Repainters' Corner

[Jimmy]

heres a guide that got me started:

1

2

3

4a

good luck with ya painting

[Charl]

We have a number of aspiring painters in the Forums.
With a little nudge in the right direction, a whole bunch of NZ aircraft will fly which might otherwise have remained a dream.
Post your tips and tricks here.
Jimmy's post above gave me a couple of pointers for Photoshop which may yet help to produce a Great Repaint one day!

[victor_alpha_charlie]

thanks jimmy!

[Jenks]

Interesting techniques, especially the 'dirt' ones. The key to making that work though is understanding how the real thing looks - very easy to overdo it.

Personally I create all my base scheme in vector, rather then bitmap. That way I can work in much finer detail and have a LOT more control over more complex schemes.

His example, while very well explained, is quite simple and basically consists of just drawing a couple of boxes When you want to produce complex shapes from scratch (like logos) - that's where vector really comes into play. Much easier to draw in Illustrator or Freehand

Interesting that he finds his airline logos on that site as vector - I'd never thought of looking there. Maybe we need to establish a place where we can store Kiwi aviation art. Don't know how it would work, but I would be more than happy to contribute my artwork - various airline/flying club logos etc... and of course an accurate RNZAF Kiwi roundel

Thanks for the links Jimmy - nice find.

[Kelburn]

Are there any freeware painting programs that I could use for repainting instead of Adboe Photoshop etc.

[Zöltuger]

Interesting that he finds his airline logos on that site as vector - I'd never thought of looking there. Maybe we need to establish a place where we can store Kiwi aviation art. Don't know how it would work, but I would be more than happy to contribute my artwork - various airline/flying club logos etc... and of course an accurate RNZAF Kiwi roundel

I get my logos from that site too, unfortunatley in Paint Shop Pro they turn into raster layers after you import them. I just make them really big, then shrink them.

I'd be concerned about copyright if there was a site of club logos.

And for freeware graphics software, GIMP is apparantly the best

[Kelburn]

A guy I know recommended that to me, I've got it I just need to work out how to use it.

[Jimmy]

jimmy's post above gave me a couple of pointers for Photoshop which may yet help to produce a Great Repaint one day

okay I have edited it so it makes more sense at the begining of a thread Good idea charl

Since there never was a 4b and 5 to that tutorial heres some basic steps to finsish your repaint.

Get DXTbmp from here (some prefer to use other programs but this works fine for me)

If your continueing on with the IFDG A320 used in the tutorial heres what I did: (these principles apply to most repainting thow):


In the layers window right click on one of them and select "flatten visible" now
just use the navigator tool to find half way across your fusalarge textures (1024pix) and to the top of the texture (29 up) so your navigator should say something like 1024x11px.

now with your mouse in this excact posistion just use the selectin useing the marquee tool and sellect from this point right across to one of the cornors and it should look like you have half of the fusalge selected then hit control c.

next start dxt.bmp and select "load extended image" and find were you have the ifdg paintkit and open the fuse texture.
then make sure that dxt has paintshop as your editor and select "send to editor" from the menu bar not the bar on the right.

In paintshop there should now be a "norm.bmp" and with that up hit control v and drag your first half to were it should go (very easy to see were biggrin.gif ) and then go back to your fusalrge image and select the other half of it in the same way (remember to be precis with this) and paste i in the norm image.

Repeat the step for the other side of the fusalarge. Then click "save", hopefully it shoudl just save it with out asking you anythign and then go back to dxt and click "save extended image" and navigate to were you loaded the image and overright it with the new one. Others may want to add to this as there are quite a few ways to save the textures in dxt, I belev there is a later version of dxtbmp as well yet I cant find the link..

hope I didnt make this to confusing!
James

[Jenks]

So how would a site of club logos etc run into any different copyright issues to those sites that are already providing them

In a nutshell, any one of us could generate a copy of a logo and use it without any fear of copyright issues. It only becomes an issue if we start to use those logos to misrepresent the original owner, and only really would become an issue if it was widespread abuse, or involved financial gain. Personal use doesn't really bother anyone.

Otherwise we'd all be in court for the repaints we've already done

[victor_alpha_charlie]

jimmy's post above gave me a couple of pointers for Photoshop which may yet help to produce a Great Repaint one day

okay I have edited it so it makes more sense at the begining of a thread Good idea charl

Since there never was a 4b and 5 to that tutorial heres some basic steps to finsish your repaint.

Get DXTbmp from here (some prefer to use other programs but this works fine for me)

If your continueing on with the IFDG A320 used in the tutorial heres what I did: (these principles apply to most repainting thow):


In the layers window right click on one of them and select "flatten visible" now
just use the navigator tool to find half way across your fusalarge textures (1024pix) and to the top of the texture (29 up) so your navigator should say something like 1024x11px.

now with your mouse in this excact posistion just use the selectin useing the marquee tool and sellect from this point right across to one of the cornors and it should look like you have half of the fusalge selected then hit control c.

next start dxt.bmp and select "load extended image" and find were you have the ifdg paintkit and open the fuse texture.
then make sure that dxt has paintshop as your editor and select "send to editor" from the menu bar not the bar on the right.

In paintshop there should now be a "norm.bmp" and with that up hit control v and drag your first half to were it should go (very easy to see were biggrin.gif ) and then go back to your fusalrge image and select the other half of it in the same way (remember to be precis with this) and paste i in the norm image.

Repeat the step for the other side of the fusalarge. Then click "save", hopefully it shoudl just save it with out asking you anythign and then go back to dxt and click "save extended image" and navigate to were you loaded the image and overright it with the new one. Others may want to add to this as there are quite a few ways to save the textures in dxt, I belev there is a later version of dxtbmp as well yet I cant find the link..

hope I didnt make this to confusing!
James

haha ok no offnece jimmy but can someone please do a far clearer version of this for photoshop 7?

[Dreamweaver]

When you understand paint shop 7 can you explain it to me as well

Photo editing proggies I understand but paint shop 7 has me baffled dunno why

[G-HEVN]

I have one that shows the basics for a Carenado 182. I wrote it explicitly for Paint Shop Pro 7. I'll try to find the link...

Edit: http://www.cixvfrclub.org.uk/downloads_documents.htm Third entry under 'Club information'

[Zöltuger]

Basically I have a couple of repaints for the FSX default 737. What I want to do is import them into Imagetool to compress them into DXT5 format. The only problem is that I need to add the alpha map too. I've tried to import a .psd into it, but it doesn't seem to pick up the alpha map which I add. How does one go about doing this? I'm using Paint Shop Pro.

(and just FYI: What I've been doing in the past was to use the DXTBMP program to import the file, add the alpha map, save, then open Imagetool, extract the mipmaps and save the largest as the final version. This would work again for these new repaints, but saving it twice adds twice as many compresison artifacts- not so good)

[toprob]

I normally save as a .tga to preserve the alpha.

[JonARNZ]

Depends what software you are using, I use PSP like you for textures, then Photoshop allows you to open PSD files complete with the alpha preserved, so paste my new texture as top layer, save through PS as a 32 bmp, and then convert to DXT5 with alpha still intact.

[Zöltuger]

I normally save as a .tga to preserve the alpha.

ah, thanks, it's working brilliantly

[Kelburn]

I require help with GIMP repainting.