sources that it is extremely valuable when repainting. However it is not a paint program in of its self (someone correct me if I am wrong). Most people who I have heard use it use it to view the changes made to the bmp file with out starting flight sim up to view the changes.

Your options for software are

Coral Paintshop Pro MSRP $99.00

Photoshop CS2, CS3, or CS4 (if you have them) MSRP $999.00

and my new personal favorite

Gimp <--- Click MSRP FREEWARE

Yup the Gimp is freeware and on par with Photoshop I believe. Certainly will do every thing the repainter needs done.

Because the Gimp is open source and developed by a community it has a lot of addons availible in the way of scripts, brushes, textures... etc.

Read the manual carefully that helped me get past some initial hurtles.

Lets also not forget Martin Wright you will need his program to change the texture format.

His website http://fly.to/mwgfx/ Look for BTXBmp you will also need his mwgfx.dll package to run BTXBmp.

My suggestion is to start with Garry Smith's tutorials if you choose Gimp as your software to paint with you will have to figure out what each step in Paintshop Pro is in Gimp but that should not be too hard.

From what I remeber of Garry's Tutorial he did not work in layers (it has been a while since I read it). This is possible in Photoshop and Gimp I don't know if Paint Shop Pro can do it I would think it can.

Once you get some paint splashed on your plane you can start experimenting with Alpha Channels to see how changes look on your model.

Then to top it all off you can start to work on your weathering skills.

Good luck and don't get frustrated it is not hard to repaint but learning all of the little tricks takes time.

[flyingip]

Thanks for the reply Dave
Well I have CS2 and I use it for a long time yet but I get confused with saving the files.

Cheers,
Philippe

[Dangerousdave26]

Whoops my bad

Martin Wrights software should have been listed as DXTBmp not BXTBmp.

Yes saving the file type can be rather confusing it has taken me a while to figure it out.

For FS9 I save the files as 32bit 888 bmp in Gimp. If I need to I convert them to DXT3 for better frame rates with DXTBmp. This gives me a high quality texture that I can down grade anytime I choose.

For CFS2 you would want DXT3 textures at the most I believe.

Somewhere I read an explanation on this but now I can not find it. I thought it was on MWrights site but no dice.

Start simple just cover the bmp file with some type of color and see how it shows in FS.

[flyingip]

Whoops my bad

Martin Wrights software should have been listed as DXTBmp not BXTBmp.

Yes saving the file type can be rather confusing it has taken me a while to figure it out.

For FS9 I save the files as 32bit 888 bmp in Gimp. If I need to I convert them to DXT3 for better frame rates with DXTBmp. This gives me a high quality texture that I can down grade anytime I choose.

For CFS2 you would want DXT3 textures at the most I believe.

Somewhere I read an explanation on this but now I can not find it. I thought it was on MWrights site but no dice.

Start simple just cover the bmp file with some type of color and see how it shows in FS.

Cheers, works nice
Now I'll have to find out that Alpha thingy.
I'll post some shots of what I made yet in another topic

Regards, Philippe :ernae: