Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Terrain Editor => Topic started by: WldThing on January 03, 2003, 09:26:20 PM
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Ok i have been wonderin about this question. How do some of you skinners make the skin so shiny? When i downgrade my skin to 256 colors i lose much of the light... So how do you guys get that "crisp" look?
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I make my skins in Photoshop 512x512, but do the 256x256 8 bit color conversion with Fireworks.
It doesn't lose detail or color.
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WldThing, which one skin for example? Mby u do smth wrong?
What software u use to paint?
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P51 Skin .. and i use PSP 7 to do my skins.
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I cant tell u nothing about p51 D , bicose im not try to reskin him
Or any silver airplane:(
My advices about PS7:
first flat all layers
if u make skin in higher res then AH standard, do not change size by "image size" option.
Make another window with correct size /256x256 rgb/.
Move layer from your psd file to new window
Scale moved layer by "layer scale" in edit menu, do that by nombersnt manual. Just type 25% for example if u rescale skin from 1024.
After that aligin center /vertical and horisontal/ layer to background layer.
Convert to indexed colors /PS should ask about flat, just agree/
this way give much better effect then simly command "change size. Thats one of tips with works on pS;)
ramzey
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cool thanks for the tips ramzey!
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Man, ramzey is easily the most helpful person with PS
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Question for the Skinning Gods....
I want to try my hand at skinning the 51B to look like an A36. The particular A36 I want to copy had stars on both wings, top and bottom, instead of 1 on top and 1 on the bottom of the other wing.
So I exported the 51B's stock textures and discovered that there are no stars on the wings at all in P51BTOP.bmp. Instead, the stars apparently come from MARKINGS.bmp. This is just the stars on the wings--the fuselage stars are draw on the textures in P51BSID.bmp.
My question is this: How do I keep the MARKINGS.bmp stars from showing up and blocking the stars I'm going to draw on the wings?
Thanks in advance.
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does the markings.bmp come with a markings_a.bmp?
well, if it does you can locate the stars on the markings_a.bmp, you can just black it out
if not.......................... ..........
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BenDover said:
you can locate the stars on the markings_a.bmp, you can just black it out
Ah, cool. Yeah, it's got such a thing. Thanks for the tip.
This won't screw up markings on other planes, will it? IOW, does each plane have its own complete set of textures (including markings and all those dashboard instruments) or are these things shared?
And is there a FAQ on texturing planes around somewhere that I can look at and quit pestering you all with questions that no doubt have been asked and answered many times?
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The USN Midway skins needed to have the MARKINGS_a.bmp blacked out. Yes, every skin that uses those markings will have them disappear now.
It seems the boys at HTC went through several evolutions concerning how they were going to go about this stuff... which is a normal and necessary process... and they abandoned the "separate-markings" technique after a few models.
Easy to work around, though. If the blacked-out alpha affects another plane, simply paste the same insignia onto that skin.
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Dux said:
Yes, every skin that uses those markings will have them disappear now.
OK, so I guess that means all those dashboard instruments are also shared, right?
It seems the boys at HTC went through several evolutions concerning how they were going to go about this stuff... which is a normal and necessary process... and they abandoned the "separate-markings" technique after a few models.
Well, I haven't looked at all the textures yet, but the ones I've seen so far only have a skin for 1 wing, which gets mirrored onto the other wing. This works fine for everybody except the US, which for some reason chose put its national markings on 1 wing only. Hence the need for the separate markings thing for them.
Easy to work around, though. If the blacked-out alpha affects another plane, simply paste the same insignia onto that skin.
That would be good in a way, by allowing you to weather the insignia to match the rest of the plane. But seems to me that would cause another problem..... Wouldn't this make the US stars appear on both wings due to the mirror effect noted above? That happens to be what I want for the skin I'm working on, but it's not appropriate later in the war. Is there a workaround for that?
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1. Yes, the instruments ARE shared. Someone once did some nice metric instruments for German planes, then discovered that they were all shared.
2. *Most* skins have upper and lower surfaces of each wing (except probably the one that you're interested in). I've seen a few stabilizers that share top and bottom textures... most of the "Blue" planes do.
There is no real workaround when this happens. Just hope that someday the planes will get an updated skinning from HTC.
re: your earlier question about an FAQ... this forum will be the closest thing to an official FAQ that you'll find. Browse through the last couple month's worth of posts, and I think you'll find that just about any question you can come up with has been answered (or at least discussed).
But still, don't be afraid to ask anything.
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what hitech can do.
Make it like sounds, so you put the textures for that plane only in a folder in the texsrc, and ones for all of em in the root texsrc dir
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noo they dont, i hope u dont wonna have cheaters on server with glass cockpits and invisible airplanes?
Until all terrains-skins are under HTC control thats can't be happend.
ramzey
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ramzey said:
noo they dont, i hope u dont wonna have cheaters on server with glass cockpits and invisible airplanes?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my understanding that dinking with skins only affects what you see on your own computer. Thus, it would be impossible to make your own plane invisible to others by dinking with your own skins. All that would do is make everybody else invisible to you ;).
Glass cockpits, however, are the reverse of this. That's making your own plane invisible to yourself. This could in theory be possible by dinking with your own skins, because it would only appear on your own box. But I wager that HT, who's known of this possibility for many years, (folks tried it way back in DOS AW, after all) has certainly incorporated prophylactic measures into AH.
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about invisible planes u right,
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Originally posted by ramzey
noo they dont, i hope u dont wonna have cheaters on server with glass cockpits and invisible airplanes?
Until all terrains-skins are under HTC control thats can't be happend.
ramzey
Read my post again, slowly and carefuly, then i'll explain if your still confused
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Ben,
if u have custom skins in root directory u can allways use xxxx_a.bmp, right? Walking this way u can create transparent plane wide glass cockpit. Here i see danger
To create custom skin for everyone HTC need to rework whole AH system, i think.
Imho better way is create smth like personal.bmp with mapping, working like nose art or personal painting. Placed on the nose.
Just like squad bitmaps on airplane
Like in B26. Imho thats will be enough.
Imho system like in il2 will not work in so big online game like AH.
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BenDover said:
Make it like sounds, so you put the textures for that plane only in a folder in the texsrc, and ones for all of em in the root texsrc dir
I assume you're trying to tell me how to apply custom skins to the game as a whole instead of having them only function on terrains they are built into, right?
If so, please clarify this a bit. I know next to nothing about anything related modding AH so you need to walk me through this ;)
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no read it again.....
Here's a clue, seen as you don't have one
HTC\aheditor\terrains\yourterrain\texsrc\190a5
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ramzey said:
if you have custom skins in root directory u can allways use xxxx_a.bmp, right? Walking this way u can create transparent plane wide glass cockpit.
Has anybody tried making an xxx_a.bmp file for the cockpit interior and airplane exteriors? I'm sure somebody has :D, because these ideas are a dozen or more years old. I haven't tried it in AH, but I'd assume that AH is programmed to only look for xxx_a.bmp files in conjunction with specific textures, or conversely is told NOT to look for an alpha map for a few specific textures. So even if you made an alpha mask for the side wall of the cockpit, etc., the game program would disregard it. Seems simple enough.
An alternative cheating method would be to not use an alpha mask but just paint the textures you want to remove in a color that's transparent in-game, like the pink on gun sights. Assuming there is such a thing that would work on other parts of the plane. But again there's a simple way to prevent that--the game checks for the transparent color and doesn't let you put it on textures that ain't supposed to have it.
If something along these lines isn't in place, then yes it appears there's scope for abuse, mainly because airplane textures are only visible on 1 side of their poly. For instance, to see into your low-6 area, you'd just have to make the headrest, seat, radios, etc., invisible. Then you'd look down the inside of the rear fuselage, but because this is only visible from the outside, you'd have a clear view. And you'd still see the textures on the rear fuselage of nme planes because you've done nothing to them. The same would probably be true for looking down through the cockpit floor.
It would be more problematic to "glass" other directions, however. The only way to look down to the sides through the wings would be to remove the upper wing texture and look through the back of the lower wing texture. But this would make the upper wing surfaces of all nme planes of the same type invisible to you. That would seem to be more a hindrance than a help. Likewise, being able to look further down below your boresight dot would required blanking out the instrument panel, and you do need some of those things ;).
But I'm certain HT has already thought of all this, and much more besides, and has something in place to prevent abuse. I mean, he was a legendary hacker and sneaky bastid himself back in ancient AW days. So it's setting a thief to catch a thief in AH ;)
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now i catch, ty for patience
and TY for clarify me som other things
ramzey