A question for the repaint pros...

[Alfashark]

Discovered a curly little problem lastnight when I went to test version 2 of my BKJ repaint - In order to get crisp clean lines for the stripes on the fuse, I rotated the main texture sheet 3 degrees clockwise to bring the fuse level.
Applied the striping and then rotated back 3 degrees anti clockwise, but it looks like when you rotate the image it has reduced in physical dimensions. Tested it as is, and sure enough I have a semi naked Cub and textures in the wrong place...

Back into CS5 and stretched the image back to it's original 36.12cm square then tested again in the sim - right size, but it just doesn't look as sharp... I'm assuming this is a result of the stretching.

Is there any way around this? Or should I draw up the stripes separately then cut, rotate and paste onto the existing texture blanks?

[deaneb]

The way I apply simple stripes (or any other part of a paint scheme) over base textures, is to do it on a separate layer. That way you can move, rotate and crop the stripes you are using without affecting the base texture.

If there is a lot of detail you are painting over such as rivets and panel lines, then copy an approx area from the base base texture, paste that on my new layer and then re-colour, trim and crop to the required size to get the stripes. It takes a bit of trial and error, especially adjusting RGB, hues and brightness/contrast to get the right colour !!

[Alfashark]

Cheers Deane More swearing and chain smoking again tonight - I started from scratch, but on the plus side it's done and ready to test!

[Timmo]

The reason for the shrinkage is the cold

No, seriously, a raster image always has to fit into a rectangle- When you rotate an image (say, clockwise) those pixels that were at the top right and bottom left will need to be cropped and the pixels at the top left and bottom right will need to be filled in order to maintain that rectangular shape- The blurryness is caused by the image software doing its best to re-align everything to fit its new orientation...but of course if there was, say, a single pixel line going straight up and down, that will now be slightly wonky meaning some pixels will need to be aliased (i.e. blended to give the appearance of a straight line on an angle).

As Deane said, do all edits on a new layer- The less you mess with the original image the better (especially if it isn't a paintkit and you are using a de-compressed texture sheet which has already lost detail through compression)

[Cbris]

Another option is to draw vector lines. I use Corel Draw suite and "Draw" does perfect vectors. I think the Photoshop equivalent is Adobe Illustrator. There is also a vector based line/guide creator in photoshop. Corel Photopaint has something similar. But as I prefer to draw vectors in the "Draw" program, I do it that way.

[Wildbillkelso]

QUOTE (Cbris @ Mar 10 2011,10:01 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Another option is to draw vector lines.

Yep - vectors and seperate layers are the key!
Using PSPX, I usually create all kinds of lines as vectors (straight or curved), duplicate them to a pixel layer and do all the cutting stuff with the pixels. The untouched vector layers make great backups in case I mess up.
Having the lines on seperate layers makes turning, shifting and changing their colours very easy!

Cheers,
Markus.