Question on livery painting

[VictorTango]

Hello everyone,

I hope I'm posting this question in the correct forum, please let me know if I should move it to somewhere more appropriate.

I recently started painting liveries and I compared what I've done (screenshot 1) to some of the liveries produced by iniBuilds (screenshot 2). I noticied that in the iniBuilds livery, the colour that appears on the skin bleeds off and diffuses on the grey background. I was wondering if someone could explain to me what is the purpose of that, if I should apply it to my liveries, and lastly how would I do that?

Thank you very much in advance for your help! 🙂

VictorTango

Edited April 25, 2022 by VictorTango

[ThePilotX]

Hey! that's one form of diffusion dithering meant to fill the pixels that are just next to the uv borders when using 3D painting software, which in most cases is used to prevent unpainted pixels on the borders that would be shown as white lines on the sim.

If you are using just Photoshop or any other 2D painting tool then you shouldn't worry about it as long as you always paint up to the uv border, your screenshot of your livery looks good! 

[VictorTango]

Thank you very much @ThePilotX, I'm completely new to this, so I wasn't sure I was missing something crucial! Indeed I used Affinity Photo to create the livery and was happy with the result, but my knowledge is limited.

Should I want to use 3D painting software to make liveries, which one would you recommend? 

[ThePilotX]

10 minutes ago, VictorTango said:

Thank you very much @ThePilotX, I'm completely new to this, so I wasn't sure I was missing something crucial! Indeed I used Affinity Photo to create the livery and was happy with the result, but my knowledge is limited.

Should I want to use 3D painting software to make liveries, which one would you recommend? 

No problem! 3D painting software is commonly used to paint more complex stuff into your livery, and it's often used in combination with a 2D one. For most cases using just 2D software it's enough.

If you want to get into 3D painting i would recommend Adobe Substance 3D Painter and Blender (Which are the ones i use) But there are more tools out there if you'd like to investigate!

[VictorTango]

7 minutes ago, ThePilotX said:

No problem! 3D painting software is commonly used to paint more complex stuff into your livery, and it's often used in combination with a 2D one. For most cases using just 2D software it's enough.

If you want to get into 3D painting i would recommend Adobe Substance 3D Painter and Blender (Which are the ones i use) But there are more tools out there if you'd like to investigate!

That's good to know that for the vast majority of cases 2D is sufficient.

I do have Blender installed, but I never had the time to learn it. I assume Substance 3D Painter is not free, because it's an Adobe product, right?

The thing I find most difficult to paint on the 2D livery are the nose cone and tail sections, and the inside of the rudder. By using the UV map it helps somehow, but it's still fiddly and really time consuming, especially because you have to wait for X-Plane to reload the aircraft... Unless of course there's a better ways of doing all this that I don't know of! 🤣

[Matt3o0]

For the reloading part, it’s faster for me to switch to the default livery and back to your own livery. And for blender I suppose you put in as a image texture and see how it lines up

 

kind regards

Matt3o0

[VictorTango]

Ah thank you, I’ll try using the default livery shortcut you suggested.

[ThePilotX]

1 hour ago, VictorTango said:

That's good to know that for the vast majority of cases 2D is sufficient.

I do have Blender installed, but I never had the time to learn it. I assume Substance 3D Painter is not free, because it's an Adobe product, right?

The thing I find most difficult to paint on the 2D livery are the nose cone and tail sections, and the inside of the rudder. By using the UV map it helps somehow, but it's still fiddly and really time consuming, especially because you have to wait for X-Plane to reload the aircraft... Unless of course there's a better ways of doing all this that I don't know of! 🤣

Indeed, you need to have a License in order to use Substance and there are plenty of tutorials on Yt that can help you to get better at blender.

Now the best way to preview/reload your textures in XP11 is using the Texture Browser tool that allows you to reload any texture that is currently loaded in your flight

You can access it via the top menu while inflight going Developer>Show Texture Browser

Once opened you can browse for any texture you'd like using the search bar, keep in mind that it is case sensitive so if you can't find your texture it might be due to that

After you find the texture you want to reload just double click over it, a new window will pop out and click reload

And that's it!

 

Edited April 25, 2022 by ThePilotX

[VictorTango]

@ThePilotX thank you so much for the detailed explanation, much appreciated. I will give it a go tomorrow!

[arslan.turegun]

Hello all,
I am not quite sure if this is the right place to ask this question. As it is repaint related I will give it a try.
I have been doing repaints since FS2000 and with a simple edit of aircraft.cfg file I was able to see the aircraft in the sim.
With MSFS I simply can't.
I have tried to follow the SDK documentation after doing a basic paintjob for A310 but it either didn't show in the menu or it is all pink (no textures I suppose).
Weird thing, I can see my repaint if I replace the textures in any A310 downloaded with ini manager.
Can someone point a better documentation than the SDK to do the job?

Regards,

Arslan Türegün