How to night light your panel and gauges

[Piglet]

????????????????? Something sure is whacked in this thread.

[Lateral-G]

????????????????? Something sure is whacked in this thread.

Where did all the posts go?

-G-

[Meshman]

Works great, THANKS for the tip!!

[limjack]

hmmmmm....scratching my head

[Piglet]

Perhaps Roger can finish this thread he started.....

[MenendezDiego]

I'm assuming he saw he could not see people's posts, so he made his own, came up with a topic name, end of story

[Roger]

There was a glitch on the forums when I posted this and the message and screenshot were evidently deleted. I'll recreate the thread when I get to my home pc tonight.

[Lionheart]

Looking forward to it Roger.




Bill

[Roger]

Simple...paint Radium on the needles and characters You''ll glow in the dark too after a while
Mathias' 190s used the same stuff.

[Lionheart]

I cant figure out how to paint the Radium onto the dials without getting it on the monitor screen...



So you must have taken out the dome light, or caused the dome light to work with a different light circuit such as Logo, Recognition, etc.




Bill

[Roger]

I'm just the guy who took the screenshot...Tim is the guy who made it work

[Roger]

Well the panel is from the Dc2X

[Marvin Carter]

I would like to know how to do it. The LIC Champ planes have a texture for them in the panel folder, it has white circles where the gauges are in the panel, not sure how it works? Not sure if I've got the right plane here I'm talking about.Its in the texure folder and prob. modeled!!!

[Lionheart]

Basically its nothing more then a lightmap, but you need to insert the work (lightmap for instance) in the model before exporting it to FS. Thus if you do not have lightmaps assigned to the materials in the aircraft, then you will not have anything show up. Thats the down side.


There are some subtle tricks to lightmaps that you can do.

1. For older aircraft, use a yellowish color for the light zones.

2. You can colorise it to red if you like on modern planes, such as a new Piper, etc.

3. You can lightly illumine the surrounding area's if you like, say a cascade of white from a lightbar (located under the dash hood) that flows down the panel from the top, fading towards the bottom. This can take some learning to do. One way is to make a layer above the work, make a rectangle, then use Blur/Gausian Blur, and blur the heck out of it, and then lightly erase the bottom to give it an appearence of fading.

Slight colorizations are good too. For instance, if you have a blue faced Attitude indicator, then a light blue light will appear on the rim of the Attitude indicators bazel rim. On a Garmin screen surround, or military jet fighter readout screen 'rim edge', you can slightly colorize the inner edge to appear that the glow is cascading off the inner edges. A cool little touch.


So much you can do.


If the interior is light-mapped also, you can add some cool glow zones from instrumentation and things. At least give it a 5% glow so you can see a bit in there at night. Only shows when the instrumentation is actiavated.



Bill

[Piglet]

I light map my interiors also. Fly the Orion spaceplane, or J-21 at dusk/night. My gauge lighting is kinda on the "cheap" side, but it works.