new paint

[lowglow]

I have found lots of imformation on the net about repainting an aircraft, and I have done a couple of these, but what about starting from scratch when you don't actually have a dds file to edit.
I have an aircraft that I want to do a repaint for and also creat bump maps for at the moment the dds files that color the aircraft are just colored squares. I want to add a lot more detail so I really need to start from scratch. Can this be done and are there any tutorials on how to do this?

[deaneb]

Fairly much impossible to do what you are doing. The area of a texture tile used to cover a part of the aircraft is specified by the modeller in the design stage. As you can imagine it would be impossible to know which area of each texture sheet maps to what part of the model and the boundaries of each if nothing but textured squares exist on each sheet!.
I'm wondering why the aircraft you wish to repaint does not have completed textures?

[lowglow]

QUOTE (deaneb @ Dec 13 2011,8:11 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Fairly much impossible to do what you are doing. The area of a texture tile used to cover a part of the aircraft is specified by the modeller in the design stage.

Thats what I was thinking I wonder weather I would be able to open the .mdl file with something like FS Design Studio and then edit the textures?

QUOTE

I'm wondering why the aircraft you wish to repaint does not have completed textures?[/quote]
The model is fairly basic the aircraft does resemble the original aircraft accuratelly enough has resonable panels, but the texturs are very basic, its an orange aircraft so the texture is an orange square it has some silver wing struts so the textue for that is a silver square. I would like to add the missing details, panel lines, rib stitching etc
Something else I have thought about is Abacus FS PaintV2 may this work?

[Jamessx]

QUOTE (lowglow @ Dec 15 2011,1:02 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Thats what I was thinking I wonder weather I would be able to open the .mdl file with something like FS Design Studio and then edit the textures?


The model is fairly basic the aircraft does resemble the original aircraft accuratelly enough has resonable panels, but the texturs are very basic, its an orange aircraft so the texture is an orange square it has some silver wing struts so the textue for that is a silver square. I would like to add the missing details, panel lines, rib stitching etc
Something else I have thought about is Abacus FS PaintV2 may this work?

There’s no real way to do this even if the model is simple due to the fact that once you import/export it you loose of your key frames and animations and only have the shell of the aircraft, if you wanted to redo all of the animations ect you would have to create new UVW maps which is the base for the repainter to paint on. I would suggest you enlarge the texture sheet size to 2048 x 2048 if not already and re rivet and paint the aircraft.

Jamessx

[lowglow]

Ok I will have a play around and see what I can do.
Maybe I could just start from scratch and create a new model of this aircraft.

[deaneb]

Firstly - you cannot open MDL files in FS design studio. MDL files are a format specific to the simulator and are compiled from FSDS via microsofts MakeMdl or XToMDL utilities.
The only option I see is to paint the texture sheet with a series of different coloured squares or grids, say 16x16 pixels. Then you will be able to get some idea of where the texture falls on the model so you can align the re-painting you wish to do. This will require a lot of trial and error though.

[lowglow]

Ok so the actual model is made using FSDS and then the model is converted to the necessary files using microsofts MakeMdl or XToMDL

[deaneb]

QUOTE (lowglow @ Dec 15 2011,8:09 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Ok so the actual model is made using FSDS and then the model is converted to the necessary files using microsofts MakeMdl or XToMDL

Correct. Although FSDS is not the only modelling program, GMAX is also common.

[lowglow]

Yep I have Gmax and Metasquoa I use this to make model for another sim Like this one