Classic British Flight Sim

Kevin Farnell wrote:One thing that I appear to have missed ( as pointed out on Retro AI), is addition of metalic textures to the engines.
I have no idea how to achieve this. This is my first paint, and what I have produced is simply from opening the paintkit in Photoshop Elements 3 and seeing what I could do by trial and error.
If someone could describe how to do the engines, or point me towards a guide, this would be much appreciated.
Having spent a good deal of my Easter weekend, working on the paint, I decided to have an evening away form the PC tonight.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Kevin

If you mean you want to have a shiny, relective effect on the bare metal, you need to edit the amount of grey in the alpha channel. I use DXTBmp from MWGraphics which is freeware ( http://fly.to/mwgfx/) which allows you to load the alpha channel seperately into your bitmap editing program to amend the amount of grey that is there. Basically any areas you want o have shiny should have a corresponding grey "mask", the darker the grey the more shiny it is, too dark and it looks like a mirror, so it's trial and error to get the right effect. DXTbmp also allows you to create an alpha mask from the basic livery texture, so you can use it to create a new grey mask, ideal where you want to apply say just a shiny effect to parts of the belly, wings and engine, but leave the rest as normal gloss effect, all you have to do is go over the areas to be shiny on the new template in grey, and colour the rest of the tex white, then using DXTbmp export and save to the original file overwriting the originals. DXTbmp is a very intuitive and easy interface program to use and helps getting the shiny metal effects in a very painless way, especially if you are using an old clunky (but very familiar) version of PSP as I do which doesn't understand multi layering like some newer graphics editors do!

Was that what you were referring to?

Sorry, guy's but this is getting far too heavy for this time of night.
I'll read through these again tomorrow, but now I need to get some sleep.

Regards

Kevin

Hi Kevin

Just follow my directions tommorrow to re add the lost alpha rather than try editing it

If you need to edit it then that's in mentioned in Marks post.

Garry

Hi Garry

I'm not sure that it's the alpha channel that I need.
The engines on my DC-9 look to be a sort of dove grey. I would like to make them look more like metal. Do I do this by painting them a light grey?
Also, I've notice that Photoshop elements has a 'gradient tool'. Is this any use for creating a metal look.

Cheers

Kevin

Hi Kevin

The alpha is what will make it look metal.

Was it metal to start with?

Garry

I Tried your suggestion, Garry but there appears to be no alpha channel in the paintkit.
I have opened both the Photoshop and texture files (from the original zip file) with DXTBmp and in both cases, the alpha box is just white.

The image was not metal to start with, but an off white.

Regards

Kevin

OK Kevin

In that case you are going to have to make one to get a more metal effect.

It could be though that as it is an AI model it won't support aplha channels..so that wouldn't work :think:

Best bet is to find on a pic or another texture the colour you wants and use that.

Garry

Thanks Garry

I had a play in DXTBmp last night and learned how to create a new alpha channel. I've checked that this shows, in FS9.
I intend to colour the engines light grey and add alpha to get a metal effect. I still need to learn how to tone down the alpha (if it's possible).
Then, it should be just about ready to upload.

Regards

Kevin

Hi Kevin

The darker the Alpha the more shiny but the lighter it makes the grey

To tone down then you need to make the alpha lighter and adjust the base layer for colour.

Garry

Well, I've finally uploaded it to Avsim (if I've done it correctly).

klm_dc930.zip ...Not plugging it, of course

I followed Garry's advice on adding alpha to get a metal finish to the engines.



Thanks to everyone who offered advice and encouragement.
I have another project to start. Hopefully this will go a little easier and I won't ask so many questions.

Regards

Kevin