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For those who wish to push the boundaries the next step will enable you to add
the reflective effects to your aircraft.
Reflective Effects – the making of a shiny
aircraft in DXT3 format.
Step 6 Reflective Effects
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.
Setting Up. 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. Martin’s
programs requires these additional DLL files – please download and install
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. OPEN
DXTBMP
For those using the program for
the first time you must set PSP5 (for this tutorial) as your Graphics Editor.
See Figure 35 Click on
Menu Item - Prefs
and then navigate to the location that
contains your copy of PSP5 and click on PSP.EXE
That’s it – we are now set up
to use DXTBMP Click
Menu Item – FILE - Load Normal Image Navigate to
fs2002\aircraft\b737_400\texture.2 and select 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.
Click Menu
Item - ALPHA - Send Alpha to Editor
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
Navigate to
fs2002\aircraft\b737_400\texture.2 Select and open
your Bahamas-737.bmp image. Close the Browse
screen – simply to make life a little easier while we work. We now have two
images in our work area. See Figure 38
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
Bahamas-737.bmp image and press CTRL-C keys (copy) 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. Tools to be used:
Shapes 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
Close the
TRANS.BMP file – Answer YES to save the image. Close PSP5 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 Click on
Menu Item – FILE - SAVE EXTENDED IMAGE
In File Save As Type
select DXT3 with Alpha as the format
Navigate to
fs2002\aircraft\b737_400\Texture.2 and select the B737_400_t.bmp file
Click on Save – answer YES
to Replace question Exit DXTBMP.exe All done – go and fly your
SHINY new aircraft. 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. Happy Simming
Garry J.
Smith 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. |
