Step 6

For those who wish to push the boundaries the next step will enable you to add the reflective effects to your aircraft.

Microsoft has elected to use DXT3 format for the new aircraft that they have released for Microsoft Flight Sim 2002. DXT3 format is 32 bit colour and contains an ALPHA channel.

What is an Alpha channel? There are many people out there that can give you a great in depth description of this function of the BMP image but I will try to keep it simple.

On Martin Wright’s site there is some excellent information on the various BMP and other graphics formats. For those that desire some of the technical information please visit Martin’s great site. He has provided some incredible tools free for all of us to use so have a look around. His site: http://fly.to/mwgfx/

For the purposes of Aircraft Textures in FS2002 the Alpha channel is a part of the BMP file that holds the information for creating the reflective effects for our aircraft.

The Alpha layer stores this information in a grey scale image of 256 shades of GREY from absolute white (RED-255, GREEN-255, BLUE-255) through to absolute black (RED-0, GREEN-0, BLUE-0).

Full BLACK is the maximum reflective effect and Full WHITE is no reflective effect. All shades of grey between Black and White provide various levels of reflective intensity.

We need to use DXTBMP.exe – for accessing and implementing the DXT3 formats. This is Martin Wright’s excellent tool for manipulating multiple graphics formats.

Available at http://fly.to/mwgfx/ See DXTBmp icon at bottom of his page.

Direct downloads are available below but please visit Martin’s page and see what other great tools he has available.

http://www.mnwright.btinternet.co.uk/download/dxtbmpx.EXE
This is the address for the self installing executable file

Martin’s programs requires these additional DLL files – please download and install

http://www.mnwright.btinternet.co.uk/download/mwgfxdll.EXE
This is the address for the Latest mwgfx.dll (required unless you already have it) self installing executable
http://www.mnwright.btinternet.co.uk/download/dllzip.EXE
This is the address for the Current Support dll set (for extra formats/features) self installing executable.

NOTE: I found that installing the required DLL’s first and then installing DXTBMP worked best for me therefore I recommend that sequence.

Firstly, this tutorial will be focusing on using only the parts of DXTBMP that we need to use to create our reflective effects. There are many more features available in DXTBMP and you should experiment and get the feel of this incredible program, but not now, lets just concentrate on doing the texture effects using the Menu Items only.

Well, lets begin the adventure into creating some reflective effects. We will of course work with our newly created Bahamasair texture and create some chrome and gold effects to make it really shine.

For those using the program for the first time you must set PSP5 (for this tutorial) as your Graphics Editor. See Figure 35

Figure 35

Click on Menu Item - Prefs and then navigate to the location that contains your copy of PSP5 and click on PSP.EXE

Navigate to fs2002\aircraft\b737_400\texture.2 and select
"Bahamas-737.bmp" our excellent Bahamasair file that you have created.

You will see a copy of your Bahamasair image in the mail work area – this is known as the NORM image in DXTBMP – on the right at the top is an area for the "ALPHA" image that is blank at the moment. See Figure 36

The ALPHA image is the one you want to play with for the metal reflective effect.

This will load up PSP5 with a Blank image called TRANS.BMP ready for editing of the texture. See figure 37

REMEMBER: The ALPHA is 256 shades of GREY and creates various shaded of reflective intensity - from maximum reflect at full black to no reflect at full white

We need an image to work with here, so click on Menu Item – File - Browse

We will now copy the image of our Bahamas-737 and paste it to the TRANS.BMP texture – it will automatically turn to Grey Scale for us at this is the format for the TRANS.BMP

Select the TRANS.BMP image – important – move the mouse away from the TRANS.BMP image – anywhere will do but not on the TRANS.BMP image.

Press CTRL E – this will paste the image into TRANS.BMP positioned exactly where it should be – carefully press the left mouse button to fix the image in place.

Select the Selection Tool and right click on the TRANS.BMP image (anywhere will do) this will release the select border.

Close the Bahamas-737.bmp image – simply to make life a little easier while we work.

Now we have a grey version of our Bahamas-737 texture – all of the various shades of grey are levels of intensity for the reflective effect – but the body is white and the bits that we want to look shiny are not quite dark enough.

Step Number 1 – select Menu Item - Colours – Negative Image – WOW that looks closer to what we want – see Figure 39

But from experience I know that this is a little too intense for the effects that we want so I recommend that we lighten the image a bit to be more realistic.

Step Number 2 - Select Menu Item – Colours – Adjust – Brightness/Contrast set the Brightness to 17 (plus 17) and the Contrast to 8 – click OK. Why 17 and 8 – well, again from experience, these have proven the best combination but feel free to experiment with these setting at a later time.

Nearly done now, but some parts of the image we do not want to be reflective in any way such as wheels, interior, faces, shirts, cockpit etc so we have to eliminate the effects for those areas.

Step Number 3 – using the full white colour we need to cover over the areas that are not to have reflective effects.

Firstly select the colour white – click on the top colour option box and select the highest level of white available.

Select the Shapes Tool and check the Tools Control box – set Shape to Rectangle, set Style to Filled and Select Outline Width to 1 (one)

Now carefully draw full white boxes over all of the items that we want to remove from having any reflective effects. I have highlighted these areas in Magenta so that you can more clearly see the areas requiring to be blanked out in white See Figure 40

We should still have DXTBMP open and we now need to load our new TRANS.BMP into the Alpha Channel Area.

Click Menu Item – Alpha – Refresh Alpha – Bingo you should now have the Alpha channel loaded in the top right image area. See Figure 41

At last we are ready to save our file in DXT3 format for the reflective effects, just a few important steps to go

Navigate to fs2002\aircraft\b737_400\Texture.2 and select the B737_400_t.bmp file

This concludes the graphics tutorial on the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002 aircraft. I hope that this has been of benefit to you and that you are all now very comfortable with creating your own textures. I look forward to seeing many new textures being available for us all to enjoy in the near future.

There is still a lot of things that you can do with the Alpha channel to improve the reflective effects such as darkening up the under belly, enhancing the window and door frames and the list goes on but that is another story. Have a go, tinker and enjoy the pleasures of enhancing your own textures.