I'm supposing you are going to repaint an FS2004 (FS9) plane. In the old FSFW95 days when people didn't use things like cell phones and there were advanced devices like Betamax and music casettes, the texture files were stored in a special format, called *.*af files. The repainting was done using TEXCON01 to convert the *.*af files to bitmaps and back again. FS2000 was easier for the repainters: its planes used normal bitmaped files, and could be modified even using Windows Paint, as did at least one repainter. Today, we use extended bitmaps with alpha chanel. Alpha is the reflection chanel. The metallic parts are more reflective than the tires, for example. I use the DXTBmp program to convert the files.

I know you must have selected your model and the pictures of the plane you want to do. I was preparing a long discourse about the tools, steps, kind of files you must open, alpha channel and so on. But I realized that there are a lot of manuals about how to repaint that do just that, some of them on FlightSim.Com. Of course, if many of you request me to detail this part, I'll do. But I think that, reading the manuals, and knowing how your graphics editor works, the only thing you have to do is try, fail, retry and succeed. To give you a detailed example of how to do an specifical repaint with specifical tools, will be like Tony Vallillo (the one from Golden Hawaii and anothers) giving you the pre-flight checklist and tell you how to kick a tire. So, I decided that the main purpose of this series of articles is to give you ideas, motivation and clues about how to be a repainter.

We are going to talk here about weathering. Weathering is the art to simulate that a virtual plane is real and has been used. To weather a new virtual plane you just must take a virtual hose... guess not. Any plane has its age, but we must take care about what age we want to show. Once I saw a plane in demonstration colors, all rusty and full of water streaks. The detail was that the demonstration planes never get rusty, because they are kept clean until they are sold to an airline. It's something like to paint cargo containers on the Titanic deck.

There are four kinds of surfaces: metallic, fabric, painted metal and composites. Each one must be painted different.

Fabric is perhaps the most easiest to paint. WWI planes and many of WWII were made of fabric. There were no junctions, or speed lines. And you can even simulate the ribs, painting diffused darker lines. Of course, the only way to do a perfect simulation is to look at real pictures. For example, if you find pictures of B-17, DC-3 and other American planes of WWII, the skin was metallic, but the control surfaces were fabric covered. The fabric gets cleared by the sun, but only the upper surface, of course. It's usual to paint invasion stripes on these planes, but remember that many transport and bomber crews felt that it was too easy to see and removed the upper stripes, leaving a mix on metal, camouflage and black/white areas on these zones. I said there were no speed lines, but the engines dropped oil, so we must do darker, defined lines and stripes leaving from engines, cartridge exits and carburators and following the airflow. It means that the line is curved on the fuselage over the wings, for example.

Painted metal and composite surfaces is more difficult. Usually they have no oil streaks. But any airplane, even the newer, has darker lines where the junctions are. There are very diffuse lines leaving the joining line in the airflow direction. If the plane is small, you can even paint the screws. WWII planes, fighters, regional jets, they all have screws that can be displayed following the junctions. On the wings, the area after the airbrakes has darker airflow lines than the fuselage, due to the air resistance and the water that can be stored here. And the engines near the fuselage, as is the case of DC-9 and 727, can have a long, teardrop darker zone caused by the burned fuel. In the case of military planes, the reverses creates another darker zone, as is the case of many Tornado's tails.

On the seaplanes, the flotation line was green, due to algae, but the submerged surfaces were clean, because the running water removed all the dirt. And a seaplane, even in war time, spends many of its time docked, specially on rainy days. So usually there are no high speed marks, running horizontally (after all, the PBY Catalina was so slow that the crew used a calendar instead of a clock to reach the meeting points). The seaplanes had rust zones falling from windows, junctions and struts. And the places where the anchors and ropes scratched the paint had metal streaks. Many seaplanes had metal scratches on the base of the doors, due to the difficulty to board the plane. Again, be careful with the kind of plane: a CL-215 or a PBY waterbomber has no rust. They had smoke streaks, dark and diffused, running through the wing-engine junctions. Again, watch some pictures.

The bare metal surfaces are the most difficult to do. You must remember that there is not a "metal" color. There are metallic colors: copper, aluminum, steel--each one has its own color, from clear grey blue to dark gold. Here is where a repainter must look closely at the original pictures and decide which base color has each part of the plane. Usually the wings and fuselage are composed of some different parts, each one with slighty different metal color: airbrakes, krueger flaps, cargo doors, wing roots.

Plus, the metallic surface has junctions, sometimes has oil leaks, and very often screws. You must combine everything you have learned. And you must do something new. The metallic surfaces are never monochromatic. They allways have myriads of parallel lines, each one of slighty different color from the adjecent. To simulate that, I use two methods: to copy a small piece of the original picture inside my work, file, and duplicate this bit many times, or to generate random points and distort the result into long lines.

Of course, you must add the speed lines to the result. No mather than the "just fly" user never sees the plane closer to detail the work, no matter that the alpha channel emulates the metal by a higth reflex, a good metallic repaint must have all this.

Do you see why any repainter specializes on a few models? Because the most difficult is to find the right amount of dust, junctions and detail for each plane. Sometimes I include help files for repainters inside my creations. If you look on my Air One Boeing 737-800, you'll find a texture for a white fuselage, with all the weather marks but without any airline decoration.

But I must confess that I don't follow this rule all the time. After all, it applies for aged planes, and I like to do newly painted planes. Even if you want to paint a plane as was painted in February 1985, it doesn't mean that you must put twenty years of dirt over the wings. Just paint it as was on April 1985. And remember that the main thing that brings us here is the joy of doing something beautiful and sharing it with all the flightsimmer community.

Another difficult point about repainting is the use of the "cut and paste" skill. I, as many repainters, used to cut the airline logo and paste it on my work file. It happens especially on the tails. If you see, or download my Air Europa's Martini repaint, you'll see that almost all the fuselage and tail were made using the "cut and paste" method. Does it means that I just scanned the picture? Never! The pictures used to have shadows, as for example on the fuselage under the stabilizer, on the tail surface if the plane is a T tail shape and the engines if they are underwing. So, if you just copy a picture and paste it on the work file, you'll have something similar to roll a picture around a trunk: everybody sees that something is very wrong. In this case, I had to cut the pictures bit to bit, correct the distortion due to the perspective (it made the doors near the far end of the plane seem curved), adjust to the windows of the model and correct the tonality and light of the picture to match the one I selected. Plus, very frequently you must repaint over the pasted zones to homogenize the colors and remove the original reflections. And a warning: some models are not 100% accurate to the real planes: sometimes the wings have slighty different angles, the tails have slighty different shape... you don't see it until you try to make fit a cut tail image over the existing guide. I don't blame the modelers: they sometimes start to do their models with a 3D view that will be a few centimeters long. As I said in the first part of this series, I'd like to read a "how to be a modeler" article.

The next and last part is how to upload the finished file and some history after the release.

Alejandro Hurtado
dracosist@cantv.net