Repaint Tutorial für Dummys :)

I have some ideas to mention... anyone with anything to add is free to dive in and give us more insights.

I think that perhaps I should describe my process. It will be broadly the same with everybody. This is just for painting AI aircraft, so there is one texture, and I will assume I am working with a pre-existing paint kit with features (weathering, shadows, small fixed details such as pitots, etc) separated into layers.

It is important to remember that FS9 operates with small bitmaps compared to what can now be used. 1024x1024 pixels is not a lot of space when you are cramming in lots of detail, such as "coats of arms" on some government aircraft. This requires compromises to be made that are less necessary when on later sims you can use 2048x2048 or 4096x4096 resolutions. A detail that is "described" by 4 pixels in a 2048x2048 image is defined by a single pixel in 1024x1024 resolution. 1/2 of the size = 1/4 of the detail. Sad, but true. It can also happen that moving a lineup or down by a fraction of a pixel can sometimes improve the overall look of the line, because of the way it flows across pixels when antialiased.

There is a rule to mention before anything else. SAVE REGULARLY! In my painting program I have set autosave. It can be annoying on a large format paint kit because the software will pause for a few moments as it autosaves. If you’ve ever lost 90 minutes of painstaking effort in an instant, you’ll not mind so much to wait for a few moments.

1/ Find a side-on image of the aircraft I want to paint. As flat an image as possible - long zoom is best. Try to find one taken on a day with moderate light - a bright hazy day at most, and probably a cloudy day that is letting a lot of light through. Not too dull and not under night lights. The source image will be used to copy the design and to sample the colors.

2/ Open the graphics program and load in the paint kit and your source image.

3/ Cut out the overall fuselage shape using a point-to-point selection. This makes a guide image for the livery design.

4/ Paste this fuselage guide image into the paint kit as a separate layer that sits low in the layer hierarchy, in fact quite close to the bottom of the layers list.

5/ Select the fuselage guide image, grab a corner of it and stretch it to fit with the fuselage in the paint kit. You may also need to rotate it slightly. Try to get the windows in the paint kit to align with the windows in the real world image. Only use the corners to do this, otherwise you will mess up the aspect ratio of the image and nothing will fit! I've found that the most important clue to alignment is to get the windows of the paint kit completely matching the windows from the photograph. Some paint kits may have the windows slightly in the wrong places because the author of the p/k wasn't very good at this when they made the model (ahem). Most are very good; the KCAI ones are generally very accurate.

6/ Alter the transparency of the guide image layer so that it becomes fairly faint. Too intense and it might complicate the next step.

Now let's imagine that this livery has two stripes along the fuselage that curve up from the nosecone, run below the fuselage windows and, about where the engines are, they both swoop up the tail. Something to set before making any lines is "anti-aliasing = ON", this is to ensure that curves or straight lines that are at an angle, are not pixelated as they cross the bitmap. The edge pixels will gradate away in to the background color and while this blurs the line a little, it also makes it look smoother.

7/ Using the line-drawing tool, draw a multi-segment line that traces roughly around the uppermost fuselage stripe, going along the upper part of the stripe and then back around to the nose this time following the lower edge of the stripe. We draw first from the nosecone point of this stripe as you see on the guide image, to the point where it begins to run straight beneath the windows, then to another point where the line is about to head up the tail, then at the highest point of the stripe on the tail, then back down to the point where the bottom of the stripe begins to run flat below the windows, then to the front part just before the stripe curves downward to a point, then close this multi-segment line at the same place at the very tip of the stripe at the nose. You will see that the stripe looks very rough, and it doesn't even follow the curves - yet!

8/ Bezier! We now deploy Bezier curves to bend those swoops at the front and back. We can make the nodes at the very front tip of the fuselage stripe and the one at the opposite end into asymmetric nodes with curves before and after the node. When you do this, "handles" appear on each side of the node that you can then move from side to side and also lengthen the "handle" to change the way the curve lies over the guide template. You should fairly quickly get a feel for whether you need to shorten or lengthen a handle, and how far to one side to move it. You will see the outline of the shape you are creating over the top of the guide image's fuselage stripe. You can even switch off the layer on which you are drawing these curves so that the color disappears but the outline of the curve remains - this for me makes the whole operation much simpler.

With Bezier curves, you control an arc that leads from one point along your line to the next. If the next point is fixed (no Bezier controls) the line will "try" to arrive at that node in a way that smoothly leads into the straight line that is beyond that node. But you can make both nodes into Bezier nodes and potentially get a lot more control over the curves that the line follows, you can recreate lines that bend twice along their length. The arcs are always going to be smooth continuous lines. Bezier curves are essential to master for the more complex liveries out there, especially on bizjets.

9/ Liveries with straight lines are relatively simple to create; you can use the line drawing tool and specify the "weight" of the line, usually in pixel widths. Straight lines that ascend or descend from one side of the paintkit to the other will need to be antialiased to avoid pixel "stepping" as they go along. The "fuzziness" of the resulting line is still more appealing than 1-pixel jumps, especially on bitmaps that are only 1024 pixels tall and wide to begin with. Sometimes moving a vector line very slightly up or down can improve its appearance when it gets converted to raster - but not always!

With painting, you really need to be happy to experiment, and also to save regularly!

10/ Text is troublesome to get right unless you care a lot about typography and are able to identify fonts by name. Generally, a FS9 painter will not have access to any information about a particular font that is used on an aircraft, and we simply have to get close enough to the original for any small differences not to matter. in general, Arial, Square and military-style fonts will get us through most situations, but you have to be careful about things such as the shape of the letter "M" (do the legs slope outward, does the tail reach the base line or hover above it?) and small details such as that. The particular nuisences are the letters M, N, E, K and S, in my experience, but they can all be a problem. Fonts of the same point size may also still be physically different sizes. Sometimes I try to get things right by getting a font that is all fine except for the letter M (for example). I will then try to find another font where the M is a better shape, only to discover that 60-point in Arial is in fact almost 72-point in this other font, and for one character in a registration I have to change not only the font, but the character size as well. A lot of time gets used in getting the fonts to look better, and it is seldom wasted time. For legibility, registration fonts are probably never "serif" fonts. Serifs are the small end caps on verticals and the ends of lines such as the ends of the letter S. Serifs are often used in old fashioned print books for many reasons but, for aircraft registrations, it is legibility across a distance that is a desirable attribute, so the simpler sans-serif fonts will be used. Arial is often a perfectly usable option in FS9-size bitmaps because many nuances are lost. Serif fonts do exist elsewhere on aircraft - "Bundesrepublik Deutschland" on Luftwaffe transports is one example. These titles are intended to grant the wearer a certain dignity and "gravity". The Canadian Air Force transports wear a very similar typeface in their titles. Deutsche Post many years ago looked for an alternative to the boring old font that was used for decades and, after a long and exhaustive (exhausting?) process arrived at their final choice - to stay with the original because the typeface "said" something about the service that they did not want to change.

11/ Details such as flags and logos. These can be found online and simply resized in your paint program. With all such things, don't get a vast flag and resize it to 15x10 pixels, it won’t work as well as finding a thumbnail of a flag somewhere and resizing that from 30x25 down to your size. The bigger the shrink, the worse the result generally is, pretty much irrespective of whatever resizing algorithm you ask your resizer to use. I wrote to the renowned David Rawlins a year or two ago about an Orbis repaint, and he mentioned that he was "pathing" the logo at the time we were writing. I looked into this and learned that David was in fact tracing around the logo design to turn it into a vector object that can then be resized at will, allowing constant experimentation with the results until they reached some level of perfection. Those Bezier curves... this is what makes people like David as good as they are, conscientious and thorough, and backed up by a wealth of experience.

Other things to consider are small but significant factors such as "is the aircraft overall color exactly the same shade of white?" Some are a purer white than others, the Swiss Air Frce Citation XLS is a very pure white as are the Cessnas of the Swiss (ex-Swissair) training operation, and in the right light they can look more white than the version of "white" on nearby aircraft. Some can be distinctly creamy in color. Best never to assume that a color is what you think it looks like. Look at several images if you can. for color information. It's a sad fact that cameras (and users) fiddle with settings and post-process images to look more "punchy", if the grass in an image looks ridiculously green, the chances are that the aircraft colors have also been interfered with.

Also, make sure that the design you make crosses windows or other features at the right places. If you have traced a design as I usually try to do, this should be all right as it stands, but if you have had to "eyeball" the design for whatever reason, make sure it crosses the windows in the right places, crosses over under or through pitot and AOA sensors at the right place, and likewise across vents and panel lines.

Are the engine details at the correct angles? Some registration slope to match the engine (engines are seldom 100% horizontal, they usually tilt back by a few degrees) and others may be painted to be horizontal with the ground line when the aircraft is parked.

If the aircraft paintkit has shadow layers, decide whether you want to use them and also check the results in the simulator! Sometimes the paintkit may have underside shadows that are not on all parts equally. A gear door can be tricky since it changes position and changes the shadow that falls on it, some aircraft are belly-mapped from beneath and the shading on that under-wing fuselage area needs to match the areas around it.

Learn the paint kit as well as you can. Does the aircraft use alpha channel to hide parts and are there possibilities in the paint kit to make creating an alpha channel easy? If you paint over an aerial in pure green (in RGB terms this is 0/255/0, I think, with only the green channel turned up to max and the others down to nothing) it gets easy to hide the aerial in DXTBMP - because that program lets you make an alpha channel from any area pn a bitmap that is pure green. It makes your alpha channel for you. This works on RFAI and KCAI aircraft and probably "many many more".

When you think a paint is finished, live with it in your sim for a while. It's surprising what details suddenly become wrong! You may suddenly notice that the emergency exits are marked in red when you'd left them out altogether, you may notice on a Citation that it has metal cockpit surrounds and not white after all. You may belatedly see that the underwing registration is missing, is there, is a different color than black...

Repaints are never released. They just escape when you stop watching them so closely.

Wow, thanx a million for these epic information and advices. They have to be studied more than twice...

Dedl

Richard, thanks a lot for this comprehensive tutorial. As I have done already a number of repaints, I am aware of some of your tips.

As I use paint.net for repainting I guess there are some differences. I guess you use paintshop or some other advanced software. In paint.net there is no anti-aliasing festure to my knowledge.

Cheers Kali

Great tutorial Richard

With respect to point 10, even when you know the typeface name it is like finding a needle in a haystack. When found, it is often licensed and cost to use or proprietary. Sometimes you can find a vector graphic of the airline titles online. In some cases one must resort to the method in point 11 and trace around the titles in your graphic package. You noted David Rawlins, who is the master of repaints. He does it as a matter of routine with titles and logos.

Here is an example of a free vector graphic, which is in adobe illustrator format. Some sites give format options for the vectors.

Zitat von DLH1702

As I use paint.net for repainting I guess there are some differences. I guess you use paintshop or some other advanced software. In paint.net there is no anti-aliasing festure to my knowledge.

I use Corel Paintshop Pro X8, an old version of some unfashionable software! It is doggedly incompatible with other formats as well. I sometimes use The Gimp to convert a Photoshop file to PSPImage format, but I know the interface and the tools. We have Photoshop in the house (my wife used to be in graphic design until she got a proper job (!)). She used to be able to name fonts fairly easily but it's a skill that quickly disappears when you are out of the game. I won't use it, and it's an ancient version anyway. I think she has v6, and we may have bought a later version that she didn't like. When Adobe went to a rental model I lost interest. We have several old computer systems banished to the attic, and it may be up there somewhere.

I wrote this thing because I have a cold presently and feeling a bit "grounded" and under the weather I wanted to do something to stop me feeling sorry for myself and which might also be potentially useful. I'm not sure that it is a tutorial so much as a description of what I will generally do together with a few notes about common things I encounter. The original idea was just to keep it down to bullet-points, but there really are some other aspects that can't be ignored. It's not a bad indicator of what a painter might have to do, or what they might encounter on the way. As Greg has done, anyone with something to chip in is welcome to add to it, or even discuss their own workflow since my approach is not necessarily the approach. It's just what I do.

Scaleable vector gaphics can be a godsend (finally, a use for gods!) since they shrink a bit more tidily until they get very small. With things like the German flag it is almost always best to create three bars of unaliased pixels in a stack rather than shrinking a larger image at all, because shrinking a large flag image inevitably means the bars get aliased as the image shrinks. Also, due to aliasing, rotating lines and text by a few degrees almost always makes them look worse. In the end the best experience we get is just by having a go at getting something painted up.

If someone decided they would start by broadly following my steps, they are very likely to end up following steps that suit them better so, it's a start!

The online tutorials mentioned are a great start.

Richard, get well soon . . .

You pointed out the most important considerations for a repainter and I hope this will encourage one or the other in this forum to start a project. For me, the learning process was a lot about trial and error - but that is fun too.

Kali

Absolutely right. It's like most things in life, we must try things and not be afraid of our mistakes, otherwise we will never get started. The best feelings of achievement come from overcoming obstacles.

Also, not being discouraged knowing there are people better than we are out there - and try to be encouraged by that.

I picked up on David Rawlins' casual mention that he was "pathing a logo" for Orbis, and figured that since he is one of the best, this might be something I ought to be learning as well, but that I needed finally to get to grips with Bezier curves in order to do this. Sure enough, there was an improvement in what i was doing and more things I could try to do.

I made some paints for Prince Aviation's Citation fleet before Xmas and had the perfect chance to try this out, tracing around their logo using curves and being able to resize it at will and at a far lower cost to quality. Best of all, the logo is now a vector object and I can recolor it at will, extremely useful for Prince Aviation since the logo is a different color on each aircraft (and one even has a thin black outline - the orange version). Suddenly it was easier to do. It's still difficult to get things absolutely right, but that's because I'm still trying to improve. I'm happy to follow.

By following the good, we learn to be good. I will eventually get there provided I put the effort in. What gets me about David R is the way that he evidently gets something good, then sits on it a while before coming back to it trying to improve it. He's proof that quality is an attitude and not an ISO stamp on your letterhead.

Thank you also for your well-wishing. I'm still on the way into this infection but hopeful that it will bottom out in the next day or two. In my early 20s I would run a half-marathon each week, and could start a run with a cold and be free of it 90 minutes later. A lot less likely these days!

There is very little "how" in there except in rare cases, it's more of a "where" - a roadmap of things you will master and improve on to be able to do all the key jobs in painting. As you can see, there are not that many key skills. Very skilled painters would undoubtedly add more things to that, possibly things I'm not even aware of - but that's my process and it works for me.

My main advice, if there has to be any advice at all, is to start with a decent paintkit on a model, any model, so that you get a feeling of what can be achieved when everything is in your favor. There are some AI aircraft out there with no real paint kit at all. Some light GA takes a lot of work to get looking okay, so its best to get started with a moderately good paint kit that will save you some work - start with a tailwind, as it were. They are getting more sophisticated as well. The KCAI Challenger 3x0 series has two sets of winglets mapped to the same place on the paintkit and different cabin windows according to whether its a CL300 or a CL350, and you have to be on the ball to make sure you are painting the correct set of parts! I ended up adapting the paint kit so that there was text in a small clear area that told me which bits I was using when each layer for these parts was switched on - because there's no way I was ever going to remember which were which!

But these bits come along with experience. If you're keen on painting things up, you'll make a good start with that roadmap above and add the technical details that apply to whatever paint program you use.

The game-changer for me was Bezier curves. That opens a whole new area of livery-making to me. It's a very absorbing process, I can spend hours in that painting mindset.

I would add that it is not a vital thing to have an image to trace over, but it helps place the design accurately and can save a lot of time. It is also possibly simply to "eyeball" the placing of livery elements and still get a good result. I adopted it due to the complexity of some Citation Excel liveries that would otherwise take me all day.

OO-MMT | Cessna 560XL Citation Excel | Air Service Liège (ASL) | Matteo Lamberts | JetPhotos

Cheers to the best crew of ASL - departing to LBG... OO-MMT. Cessna 560XL Citation Excel. JetPhotos.com is the biggest database of aviation photographs with…

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but obviously I will find this one easier, and just use a photo to find the right color!

D-AAHB | Bombardier BD-700-1A10 Global Express | MHS Aviation | Simon Reichert | JetPhotos

D-AAHB. Bombardier BD-700-1A10 Global Express. JetPhotos.com is the biggest database of aviation photographs with over 5 million screened photos online!

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