PHXMKEflyer From United States, joined Nov 2003, 257 posts, RR: 0 Posted (1 month 1 week 5 days 21 hours ago) and read 732 times:
I can't for the life of me figure out how people are able to create/paint airline liveries on aircraft? I wish I could figure out how to do it; i'd love to create my own virtual airline livery for my FS9.
I'm not the most computer savvy but any help/suggestions on how to do this is greatly appreciated!
CPH-R From Denmark, joined May 2001, 4925 posts, RR: 6 Reply 1, posted (1 month 1 week 5 days 16 hours ago) and read 718 times:
First of all you'll need a program to paint with. That can be anything ranging from freeware up to professional editing software, but if you're just starting out, I'd recommend you download the GIMP which is a good quality, freeware image editing program.
Then, depending on what model you're repainting, you may get a layered paintkit (usually a .PSD file) or a blank .bmp file with the outlines of the plane. In the latter case, it's fairly straight forward. But with a layered paintkit it gets a bit more tricky - but at the same time, the quality of your repaint will go up.
Since you're doing your own livery, you can let the imagination flow, otherwise most repainters will use sites such as A.net, Jetphotos, Flickr etc. to try and get as many details about a particular livery as they can.
It's a pretty broad question, so I'm not sure exactly what part of it you need help with
NWADC9 From United States, joined May 2004, 4579 posts, RR: 16 Reply 2, posted (1 month 1 week 4 days 4 hours ago) and read 673 times:
1. Download paintkit
2. Add pretty colors to it using any graphics editor (heck, even MSPaint, but please don't; GIMP's great and free)
3. Save as a 32-bit or DXT3 bitmap (there are other formats, but just worry about these two; 32-bit is much larger in size, but higher quality, whereas DXT3 is compressed and may lose some quality but is most common with AI and low-end systems) using a program like DXTbmp
Burkhard From Germany, joined Nov 2006, 1672 posts, RR: 0 Reply 4, posted (1 month 1 week 13 hours ago) and read 563 times:
Once you a blank texture, you can paint on it with any tool. MS Paint is the easiest and fastest way and allows easy handling of single pixels. Then you have to convert the texture. Advanced users who know about alpha channels might use DXT3 format, if you use no alpha channel or even ask what that is DXT1 is exactly identical, but uses far less computer resources.
For the conversion, ACES imagetool from FS) SDK is as fine as DCTBMP by Martin Wright.
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From United States, joined Nov 2003, 257 posts, 
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