How to use a 'Paint Kit'

[cgold]

I'm trying to paint a ProjectOpensky CRJ-200 (among others-(AFG YS-11, Capt. Sim 727, etc.)) and for some reason I can't figure out how to paint the plane or add logos and have the modified textures show up in the flight sim. I'm using Photoshop CS3. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[+SkippyBing]

Is this for FSX or the old one? Basically FS uses DXT format bmp rather than the plain old vanilla ones Strike Fighters uses. As you're using CS3 the easiest thing to do is download the nVidia plug in from here that let's CS3 open and save the format.

Couple of things to note, opening and re-saving a DDS format bmp will degrade the quality as it reapplies the compression algorithm so if you don't have access to a template it's best to save a working copy of the texture as a psd and make all the changes to that and then save it as a dds to check in game and then make any further corrections to the psd. Also for FSX before you save the dds you'll need to flip it vertically (flip vertical under the image->rotate options), this is to speed up loading in game as otherwise the game engine would have to do the flipping before loading it into graphics memory.

 

Hope that all makes sense!

[cgold]

Is this for FSX or the old one?

 

Yeah, this is for FS 2002 Pro. I know it's getting a little old, but my computer runs this very smoothly. I'm working on how I can 'update' to FS 2004. I have the CRJ-200's paintkit and it was downloaded from Project Opensky's Official Website. The aircraft included 'blank' textures and they are all in .bmp format. So was the AFG YS-11 and some others too. Maybe this will help you show where I am, SkippyBing. But I'll download nVidia, anyways. Thank you for your input.

[+SkippyBing]

Ahhh....FS2002. To be honest I'm not 100% sure what format it uses. If it's not plain bmp it'll be dxt1 formatted bmp which should be one of the options with the plug-in. If not get a coy of Dxtbmp from here which does everything you need for the earlier versions of FS.