Repaint Tutorial für Dummys :)

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How to Repaint Aircraft

LG Kali

A photo by itself would be vaguely OK if you were only using it for yourself, otherwise there are the rights of the photographer to consider. Photos also have fixed shadows and so on that often just look awkward. I have used photos as a template for some repaints, especially ones using reasonably complex curves, such as the XLS on this post (click on the image for detail - https://oneclickhangar.com/forum/index.php?topic=14820.0

I tend to use a side-on image that is taken on as long a zoom as I can find, because it flattens out the distortions you get at the wide-angle end of the lens. These are hard to find, and I get the impression that many painters refuse to use anything else. The one above however is a factory stripes pattern that appears on other aircraft as well (just in other colors - such as a few XLS operated by Air Pink) and since it is only the pattern you want, there are other images you can use for templates.

In my brief amateur opinion there are only a few key skills that get deployed with painting.

Color matching - it's a skill to find a color on a photo that is close to the actual color (effects of lighting affect what you see)

Working with layers - the ordering and reordering of layers, and the use of transparency and "mode" of layers (normal, multiply, etc)

Working with color palettes - selecting and filling areas on the paint kit.

The relative advantages of raster layers and vector layers - and of keeping vector objects intact for as long as possible (they are easier to alter - rasterizing effectively sets a shape in stone and makes it harder to correct later on).

Bezier curves - crucial if you want to get smooth curves. You use "handles" on "nodes" to draw curved lines between one node and the next. Done over a photo you will eventually devise a method for tracing the design with increasing precision.

The flip/mirror operations on raster or vector objects (used to replicate your drawing on the other side of the fuselage, tail or engines) and the use of the small registration marks -often small crosses - to make the alignment between halves 100% accurate.

There are also some points of knowledge that complement the skills.

Knowing that the paint kit will not precisely follow the model's outline, it overflows a little. Anticipating this means you will get closer to being accurate faster. Some paint kits have a wireframe layer that more accurately tells you where the model outline actually is.

Developing a "good eye" for where the design crosses features on the aircraft, such as AOA vanes, static vents, control surfaces etc. These are all visual cues to get curves etc crossing the fuselage, wings, and tail and looking close to the actual aircraft.

No model is 100% accurate in the AI world, more models in the flyable world are accurate.

Painting a flyable aircraft is much harder because to get the level of visual detail, the textures cover fragments of the aircraft in detail. In order not to burden the graphics engine, AI planes are at most two textures (TFS A380, AIA 737Max) and usually one. These are far easier to paint as a whole for obvious reasons. Also, with flyables, there is a lot of time invested in getting the design to flow across all these fragments.

I've only really painted AI aircraft, and only recently improved enough to be happy with what I made. Flyable aircraft are a lot more complex to do, and there will be a whole lot of techniques to get those right that I have just not mentioned. In fact other people that repaint can probably add skills and knowledge points to my little list without any hesitation.

Eventually you would develop a repetiore of techniques that are entirely your own, some of them a combination of facets of what you have learned. On an Austrian Citation recently painted and released, I needed to make a fuselage stripe that was a gradated blue ribbon shape, and I was able to draw on several aspects of things I'd learned to get that gradated effect. Copy the layer with the ribbon on it, recolor the copy from overall blue to a gradient texture that goes gradually from black to white and back to black, then use layer transparency to make this gradient more transparent until it looked just like the gradated blue on the actual aircraft. It's actually a simple thing to do, but it uses a few simple operations joined together with some experience!

There are also means to paint aircraft that lack a paint kit but have some basic white textures, but this limits your control of the results and results in some compromises. There's a nice video on this by Bill Womack, a well-respected luminary in the FS firmament.

>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwHkzVszOMg<

For painting, I use Corel Paintshop Pro X8, an older version of a relatively unpopular graphics program! Consequently I've limited my advice, such as it is, to general techniques that should be achievable in most paint programs. But those small lists above cover the things I think are important for me. Other people may chip in with their own additions to that list, either with things that are completely new to me, or which I've forgotten.

Mohamed, die richtigen Fotos zu finden ist wirklich schwierig und dann kommen die von Richard beschriebenen Probleme noch dazu, wie Schatten, Reflexionen etc.

Ich versuche oft Logos etc.für die entsprechende Airline im Internet zu finden und dann muss halt mit der Hand gemalt werden. Das ist alles ziemlich zeitraubend und man muss viel experimentieren. Ich nutze paint.net, das ist mit Photoshop bestimmt nicht ebenbürtig, aber ich kenne mich inzwischen mit den Funktionen dort ganz gut aus.

Nur als Beispiel, wenn Du einen Flieger mit der Discover Airline Bemalung versehen wolltest, gebe einfach "Discover Airline Logo" als Suchbegriff ein und selektieren Bilder. Du findest dann sicher den Billboard Schriftzug für den Rumpf und auch etwas zum Seitenleitwerk und evtl.auch etwas zu den verwendeten Farben. Mit der Grunlage fängt man dann an, der Rest ist Fleißarbeit mit dem Paintkit.

LG Kali

No amount of work is too much if you either love what you are doing or are stongly motivated to make whatever it is you want to make. If you want a particular livery with some burning desire, you'll make the time to do the steps and suddenly find yourself knowing more and getting caught up in the process.

It's a good approach to life in general, in fact.

Maybe mentioning the desirable skills and thinking in one go might seem like too much, but if nobody tells you anything about the work involved and you desire that livery enough, you would make the journey anyway, just without any signposts. It's a fine line between motivating someone with a map and putting them off the journey with it.

Most people that achieve great things are unaware that the journey will take them as far as it does. Bill Gates was a geek given the opportunity to make something for IBM, unware that it was the first step of a huge journey that would shape his whole life, and the lives of many others. Maybe if he'd seen all the steps involved he'd have stopped in his tracks, maybe not!

All my earlier post is saying is that at some point you will end up knowing these things, which is enough to paint things quite well. You don't need them all at once and you don't even need them all to make a great repaint. But if you need a curve that sweeps up the tail and it's not working out, you might remember the word Bezier and look into it, rather than trying five other things out first.

We are always closer to the results we want, we just don't always know it.

I've lost count of the number of times I'd butted my head against a problem only to overhear something one day and a light bulb goes on, and suddenly it's done. It's the drive, the desire, to do something that gets us started. One of the things I looked for when interviewing people in the past was to see any signs that before anything else, they cared.

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." Antoine de Saint Exupéry - a great poet-aviator.

Hi!

I wrote a previous reply to this thread but somehow ended up deleting it < put huge facepalm here>!

Here's the short version:

Paint.NET or Gimp for your templates - since they're both freeware and can handle layers; Paint.NET has a much smoother learning curve but it is not so powerful as Gimp.

Then maybe something like DXTBmp for converting the BMPs resulting from your merged layers into a format suitable for FS9.

A good way to start is with paint kits as they'll do a lot of the hard work for you...

In "my" days as a repainter with Milton Shupe Team I released a few of those paint kits; I'm sure the Howard 500 has it and probably the Dash7 (yes, the Dash7 for sure, too). Andre Folkers who followed me in MST also released a few paint kits. The thing with these paint kits is that you get the fuse lines and rivets in separate top level layers, so you may add your paint scheme underneath. In the case of the Howard 500 I also added a bare metal texture to it.

Also, about photorealistic repaints: they're quite hard to do, as mentioned above, but can be done, specially if you have access to the plane and can take the photos yourself. This was the case, again, with the Howard 500, where Milton went to the airport and sent me hundreds of great photos and details. Still the final repaint ended up being a mix of photos and hand painted textures.

Howard 500 - Milton Shupe

Orbx Freeware Milton's FS9 Howard 500 conversion to native for FSX and P3DV4.

www.flightsim.com

Another thing about repaints: these are highly dependent of the model mapping done by the model developer. That's the process of assigning a given texture name/are to a a given area on the plane. A bad mapping will greatly compromise the repaint, for instance, when a same texture is assigned to both left and right sides of the plane for memory saving... in a case like that you can't add letters or numbers to that section/texture.

One thing I always did was to start preparing my repaint templates, adding several good/previous repaints done for that aircraft, each to its own layer. That will work greatly to help identify sections in the plane.

Then get ready to load your work into FS hundreds (sometimes more) of times! To check results and progress I used to assign a key combination to FS so I could reload the aircraft ina pre saved situation file, without having to close the flight and load it again.

As with everything in FS it's a labor of love. And tough work..!