Repainting in FSX

Pro Member Captain
Dave Copeland (davec) Captain

All settings were at medium/high

As I said elsewhere - got my FSX De Luxe this morning and have spent most of my time examining the repainting aspect of the beast.
It would seem that MS regard a/c as the same as sheep, elephants, lions, etc and all are contained in the main FSX folder, in a folder named SimObjects, which has folders named Airplanes, Animals, Boats, GroundVehicles, Misc and Rotorcraft. In the Airplanes folder(this is equivalent to the old FS9 Aircraft folder), there are all the FSX a/c folders. Now we come to the nasty bit - up till now, the texture bmp files which defined the a/c liveries were all in texture folders in the particular a/c folder. As were the model, air, panel, sound folders and the aircraft.cfg file. It appears that the aircraft.cfg file is the same format as in FS9 - which might just be a lifesaver!! It is when we look at the texture folders that the shock comes - there are no bmp files there to edit!!! The files there, for the Airbus 321, for example, are 'a321_1_T.dds' - and what is a dds file? - a Direct Draw Surface format file. My photo editor, (Serif PhotoPlus 10), does not recognise this format nor do most others - I haven't opened up PhotoShop to see - it may well do (Hinch Can you confirm or otherwise). I have also got Neon photo editor -and Low! and Behold! , it recognises DDS format - the editing facility is a bit rough, has no layer properties and I have yet to find out if it saves in the DDS format. Mind you, if it works out well it will be a piece of cake to change the leopard's spots. 😂 😂
I will leave you with that now and do some more investigating.
Hope someone may be interested in this.
WARNING - DO NOT DO THIS AT HOME
I did experiment with Copy/Pasting an a/c from the Aircraft folder in FS9 to the FSX/SimObjects/Airplanes folder and it came up in FSX with the proper livery and no parts missing - although in the FSX/Aircraft Selection Window, the appropriate thumbnail was a big ?[/b]

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Pro Member Chief Captain
CrashGordon Chief Captain

davec wrote:

It would seem that MS regard a/c as the same as sheep, elephants, lions, etc

Great, that means I won't have to pay for a bottle of vodka every time I want to see pink elephants. 😂

Pro Member Captain
Dave Copeland (davec) Captain

CrashGordon wrote:

davec wrote:

It would seem that MS regard a/c as the same as sheep, elephants, lions, etc

Great, that means I won't have to pay for a bottle of vodka every time I want to see pink elephants. 😂

If you want me to paint these elephants then it'll cost you 2 bottles of whisky - and you can hold the elephant down 😂

Pro Member Chief Captain
CrashGordon Chief Captain

As long as I don't have to stand behind them. 😂

Nelson Brazys Guest

It's a subjetc that I'm interested in.
I tried to edit dds files in the Photoshop 9.0 and but they aren't recognized by the editor.
I think there is an editor for Need for Speed Underground (The BinTex editor), but I'm still looking for a similar editor for the FSX.
When I find something about it, I'll post it here.
If you find before, please, do the same...
Thanks.
Nelson (from Sao Paulo, Brazil)

Pro Member First Officer
Charlie10 First Officer

Is someone designing an add-on Flying Pink Elephant that uses Vodka for Fuel? I want to try fllying that one.

Running Guest

Just read the documentation that comes with the SDK.
After some reading and clicking links you'll be downloading an addon for photoshop to edit the DDS files from the nvidea site.

However there is so much you can to in respect to lighting etc. That I found the whole deal a bit overwhelming. So all I did was spraypaint some black lines all over a 737 and load the model in FSX to see if it would work.... it did.

Pro Member Trainee
navyredman Trainee

Here's the link for that plug in. It works very well, I just got done using it.
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/photoshop_dds_plugins.html

Pro Member Trainee
sivan1997 Trainee

davec wrote:

WARNING - DO NOT DO THIS AT HOME
I did experiment with Copy/Pasting an a/c from the Aircraft folder in FS9 to the FSX/SimObjects/Airplanes folder and it came up in FSX with the proper livery and no parts missing - although in the FSX/Aircraft Selection Window, the appropriate thumbnail was a big ?[/b]

Create a Jpeg 256x128 on some program and paste it in to your SimObjects>Airplanes>[AIRPLANE]>texture. Name the file "thumbnail". Open FSX and your Image should be there. 😀 😀 😀

Pro Member First Officer
Duncan (Razgr1z912) First Officer

sivan1997 wrote:

davec wrote:

WARNING - DO NOT DO THIS AT HOME
I did experiment with Copy/Pasting an a/c from the Aircraft folder in FS9 to the FSX/SimObjects/Airplanes folder and it came up in FSX with the proper livery and no parts missing - although in the FSX/Aircraft Selection Window, the appropriate thumbnail was a big ?[/b]

Create a Jpeg 256x128 on some program and paste it in to your SimObjects>Airplanes>[AIRPLANE]>texture. Name the file "thumbnail". Open FSX and your Image should be there. 😀 😀 😀

Or what I did is search for a picture of it on the internet (most add on planes were based on real ones) and put it in my texture as thumbnail.jpg

Do you notice the date????

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