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  • Please see the most recent updates in the "Where did the .com name go?" thread. Posts number 16 and 17.

    Post 16 Update

    Post 17 Warning

Doing a repaint...

skyhawka4m

skyhawka4m

Charter Member
Ok...I've done many FS89 repaints but some reason I am having an issue with doing FSX repaints.

I am doing textures using an HD 2048 PSD file in ADOBE Photoshop. I save it as a 24bit bmp file, I then go into DXTbmp and open and delete the alpha from it......now....my question is, whaqt type of file am I saving it as. I have tried a bunch of them and they all come out looking blocky in the sim.


thanks~!
 
Try to save the file as 32 bit bmp in Photoshop. Then open and convert them to DXT5 using DXTbmp
Good luck! :icon_lol:
 
If you are using PS and the textures are going to be used in FSX then go and grab the DDS plug-in from nVidia which will allow you to open and save DDS files directly from PS.

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/photoshop_dds_plugins.html

One caveat....when you have your paint ready for exporting follow the steps below:

1. Save the layered file as a PS .psd file so that you can come back to it later.
2. Flatten the image into a single layer.
3. Flip the image vertically.
4. Do a 'Save As' (NOT A SAVE!) and select DDS as the format.
5. In the nVidia pop-up window make sure you select DXT5 as the format and make sure the 'No Mipmaps' option is selected (the plug-in will remember these settings next time you use it).
6. Move the saved DDS file to your FSX aircraft texture folder and test.

The plug-in will also export the alpha channel so if you do not want an alpha make sure you delete the channel (in the 'Layers' palette') before you flatten and export.
 
ok....thank you for the PS link....how do I create them as 16 bit textures for lower end machine as I would like to offer both resolutions.
 
By blocky do you mean you are losing the definition of the 2048 pixels?

If you make a checkerboard pattern using 1 pixel sized checks on the texture does this appear in FSX or is it distorted?

I asked this question of some other simmers once and I think with FSX acceleration you need to tell FSX to use larger than 1024 pixel textures (this is done by adding TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=4096 to the [GRAPHICS] section of the FSX.CFG file). If you don't add this line FSX may be downsizing the 2048 texture to 1024 automatically.

I have FSX SP2 with no acceleration and large pixel sizes like 2048 and 4096 work fine for me with no change to FSX.cfg so I've never experienced this problem which is why I say I only think it may be the problem (unless I see something with my own eyes I don't trust it). For example, the Auster Autocrat uses 2048x2048 textures and appears perfectly fine to me on my system.

When it comes to the format I use either DXT1, DXT1 with alpha, DXT5 or 888-8 32 bit.

DXT1 if there is no alpha channel,
DXT1 with alpha for on/off alpha channels
DXT5 for alpha channels with 256 levels
888-8 for highest colour resolution, effectively 24 bit with 8 bit alpha. The other DXT formats use less bits to hold the colour.

If you mean blocky as in the colours are not translating into FSX then you may need to try using some dither in DXTBMP or use the 888-8 file format (which uses a heck of a lot of RAM)
 
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