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Panel shading using GIMP

Hurricane91

Hurricane91

SOH-CM-2023
I would appreciate some advice on a painting problem. I am attempting to paint an instrument panel but I have been unable to achieve airbrush type gradations for shading. I am a beginner with graphics editors but I have experience in studio art. I have GIMP, Paint.net, and MS Paint. The gradations coming out of the editor and as viewed in Windows fax viewer look fine, but in the sim they have a staircase effect. It seems that the sim cannot render such fine gradations and that the effect is achieved by another method. If you can give me an idea or direct me to a tutorial on this, I sure would appreciate it. Thank you for your time and consideration.

John
 
I do graduations all the time on panels I do and I add the graduation effect to a separate layer, much darker than normal, then pull the slider back for that layer to tone it to the desired look. I also save the finished panel as a 32bit for better detail. Saving as DXT3, you'll lose some detail and probably get that stairstep effect. ALSO, even when my shading looks perfect in daylight hours, when switched to night flying it looks terrible. One thing that FS does very poorly is night texturing. Another consideration is to ensure that any work you do is done on the largest texture size possible for the sim you're working on (FS9=1024x1024. . . .FSX=4096x4096). The larger the better obviously since it will hold better detail. . . .and you can see why a lot of the FSX aircraft look so much better than FS9.
 
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