F14 Skinners thread (Paintkit in 1st post)

Btw. Mavericks helmet isn't black, it's dark blue.

its just the lighting .... the helemt is dark blue

Hi guys!

I'm really new to making skins, but was inspired to make some hi-viz ones for my squadron. I used the Jolly Rogers' one as a base and changed the badges and colours in Photoshop. I did not alter the main airframe colour in Photoshop, only logos and details (like text and the roundels. When finished I saved them as .dds files with auto generate mip maps selected and the version 7 of the coding.

They all fit on the planes perfectly, but the base colour of the plane has turned to a near black colour, making all the colours darker. The plane should be the very light grey of the Jolly Rogers' livery, but isn't.

Can anyone offer any advice please?

Thanks

Any Zott sightings yet??

Hey HEATBLUR? Can we hope for a paintkit this week ?

You can hope, you don't need to ask permission for that :thumbup:

Cobra stated that they were aiming to release it sometime this week.

Hi guys!

 

I'm really new to making skins, but was inspired to make some hi-viz ones for my squadron. I used the Jolly Rogers' one as a base and changed the badges and colours in Photoshop. I did not alter the main airframe colour in Photoshop, only logos and details (like text and the roundels. When finished I saved them as .dds files with auto generate mip maps selected and the version 7 of the coding.

 

They all fit on the planes perfectly, but the base colour of the plane has turned to a near black colour, making all the colours darker. The plane should be the very light grey of the Jolly Rogers' livery, but isn't.

 

Can anyone offer any advice please?

 

Thanks

Happened to me once or twice.

I think it has something to do with the DDS encoding (i.e compression options).

if you select BC6H it happens for sure (you need BC7)

BC7 Fine, no alpha.

Fine, (Linear, DX11+

or

Fine (sRGB, 11+)

How do you install the helmet skins. Do install them into the Same place as the plane skins?

How do you install the helmet skins. Do install them into the Same place as the plane skins?

Yes. Make sure that helmet textures are included on description.lua file.

Can someone give me some directions on how to save the LOD 3 in 1 file? For the life of me I can't get it to work right. I keep getting a black aircraft in model viewer.

Open each file, re size to 512x512 resolution and copy paste to the correct position in the lod file

Tapatalkkal küldve az én S40 eszközömről

Hello Admins,

Is there any chance of this "Skinners Thread" being made a "sticky"?

Can someone give me some directions on how to save the LOD 3 in 1 file? For the life of me I can't get it to work right. I keep getting a black aircraft in model viewer.

Now I may be wrong on this, but as I understand it, the "LOD1 3 in 1" file acts only as a "mipmap" for when the aircraft is seen over a certain distance away, I don't think that it will be the cause of textures not showing in the model viewer.

Due to my lack of experience in the new skin format I didn't put a "LOD1 3 in 1" in my initial attempt at the F-14 and the skin showed up no problem in the model viewer and the game...until I zoomed out the in-game view of the aircraft and it suddenly reverted to the default "LOD1 3 in 1" and the VF-103 "Jolly Rogers" skin popped in. (However in the model viewer the "LOD1 3 in 1" did not come into use. I could zoom out as much as possible and nothing changed).

My experience of other aircraft skinning suggests that it is normally a syntax error either in the .LUA file or on the individual skin files that would cause textures to fail to render.

I would carefully go through the entries looking for spelling, spacing or punctuation errors and then make sure the names match the DDS files.

Hope that assists.

Thanks for the replies guys, I figured it out. That Lod file has to be saved using the same parameters as the other files, not cross texture or what ever it is in the drop down when saving. I’ll come back to the thread when I get back in front of my computer and offersome details so others with similar issues can see what I did to get them working.

over a week to get the paintkit out? makes me wonder what their texture artists were using this whole time for the skins..

over a week to get the paintkit out? makes me wonder what their texture artists were using this whole time for the skins..

I'm not sure where the wireframe layer that highlights individual components comes from. Maybe they do that manually? No, can't be.

The wireframe is exported from 3ds max.

And regarding how long it takes to release the templates: some times people need to prioritize. With a large number of tasks and a limited number of people, priorities often change.

By now, I assume many people have a basic template for skinning their cats (yes, that was intended :) ). I would put mine here but I live in Australia and 1GB over interwebs is more expensive than one gram of gold.

IIRC, StarScream was an F-15, but I'm totally on board...

 

 

I'm mocking up a fictonal Israeli Airforce skin based on the 1994 Peace Marble IV F-16s.

 

 

And eagerly waiting the painkit :)

 

 

 

while at it, any tips for a novice? it will be my first proper skin.

Add a kill marking or two? (three, four :) )

It takes time, because we'd rather not send out .PSDs with a ton of WiP layers and ambiguous layer naming structure that we've used during production.

I thought this would be the case Cobra , are there going to be additional dirt and weathering layers in the paintkit?

Amazing if so : )

For anyone having problems with the encoding, leading to bad looking colours (like I was, see my post on page 13). I've attached a photo of the correct settings, as far as I can see they MUST be exactly like this...

It takes time, because we'd rather not send out .PSDs with a ton of WiP layers and ambiguous layer naming structure that we've used during production.

While its just my opinion, it'd probably be better if all the layers are left intact, it would allow skinners more control over the look of the airframe, and from the way its described it wont be much different from all other skin templates available for similarly sized full fidelity aircraft.

While its just my opinion, it'd probably be better if all the layers are left intact, it would allow skinners more control over the look of the airframe, and from the way its described it wont be much different from all other skin templates available for similarly sized full fidelity aircraft.

Here's an example from the template/original master PSDs from the AJS37 (and this is from one of the small, 500MB, files). Merging and naming layers makes things a lot easier for the user (and deleting unused WIP layers can reduce the file sizes quite a bit).

I can perfectly understand why HB wants to tidy things up a bit before release.