Painting aircraft

[Sid2008]

Ok, I am a newbie in aircraft painting. I make a texture of a part, say a fuselage in FSDS and take the texture into GIMP 2 and try to paint the thing. Sometimes I use FS repaint to make sure the paintjob is where it is supposed to be.

Here is the question: How the heck do i paint smooth curves in Gimp 2? This is what I found: the smallest dot I can paint is a pixel so if the canvas size is 512*512 pixels, curves look piecewise linear, i.e., they are not smooth. In GIMP I can blow up the canvas to 1024*1024 and paint a "smoother" curve using the "Paths" utility, but they are still not totally smooth. The obvious answer is blow up the canvas size even more, say 2048*2048 pixels, but is there an easier way?

Thanks guys,Sid​

 

[Tom Clayton]

MSPaint can be the same way. Inside FS, those sharp pixelated angles are softened by the anti-aliasing function. In graphics apps, I doubt they use that terminology, so look for some sort of "softening" or "blurring" brush or filter. I've never used Gimp, so I don't know if it has that capability. You may need another piece of software to do the softening after doing the initial artwork in Gimp.

 

[Wild Bill Kelso]

Inside FS, those sharp pixelated angles are softened by the anti-aliasing function. In graphics apps, I doubt they use that terminology...

That's exactly the word!
Dunno if it works with GIMP, but my PaintShopProX allows anti-aliasing, leading to pixels of various opacities (but with the same colour).

To draw a smooth curved line, I usually add a vector layer and draw a complete ellipse. As long as it's a vector, I can simply adjust the curve by shifting the marked centre and the vertices. This is how such an ellipse looks:

And these are the anti-aliased pixels zoomed in (note the zoom factor of 2000 %):

Once I'm satisfied with the shape, I store a copy of the vector layer for backup purposes and make it invisible, whereas the original vector layer gets transformed to a raster layer, allowing further editing such as partial deleting and cutting. I can even change the whole colour later on, since all those pixels share the same shade and can easily be re-coloured with the "change colour" tool.

If this won't work with GIMP, you perhaps should consider using a different graphic editor...

Cheers,
Markus.

 

[Matt Wynn]

http://merit.oryo.us/b/16/drawing-smooth-curves-with-gimp

might be of some use :salute:

 

[Sid2008]

You guys are the best.

thanks so much. Can someone explain anti aliasing to me?
Sid

 

[falcon409]

thanks so much. Can someone explain anti aliasing to me?
Sid

In very general terms, it's a way for the graphics card to make your eye think an edge is a nice smooth line rather than the pixelated line it actually is. The graphics engine will add pixels of varying shades to "fill in" between the hard edged pixels you would see without antialiasing applied.:salute:

 

[Dangerousdave26]

Sid

For me I like to work in larger sizes and then scale the image once it is finished.

I typically work in no less than 1024 size and some times 2048.

When you need to get into adding the alpha channel to an image a good tutorial is here.

http://www.fsdeveloper.com/wiki/index.php?title=Transparencies_with_GIMP