Classic British Flight Sim

With the stripes, if you are altering the opacity you may find it best to remove the white layer underneath so that the darker 'bare metal' shows through rather than the white.
And/or darken as garry suggests. Trial and error will show what loooks best.

Rgds

john

A 75% opacity setting has produced this comparison between the best shot of the original and the wip. The windows in the MS model seem a bit too tall and I will probably make the stripe a fraction narrower - the reflected stripe on the other side seems a couple of pixels lower but I'll overtake that snail yet.



If I take a copy at the horizontal stripe stage, and lose the tail logo I'm well on the way to the Gibair scheme. Funnily enough I saw an announcement yesterday that GB Airways (Gibair as woz) have been taken over by Easyjet.

On the Hunting Surveys front, if anyone has a copy of Britain's Airlines Vol 2 : 51-64, could they scan the Hunting Horn and Flag off the back cover, as that is the missing nose logo I was needing to find!

I will probably get both vols off Amazon in the next couple of weeks anyway.

...then it's on to a bare metal Scottish Airlines scheme and maybe a default GAMMP.. gets infectious this old game.

If any of these are on John's list, I'll probably be doing them anyway for home consumption as part of the learning process.

AllanL wrote:- the reflected stripe on the other side seems a couple of pixels lower but I'll overtake that snail yet.

Allan,

Depending on stripe position, the top of the stripe on the stbd side doesn't get copied onto the port side, You have to paint the 'lost' bit off the top of the stripe onto the port side. There are so many things wrong with the model, window height being one of them. I try and use long curves to try and hide the fact so that the stripe/s end up somewhere near where they should be when they reach the tailplane.

Rgds

John

At the moment I'm managing about an hour a night, when I'm not tempting fate on flights to Exeter in a Q400 or more prosaically driving up and down the country, before patience runs out and I risk taking a chainsaw to the screen.

The section of fuselage that is both sides of the tail is a much lighter "metal" shade than the straight section ahead of it. This means that using the same shade of blue and opacity as the main stripe results in a lighter blue when applied to the tail. Increasing opacity darkens and deepens the blue - so again it is glaringly different from the bit ahead. Currently stumped by this, but will have another go tomorrow. I may put a grey "undercoat" on to see if I can get the colour balance for the stripe. Filling in the narrow section between "Dark Moments" white top and the stripe has been irritating too in avoiding having too much colour difference.

The two paint schemes that will come from this stripe/white tail base also require either a significantly reduced black section on the nose for the Gibair or a white nose for the Air Luton - well it looks white to me. For now I've cloned the metal finish in place of the black nose so that the blue of the stripe doesn't end up with yet another ruddy variation. Getting ratty, me, whatever gave you that idea. :@

Another bridge to cross is the the lower fuselage colour for the Gibair and the painting on the engine cowling/wing (ok two bridges). The available Gibair shot looks as thought the lower fuselage is painted, and suggests that the paint goes back from the engine colwing across the wing. Shots of the aircraft in Kestrel service show the painting of the cowlings going back in a stripe across the wing, and the lower fuselage unpainted. As the layout of the schemes is so similar my thought is that Kestrel just painted over the pale blue with the rust red colour of their choice, and I suspect they will not have stripped any paint off the lower fuselage to get their unpainted lower fuselage. So for now that is the basis I'm using for the Gibair scheme.

I decided to give the DC-3 a break for a couple of hours and run up a quick scheme on something simpler...and promptly met some new problems!

I thought a quick repaint of Dee Waldron's Martin 4-0-4 would only take a few minutes, but came across some aspects of it that leave me puzzled. There is a copy of the aircraft on a site that Dee left running, but won't be updating, and more repaints on flightsim etc.

The latest model of the aircraft is on Dee's site and the texture files are 512x512 256 BMPs. Repaints on flightsim have a bunch of extra files with _L on the names, and are also in DXT3 1024x1024 16 bit format. Does this simply mean that there is more detail in these repaints and the extra files are night lighting? Would I need to create the _L files for the repaint I am doing?

Also, having started the repaint on the 512x512 256 colour textures, saved files seem to have lost the alpha layer although I don't recall making any conscious decision to lose it.

Perhaps I should stick to the DC-3 instead of wandering off!

HI Allan

The _L textures are the night textures.

Suggest openiong each one up in DXT and you will get an idea.

Those _L are usually solid black an enable the windows etc on the fuse to shine of a night without the fuse or whatever applied to being transparent.

They are in effect a block

ATB

Garry

I finally got a closer colour match for the back end by increasing the opacity to over 90% and fiddling with the three colour codes individually. Now it just needs a bit more shaping and a better match at the bottom of the stripe. Then I can tidy up the nose and start on the window detailing.

At the front even 100% opacity allows the base colour to come through from the area that usually is blackened out.

I've noticed other model repaints that go from 512x512 to 2048x2048 for the same base model - I thought fs9 was limited to 1024x1024. Presumably this crams more detail in, but I assume the night lighting textures have to be the same size as the underlying day textures.

Hi Allan,

Make a copy of your background and sit the layer just above background and hide all other layers. Now, make sure your copy of the background is highlighted and use the clone tool to paint the glareshield out replacing it with bare metal. Looking good.

Rgds

John

I tried to load up the demo copy of fsrepaint but the following happens each time I tried to fire it up.



So it's back to the fs9/dxt/psp8 tango for now.

In between scratching away at the DC-3 , I've been fiddling with the following as a stress reducer - simpler model all round!

Mind you it probably isn't classic, it ain't British - but it is at least colorfull



And yes, the tail has been left to last on purpose.

Now I'm off to grab a front-row seat at the tele to wave at my daughter at the Albert Hall tonight, she'll be one of the Guides organising folk.

Hi Allan

That error was caused by a windows update or something similar

There is a patch and hopefully someone will come up with it

It was posted here many months ago but I don't remember when

You could try Googling that error and see if you can bet it that ways

Garry