Aircraft Design Guide Book 5 - Texturing the Model

Aircraft Design Guide Book 5: Texturing the Model

Compatible With: FSX (Intended for use with FS Design Studio v3.5)

While FS Design Studio does an excellent job at producing a 3D model, like an aircraft, it does not do much with the textures.

Book 5 in the Aircraft Design Guide series will show you how to use FS Design Studio to create 'Texture Templates', then combine them into fewer or even a single texture using a freeware paint program called Gimp 2. Book 5 continues on and shows you how to paint the textures to look like a plane and several other graphical-editing tricks including copying and pasting, creating transparencies and reflections (Alpha Channel) and saving directly to a Flight Sim-friendly compressed-texture format.

Book 5 picks up where book 4 left off complete with the projects and examples from the end of Book 4 to help you follow along easily.

Other Books in the Aircraft Design Guide series include:

• Book 1: FS Design Studio Basics
• Book 2: Modeling the Exterior
• Book 3: The Boolean Operation
• Book 4: Aircraft Animation
• Book 6: Creating the Virtual Cockpit

Table of Contents - 231 pages

Chapter 1 Texture Overview

• Overview 6
• What is a Texture 6
• Alpha Channel 7
• Texture Compression 8

Chapter 2 Texture Templates 9

• What is a Texture Template? 10
• Creating a Texture Template 10
• Cropping Texture Templates in Gimp 2 14
• Combining Templates 18
• Resizing the Texture 22
• Saving the Texture 23
• Labeling the Texture 26
• Making a Second Texture 29

Chapter 3 Applying Textures to the Aircraft 35

• Applying Textures to the Fuselage 36
• Texture List 37
• Texture Definition 38
• Texture Properties Window 43
• Applying the Texture 48
• Texturing Multiple Parts 59

Chapter 4 Texturing the Wings 62

• Texturing Multiple Parts on Left Wing 63
• Texturing Multiple Parts on Right Wing 68
• Texturing the Vertical Stabilizer 73
• Adding A New Texture 73
• Texturing Multiple Parts on Vertical Stabilizer 76
• Correcting the Part Axis 79
• Setting Texture Folder in Preferences 81

Chapter 5 Texturing the Horizontal Stabilizer and Props 85

• Horizontal Stabilizer Texture Templates 86
• Applying Textures to horizontal Stabilizer 88
• Prop disk Texture 90
• Prop Blades Texture 92
• Prop Spinner Texture 95
• Aircraft Design Guide for FS Design Studio v3.5 Texturing Your Models

Chapter 6 Texturing the Landing Gear 104

• Tire Textures 105
• Tire Tread Texture 110
• Removing KeyFrames 112
• Wrapped Texture 113
• Applying the Wrapped Texture 115
• Strut and Hinge Textures 122

Chapter 7 Texturing Polygons 127

• Locating the Polygons to Texture 130
• Polygon Texture Properties 133
• Positioning the Handles 134

Chapter 8 Painting the Textures 146

• Paint Kit 147
• Opening Existing DDS Textures in Gimp 2 149
• Painting the Wings 155
• Copying from One Image and Pasting on Another 155
• Adjusting the Opacity of a Layer 158
• Scaling 159
• Painting the Props 170
• Painting and Editing Tips 171
• Painting the Prop Disk 182

Chapter 9 Transparency 188

• Transparency 189
• Creating a Window Texture 189
• Applying the Layer Mask 192
• Saving as a DDS Texture 193
• Changing BMP to DDS in FSDS 195

Chapter 10 Reflections 198

• Flipping the DDS Texture 201
• Multiple Reflection Levels 204
• Correcting Reflective Tires 214

Chapter 11 Making the Prop Disk Transparent 216

• Transparency Tips 222
• Night Textures 224
• Cleaning up Untextured Parts and Polygons 230

For FSX.