I Want to Thank Some Modders...

[PFunk]

You know who you are.  You're the guys who, when you make an airplane, you include skins with the mesh details and proper decaling.  This means I can fly anything for any air force and the insignia show up.  Now, I understand why some folks directly apply insignia to the skins.  It often looks more realistic and YOU KNOW IT WILL WORK.  It's just a pain for those of us who want to fly an airplane for one military and someone's else's insignia are on the wings.  Thanks for going the extra mile for us 'what-if' guys.

[Nyghtfall]

I don't get you. What's the problem to ask a modder that paints something on the skin, to create a skin without those painted on bits for you? Skins ususally don't appear out of nowhere...There should be a template of any kind. And if not, you always can make one...

[PFunk]

Wasn't being a smart guy, I actually do appreciate the guys who put one together with insignia decals and not applying them directly to the skin.  Just want them to know that extra mile is appreciated.

[Trotski]

I must admit I am no lover of painted on markings, however, sometimes it is the only way to get them on the aircraft, I rarely do a skin with pre painted markings if it can be helped, but sometimes it is just the way it is unfortunately.

[+streakeagle]

I generally prefer decals because they can be high resolution and placed precisely with little or no distortion. But, they don't look right compared to the results you can get with painting. The decals tend to look cartoony and like they really are pasted on decals. Adding a little transparency helps show panel lines or other details, but ruins the colors. Painted on insignia can show all the details and responds better to lighting an shadows. Painted on insignias also don't run into the mesh limits or cause weird graphic anomalies. The best solution is to have both. It is great to have dedicated painted skins for flying your very favorite aircraft while retaining generic skins with decals for the majority of AI aircraft to allow proper and unique markings right down to the serial/BuAer number.

 

The fact is, I am so darn picky about everything (call me a rivet counter if you must, because I am), that no one is ever going to meet my standard: reality. But I am horrible at skinning, so I always have to settle for whatever the community provides. Fortunately, "settling" for many of the free community skins is frequently equal or better to anything available commercially. Here's looking at you Sundowner!

[Trotski]

Got to agree with you to some extent Streak, sometimes decals go all sparkly and look a bit odd, the main issue I have with painted on markings though is they tend to lose some resolution, especially on some of the older models , I guess its horses for courses really, I just prefer the decal option myself, plus with decals you have more randomisation, and date specific markings which change as the years go by, can't do that with a painted on marking, so good and bad on both ends of the spectrum really.

[+streakeagle]

The look of painted on markings depends on the resolution of skin and how the mesh has been "unwrapped" into a bit map. They can look absolutely horrible being pixelated and/or stretched/distorted. One of the most common/annoying results is the US insignia looking like an egg-shape instead of a perfect circle around the star. While actually playing the game, it is rare to really notice any such markings... decal or painted on. More of an issue with taking screenshots. I like screenshots where there are no aliasing issues as well as no blurs or distortion caused by anti-aliasing graphic options. In any screenshot where you can see the wing tip insignia of a US aircraft, you can quickly see the kind of issues that annoy me. Because the insignia has rectangular, straight-line stripes/border, it can look very jaggy from the wrong distance/angle. These days, the graphics options that minimize this problem don't really drop any fps. Back in the day, it was a critical decision. Multi-sampling anti-aliasing suffered from this problem. Adaptive AA would anti-alias tga's, i.e. decals and help quite a bit but cost a few fps. the best quality comes from supersampling, but that really lowered frame rates. To this day, I cannot use supersampling with DCS World... too big an fps hit. But in SF2, it doesn't seem to drop my frame rates much if at all and looks great.

[PFunk]

Both of you have a point, good and bad for both. I do love the high resolution decals, though.

[+daddyairplanes]

also decals allow variation within one skin like Gepard's work with MiG-21s or my airliners and cargo birds. otherwise planes on tarmac are one skin type and unit