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Graphics Tutorial Continued

Before we start some things
we just have to do

Selecting something to Paint

First – lets get an idea of what we want to paint – after some careful deliberation I thought we would start with a  B737 aircraft (blank texture provided) and create a jazzy Bahamasair Airlines texture.  Why Bahamasair – one, it has some stripes and a bit of colour and appears not too difficult to create, two, it does not require artistic flair for our first paint task and three, when we do the reflective effects it will allow us to have some chrome and gold effects on our aircraft as well as shiny blue paint.

Our choice of liveries are:


Figure 1


Figure 2

Images courtesy of http://www.airliners.net . This site is an absolutely great resource for budding aircraft texture painters with pictures of just about every aircraft livery in the world.

 Lets go with number TWO (Figure 2).  This one has some excellent potential and is based on some simple lines and some work with a font.  And will look great as a strong reflective effect.  

Basics: - The basic layout of PSP 5 (Figure 4)


Figure 4


Figure 3

For your convenience I have created a blank Default B737_400 texture for us to work with.  This texture is fairly rough but as this is our first experiment in painting aircraft we will not need a crystal clear image. See Figure 3

This image is available as:

Blank-B737.bmp

 


Figure 5

Important:

Make sure that the Controls utility is open – click on Menu Item View – Toolbars then select Control Palette  

I personally like to have the settings seen in Figure 5 at all times.

 Now a few steps to get the blank into our paint program and save it to a safe location.

(1)   Open your paint program and load the Blank-B737.bmp file (Menu Item File – Open – navigate to the B737-Blank.bmp location – select the file and click on Open)

(2)   We are not going to get technical here and create additional textures for the B737_400 those alternatives can come later – we will simply create a new texture for the current aircraft in the texture.2 directory

 (3)   Save the file as Bahamas-737.bmp in the Texture.2 directory of the B737_400 Default aircraft (Menu Item File – Save – navigate to FS2002/Aircraft/B737_400/Texture.2 – File name: Bahamas-737 save as type: scroll down and select BMP)

  Now we can start to work on the texture.   

Now go to Step 1

Note: These pages and tutorial are copyright and are not to be reproduced in part or whole without my express permission.    Please honour this expectation.


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