With the sad news that MZ has passed I hate to even brouch this question but the solution has evaded me for awhile. I have ALL his planes and have always used them in my game when possible. My problem is that all the prop textures show up as a solid disk. When I open the texture folder to replace with any of the available replacement prop textures it never seems to take and the solid remains. I notice that his prop texs all have different names with no two the same....
Hi Fibber!
If needs be I can always re-upload them. I have been toying with the idea to update them to my latest standards for a while, but I do not know whether I'll follow suit or not. I haven't made up my mind yet.
For as much as Akemi's aircrafts are pieces of art, his designer solution for the prop discs are a nightmare to repaint due to their mapping. I explained this several times on these pages, instead of a single file in 256x256x8 extended bmp format, Akemi choose to create a complex 512x512x8 file.
In it, the texture frame is divided exactly in four parts. The front and the back textures of the propeller disc are placed at the top upper two quadrants, while the lower parts of it are mapped to other transparent parts of the plane like the gunsight or, in case of his Spitfire MkVB, the side bullet-proof area of Spitfire sliding canopies.
This file is very attractive when one wants to paint different details on the front and the back of the propeller disc, but both discs are extremely difficult to center, a fundamental step in order to avoid that the resulting texture doesn't spin lopsided afterwards.
I remember spending an enormous number of hours moving both discs one pixel at a time in the four directions to get them centered, each time going back to the aircraft and start the engine to see if I had reached the goal. This exacted a severe toll from my eyesight, which never recovered fully ever since.
99% of other flightsim aircraft designers use the 256x256x8 format, where the prop disc mapping takes the entire frame and it's rather easy to center. In this case, the painter can devote more time concentrating on the quality of the blurred disc. While the negative side with this choice is that one cannot have a separate texture for the the front and the back of the prop disc, the positive aspect is the speed with which new blurred disc textures can be produced and uploaded.
Interestingly enough, I encountered this design technique only in other Japanese designers, making me suppose this is a design philosophy of a sort of Japanese "school" or line of thought.
All of the above also answers Fibber's questions about why generic disc textures from other planes
will never fit Akemi's planes. Aside from the fact that each aircraft model, not only Akemi's ones, has a dedicated filename for the propeller texture. If the *.mdl file calls for a different filename than the one stored in any given aircraft \texture folder, the result is a solid, opaque, ugly dark grey disc with a polygonal outline, instead of round as it should be. This only means the proper blurred disc texture file is missing.
Akemi adopted the following standard for naming his prop disc textures: his aircrafts usually have 4 texture files only and they are named after the aircraft name plus a number, 1 to 4. Usually #1 is the fuselage texture, #2 covers the wings and the tailplane, #3 the aircraft details, finally #4 is the prop texture.
I think one or two of Akemi's older models, either the Ki-61 and/or one of the Oscars he did, were uploaded with a missing prop texture file or it was never assigned at all. Their prop discs will not take any replacement cure, for money or love.
Many designers used a simple "prop.bmp" filename and this led to much confusion in the past, where people tended to think that file could be a sort of jolly prop file, good for all models.
Nothing is more far from the truth. At the beginning I myself was under the impression that a generic pack could fit all of them and that was my first upload nine years ago, which I do not recommend anymore, it should actually be deleted from SOH's archives. Over the years, I discovered that each designer created discs of different sizes, often times even within one's own production.
The bottom line is that each model needs a custom-tailored blurred propeller disc texture and this is what I have been doing for the past six-seven years at least.
Even now, I am not too happy when repainters give me credit for
"kelti-style" prop textures because I know damn' well that, if they took the texture they included in their repaints from another model I did, it's almost impossible that this texture fits this one 100% fine: it's either too small, or too large, or has wrong details painted on. So, I only take responsibility for blurred disc textures that I did and uploaded personally.
Cheers!
KH 
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