OT- Glittery Paint

K

Kiwikat

Motorcycling Kat
Back many months ago there was a thread where someone made a glittery/sparkly paint for their aircraft. If the original poster is out there, could you please post those pictures and procedures again?

I am working on it for a Citation Mustang paint. I've made a sparkly spec map but I'm not sure if that's all that needs to be done.

Thanks :ernae:
 
Got a photo or link to one? I guess you mean metallic? As opposed to multi hued "flip flop" paint...
 
Sort of metallic. The effect I was shooting for is more of a multicolor glitter shine.

I got it on the tail of the islander right now just to test it. It looks pretty cool. It will look GREAT on the Citation Mustang. Perhaps I'll do a paint for the long-EZ with it too.:jump:
 
Leon did one for an Fs9 aircraft and I believe Chuck Jodry painted an FsX SUV in glittery red paint.
 
Let me see...

On the normal texture: Try a 40 to 60% black on the alpha part to the glittery bit. (trial and error - or experience and feel). Paint the colour slightly darker than the final colour you want on the finished fuselage. Don't necessarily add the glitter (metallic flake) to the base paint.

On the specular: paint the glittery bit the same base colour but slightly more intense. i.e. if the glittery bit is cherry red then make the specular part a slightly brighter red. Then using a very vine spray brush, with a big particle spread, spray the "glittery" sparkles over the colour (make this a separate layer/object so you can copy it). Use maybe "gold" or "silver" (ochre or grey).

On the specular alpha - use a very light alpha but copy the glitter layer ("glittery" sparkles above) and paste over in exactly the same position. Darken this almost to black (90%ish). Offset this loyer/object 1 pixel "north and west"

Copy this glitter layer over to the normal texture's alpha layer and offset it 1 pixel "north and east" and make sure that the dots are almost 100% black (start with 90%)

The more pixel resolution you have, the better. 2048 texture sheets and big maps will look a lot better.

If you can create the spray pattern for the glittery bits as fine and small as possible, then that is good too.

Experiment and have fun!
 
What was laid out would work in FSX but the size of the lightpoints remains too large i find and needed to tile the bitmap to keep the effect luminous and fine grained , the other thing i do is use noise to produce the sparkle in the alpha layer and its used in the specular map slot.
This kind of mapping doesnt not lend itself to conventional paint jobs.
 
The smallest you're going to get in any case is 1 pixel. But I do like the noise effect. That was what I was looking for by way of an alternative description.

Nice paint too!
 
I finally cracked this effect back in the summer after literally months of playing around trying to get something that looked right. As the other posters have mentioned the secret lies in setting up the noise filter in the spec map alpha channel and I also added a 'tint' in the main paint area of the spec map.

It's a lot of fine tuning and a lot of checking in-game to tweak the settings as a small change in Photoshop can make a huge difference in FSX.

The aircraft in question must also have individual spec maps assigned to the main textures in the model too otherwise it's game over. I tried to apply the effect to Bill's Epic but he used a single, global, spec map and therefore this effect cannot be used on that aircraft.
 
Was this the plane?

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The metallic paint jobs add a new dimension over the plain ole flat paint jobs. It seems to bring even a more real to life depth to anything it is applied to for sure. It is easier to capture the curves and lines of the plane, easier to add depth perception, just better in every way overall than the stock paints!!!

It is almost like living with a black and white TV, and liking it; then look at a plasma screen HD TV. It is hard to go back to the plain flat, no extra dimensional paint jobs.

I hope more people start to use this method. I have a couple of Chris’s paints and they are the cats meow. Thanks to everybody for sharing the ‘secret’ to making these paints.

Robert the Bruce (LOLJ:costumes:), your picture is a PRIME example of how this kind of paint shows off the lines. You should add a screen of a ‘regular’ paint with the same sun angle, same… so others can see what I’m talking about.


Bravo gents, thank you for everything! :ernae:<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:eek:ffice:eek:ffice" /><o:p></o:p>
 
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