Robo.

I am not sure why has your post been edited by admin nor do I understand why I got neg reputation from you Ali :lol: I was just trying to help. If there is a problem, feel free to PM me. I know Winger from 1C forums (great BF 109E template mate!) and I am sure that's all he needed to know to start his own skins. I am sory to interfere with your thread but I thought that was on topic. :) Keep up the good work Ali, looking forward for your skins. :thumbup:

Here a short tutorial of how to start, used for Adobe Photoshop, but the process is similar in Gimp or PSP... 1. Create your diffuse textures. This is your basic aircraft 'skin' with the paint job, all markings, stencils, noseart etc as you want it to be shown on the actual aircraft. I strongly suggest using original ED template released here: http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/downloads/misc/texture_template_of_p_model_51d/ You get 4 *.PSD you can open in Photoshop or similar to start with. Edit at will, I hope you have basic understanding of how to work with layers. This guide focuses on creating specular maps for your skins so I assume this is the easy bit for you. (it is indeed with the template containing all you need to create a custom skin). The aluminium part of the skin is obviously light gray colour. We want to get this parts of the aircrafts surface shiny in the game. I also strongly suggest you use the ED's modelviewer to preview your work easily: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=88508 For extra polished aluminium, I prefer to use RGB 160 174 180 as a background colour. The darker colour you use, the less reflective it becomes in the game once you combine your Diffuse and Specular map (Texture). Let's start with the file 'p51D_DIF_Fuz_Front.psd' from the above template which is the front part of the fuselage with the nose, canopy and radiator scoop of your Pony. You will need some way of creating a DDS file out of the PSD from Adobe Photoshop. I suggest you use the native plugin by nVidia: http://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-texture-tools-adobe-photoshop So you can open and save DDS files straight ouf of Photoshop. 1. Create your specular textures. There are several methods to achieve similar results. Here is the easiest one. I will create specular map for the front part of the P-51 fuselage for all-metal P-51 and I will add a sample noseart and paint to it later. a) Starting with the diffuse texture - turn all your marking, paint and other layers OFF so only background colour, panel lines, rivets and weathering layers are visible similar to the picture below: (I left some black stencils and red bits and bobs ON for now) b) save your texture as straightforward 24bit BMP file and edit is as follows: click IMAGE -> ADJUSTMENTS -> DESATURATE (or use the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+U) Your texture will be desaturated, you obviously lose all colours etc. c) click 'CHANNELS' on the right hand side d) click on green channel (Ctrl+2). The channels are identical now, as you have got the whole thing in grayscale. e) Invert the green channel IMAGE -> ADJUSTMENTS -> INVERT (or Ctrl+I) you will see how the first line representing all 3 channels changes, click it to switch all channels back on: and save as a DTX1 *.DDS with no mip maps (afik this is the correct format, it certainly works OK and the size matches the default files made by ED) This is your specular map to match your diffuse texture with no markings on it. Name the former p51D_DIF_Fuz_Front.dds (mip maps, size 2.66MB) and the latter with lodts of green and cyan p51D_SPEC_Fuz_Front.dds (no mip maps, size 2.0MB). Using these two files in the model viewer (or in the game if you wish) will give you a result of very shiny and highly polished surface of your Mustang. You can see that everything that was dark on your desaturated BMP texture is now green on the specular texture and reflects very little light. Everything that was light, e.g. our light grey background colour is now cyan in the specular map. These parts of the surface are considered a highly reflective parts by the game and it will appear mirror like. In this example, very light colour has been used resulting in lots of cyan. Too much perhaps unless you intend to create a highly polished P-51 example. Now try to go back to the beginning, to your PSD file with all markings switched off and change the background colour to darker shade of grey, say RGB 102 / 108 /111 and repeat. this process with desaturating and inverting the green channel. You will get a specular dds file with much less cyan colour in it and the surface will therefore appear much less reflective in the game engine. You can experiment with various settings and find what looks best to you. The conclusion is that whatever you do, just get yourself a desaturated texture of your standard diffuse texture (your actual skin) with the background colour lighter on the surfaces you want to see shiny (cyan) and darker bits for parts you want to keep matt (green bits on the Spec map). Keeping your weathering and lines / rivets on the initial texture (the one you are about to desaturate) is a good thing as it adds to the plasticity of the final skin. Also, if you keep your paint chips in there lighter, they will be more visible as shiny missing bits on matt painted surface. Very realistic indeed! My personal method is combining few pre-made spec maps varying from all shiny (lots of cyan R+B) to all matt (very green based on dark surface) and playing with the opacity depending on the result I'd like to achieve on that particular part of the aircraft, e.g. selecting markings via Ctrl+D and pasting that selection onto matt bit. But once you understand the principle, you will find your own way of achieving light effects as needed.

-Rudel- cool stuff! It is my understanding that the 2 or 3 channels define simple parameters of the specular colour map. I've been checking the extremes to see what is doing what (spec maps of 255,0,0, 0,255,0 and 0,0,255). The more green, the less reflection you get. 255 is fully matt surface, see the left wing on the screen below: Flat texture, no reflection at all (that's 0 / 255 /0), this can be obviously tweaked by getting slightly less green and adding some R and B (that's your cyan actually). Right wing is fully blue iirc (0/0/255) and it's pure mirror and the Blue channel controls the intensity of the reflections. The problem is that in game it is mainly reflecting the sky which is blue, hence the blueish tint. It's not that visible in the model viewer and becomes more obvious in the game. Depends on the weather settings and ligt condition (like in real life). Red channel (255/0/0) is taking care of the actual specular highlights (colour) and it seems to be adding some gloss and / or white colour into the reflections, that is your shininess channel. Some spec maps are grayscale, some are using alpha channel (RGBA), this seems to be 3-channel colour specular mapping where each channel, red, green and blue, are creating their bit, you can combine them as needed, e.g. your cyan would be no green but lots of blue and red and I don't think it would get rid of the blueish tint. The background diffuse colour has also got big impact on the display in the game's engine. You need to use some shade of ligth grey if you want to depict polished aluminium, the problem is that on brighter diffuse colour, the blue reflection will be more visible. This is OK in real life in a bright day, but looks a bit odd (unnatural) in game. I am using green for matt aluminuim, e.g. tom surfaces of the Mustang wings as they were manufactured that way - dull, filled and sanded: RGB 68 / 195 /52 For shiny stuff, e.g. mirror polished aluminium, I use 162 / 155 / 172 with a wee bit more red on the highlights. That looks, in my opinion, pretty good in the game's engine at any time of the day and any weather. The best way of making a specular map for your Mustang is by creating a Diffuse map first (of your shiny aircraft) with no markings, stencils etc and save it as a flat BMP image. Then completely desaturate it, edit the G channel (select and invert), then turn the R and B back on, which gives you final specular map. All you need to do then is just save it as a *dds and use it in game - your pony will be nice and shiny. The lighter the diffuse clour, the more light it will reflect in the game engine. If you want to add some markings or matt parts (blue nose for example, you will add this as a selection on the specular map. And use green for matt as described above. You can tweak the opacity of the green layer to your liking to obtain semigloss surfaces etc. You can also create a fully matt Pony spec texture by the same method as described above, but using dark background colour. And combine both shiny and matt layers as necessary by the means of selections. This is at least my preference as the specular texture made from final diffuse map with all markings and paint on it will give you very raw result with white colour burned in as the shiniest mirror. Feel free to experiment with the settings and tweak your specular texture depending on if you want to achieve high reflectivity of a restored and polished Mustang or dull surface of slightly annodised aluminium of wartime examples. Make sure your painted things, e.g. invasion stripes or unit markings and codes are matt so they would stand up on the glossy aluminium surface like in real life.

Hi Winger, the original PSD template is to be obtained here: http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/downloads/misc/ This particular skin: http://www.axis-and-allies-paintworks.com/download.php?view.531 Just have a look at how the included specular map is done, some information is here: http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=1464152&postcount=24 and here: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=88855

More horsepower? Equal match? Merlin III Spitfire vs. P-51D? I strongly disagree. :pilotfly: I agree on A2A being marvelous, got all 3 of their warbirds, love them all.

And he says ''I would like to extend my thanks to AliFish who explained the Specular process to me as he has helped add an extra level to this skin.'' I'd suggest you keep that swearing stuff in private, it's just a skin. And there is nothing special about figuring out the specular mapping as used in the game. It's a nice skin and I am glad you helped him to deliver it. I don't know what was your intention exactly, but anyone can read few threads and posts regarding how to use the spec textures and there are many people around here that would be happy to help.

Don't get me wrong, I have deep respect to authorship but the specular mapping is not your idea, is it? Are you the author of the above skin?

Naaah. It's just a skin. You were speaking about this specular textures as of some very deep secret. Which it is not, it's very simple and straightforward stuff and you are being ridiculous imo. :pilotfly:

Rock - not a problem, I just compared the skin with the real machine and it's just small details. The small things would add a bit of authenticity to the skin imho, please do take it as constructive criticism. What the hell is wrong with you Ali Fish? :laugh:

Beautiful! I would add white background of the kill marks and stars, matt rudder, pilot's and crew names, allign the s/n on the tail and add s/n on the fuselage and it would be spot on. Great stuff Rock!

Sorry dude, I've missed this post - see PM. :smilewink: -Rudel- cool stuff! It is my understanding that the 3 channels define simple parameters of the specular colour map. I've been checking the extremes to see what is doing what (spec maps of 255,0,0, 0,255,0 and 0,0,255). The more green, the less reflection you get. 255 is fully matt surface, see the left wing on the screen below: Flat texture, no reflection at all (that's 0 / 255 /0), this can be obviously tweaked by getting slightly less green and adding some R and B (that's your cyan actually), green is your SPECULAR COLOUR channel. Right wing is fully blue iirc (0/0/255) and it's pure mirror. The problem is that in game it is mainly reflecting the sky which is blue, hence the blueish tint. It's not that visible in the model viewer and becomes more obvious in the game. Depends on the weather settings and ligt condition (like in real life). Red channel (255/0/0) is taking care of the highlights and it seems to be adding some gloss and / or white colour into the reflections, that is your shininess channel. Some spec maps are grayscale, some are using alpha channel (RGBA), this seems to be 3-channel colour specular mapping where each channel, red, green and blue, are creating their bit, you can combine them as needed, e.g. your cyan would be no green but lots of blue and red and I don't think it would get rid of the blueish tint. The background diffuse colour has also got big impact on the display in the game's engine. You need to use some shade of ligth grey if you want to depict polished aluminium, the problem is that on brighter diffuse colour, the blue reflection will be more visible. This is OK in real life in a bright day, but looks a bit odd (unnatural) in game. I am presonally using green for matt aluminuim, e.g. tom surfaces of the Mustang wings as they were manufacturet that way - dull, filled and sanded: RGB 68 / 195 /52 For shiny stuff, e.g. mirror polished aluminium, I use 162 / 155 / 172 with a wee bit more red on the highlights. That looks, in my opinion, pretty good in the game's engine.

Nai bother :thumbup: I just didn't understand if you were talking about remake of the game's engine fro the final release and you're a developer and the above screens were WIP of that or you're just making skins and experimenting with the specular mapping settings. Good luck with your project, it looks very very good. :thumbup:

Hi Ali, I don't quite understand tbh. I've been reading your posts and I am not sure if you are tweaking the shaders (dll stuff and / or are developer or tester) or the above effect is achieved in existing engine via RGB channels of the specular maps. Sorry if my question is silly I am new to this forum and I don't know who is who just yet. I agree the sim looks superb, keep up the good work! :thumbup:

Screens are looking superb indeed. What spec settings have you used?

Hey mjmorrow - that's pretty much the way I see it, too! :thumbup: Korean skins are not as cool visually as WWII ones, but their pilots did a great job in there. Weathering is quite different, too, to the polished look of restored machines or to the dull aluminium of WWII planes, these were simply dirty and with this particular sharkmouth scheme, dog ugly imho. But it's historical + all the credit to the brave Stang pilots in Korea. Many were KIA or MIA while attacking ground targets, so were Mr. Glessner. Thank you for your kind comments!

Hi -Rudel-, thank you very much. I see what you mean by the blueish reflections, I am all new to DCS and specular maps in this engine. I am not quite sure yet what the possibilities are, all I did was I altered the shiny stuff (R and B channels) a bit closer to white to get desired effect (nice shiny mirror-like polished aluminium on the fuselage and flaps). I have kept the G channel as it was as I was happy with the RAF dark blue used on the blue nose and it's mattness in game. I did a bit experimentation with various values but I found that in order to get rid of the blueish tint I had to choose different background colour in the diffuse map - the default 'bare metal' skin has got this darker bluegrey. I am quite happy with the results but it might as well be revised later on. Maybe the shaders will also be changed or tweaked a wee bit in the final DCSW release who knows. Not sure that helped though, but I honestly don't know. In game effect very much depends on the weather and time settings. The models look sligtly different in the model viewer, that does not help either. Thanks for your kind comments!

Hi Smiladon, very nice, keep up the good work mate! Nice to have your 'local' plane in the sim :thumbup:

If there are any textures missing, you get this orange replacement texture. In the TempTextures folder, you need to use default texture names, e.g. p51D_DIF_Fuz_Front.dds, p51D_SPEC_Fuz_Front.dds etc for all 4 texture parts. That way, the model will load them. when you finish, just rename the files by adding _YOURAICRAFT or whatever and drop them in the game folder.

Sorry I missed the link. It's being uploaded to the userfiles, here is a temp link: CLICK This is the restored Stang, mind you, no wartime weathering. I used many photographs of the ML151BW aircraft which is in superb condition, highly polished and everything. This is in no way attempt to skin real wartime Preddy's Cripes A' Mighty. I've seen these Virtual Horsemen guys flying some sick aerobatics and I hope this modern example could be of some use to them. :thumbup: I am not entirely happy with the result as the 3d model is slightly different (obvious differences are mirrors and aerials) and some details like the kill marks could not be matched with the real life Mustang due to different panel lines alingment (perhaps California / Dallas differences) and I had to make few compromises to get close to the original. I might be able to fix some of the differencies but I need to figure out if I can alter the bump *.bmps somehow. Beautifuly restored aircraft that is!

No bother. Yes you're right, all you need to do in order to create a new 'livery' is have a folder with 'description.lua' file in it. That one shows the path to all textures used. Say you want to have same aircraft with different noseart - you simply add new textures of the nose (p51D_DIF_Fuz_Front_YOURAIRCRAFT.dds + corresponding SPEC file if necessary) and add the path to the existing folders with textures to be used on the rear part of the fuselage and wings. There is no need to have identical textures duplicated. Normally though, if you want to create a brand new aicraft with unique 4 textures, you need to create them (obvioulsy), then you need to create a folder (use same structure as default skins, e.g. C:\Program Files\Eagle Dynamics\DCS World\Bazar\Liveries\P-51D\YOURAIRCRAFT, place the textures in it (should be 8 *.dds files). Your description.lua file should look like this: Use notepad and REPLACE function (Ctrl+H) to replace all _youraircraft with appropriate name and save. The above example is for a custom skin with all markings on it. Many lines are obviously for generic skins as the game is able to add specific squadron letters on same skin for various aircraft in the same flight. If you paint your letters on the fuselage, you don't want the game to put anything on top of that. You can edit decals, pilot skin, pilot patch (unit badge etc) for each skin. Pretty cool. So Leafer feel free to copy any description.lua into your folder, open it with notepad (you can associate the *.lua file extension woth notepad) and copy and paste the example above. Save. Then use the 'replace' function to change YOURAICRAFT to anything you need. Make sure the names of the files match with the texture names. So basically yes, you need to edit the lua file for every skin you create. Don't worry, it's pretty straightforward. Modelviewer is pretty useful for finding and tweaking this pesky little details. It works alright for me, I used the latest version from the above FTP, installed OK. I am able to open the *.emd files and I am seeing the a/c I am painting in the game's engine. All I had to do was finding the P-51 emd file and copying all textures to C:\Program Files (x86)\edModelViewer\Bazar\TempTextures so the thingy can see them. You can reload the model to see the effect of the tweaks you're doing and you can see how the SPECular reflection work (green / violet).

DOWNLOAD HERE

Oh no, it's pretty straight forward. All you need to do is make sure your DIF and SPEC files are matching. I suggest starting with the SPEC files of the default 'BARE METAL' livery. Open the SPEC files in Photoshop normally, you'll see it's all violetish. That means that everything will be shiny in the game's engine and will reflect light as a mirror. If you have a look at the Spec files of say the Desert Rat (also a default skin), you'll see it's a Olive Drab camo which is matt. It's SPEC file is therefore green (shocking green that is). You can combine both by the means of pasting a selections of the green one onto the violet one. If you have got markings on a polished aluminiumm surface, you can select the shape of the markings and fill it green on the violet background. This will mean that the markings will be displayed matt on the shiny surface in the game. Pretty realistic I must say. What happened to you - you removed the G letter from the DIF file but it remained on the SPEC file therefore you have a matt bit on a shiny surface. PM me the WIP skin of yours, I can have a look. Best way of doung that is by using the SPEC group in the original PSD template and saving it in green / violet (magenta) pallette. Difficult to explain how to do that tbh. Ad model viewer - very helpful when skinning, have a look here: ftp://ftp1.files.eagle.ru/mods/model_viewer/

Hi matey. The 3d models in DCS have also got a specular mapping texture. That's the *.dds file with a SPEC in it. This defines, by means of certain colour shades, which part of the model will be matt and which part will be shiny. What happens to you, you've got this letter G defined as matt (probably from previous skin) and the rest is shiny hence the effect in certain light conditions. I suggest you check your skin in model viewer so you don't have to start the game each time you want to check a small detail. Anyway, the SPEC dds files are shocking green (the more green, the less reflections) and magenta / violet colourish. Violet is used for the shiny parts of polished aluminium. http://www.rastertek.com/dx10tut21.html - have a look here Btw, there are SPEC files for each part of the a/c in both matt and shiny versions in default skins. You can also use (and I strongly suggest that) a SPEC layers in your PSD file. Hope that helped.

There is a campaign mission dealing with navigation. It looks like the 'video' tutorials are just something to start with and then you crack on with the P-51 challenge campaign to get better and better at flying the 51 (take-off and landing in cross wind, ground attacks, aerial combat, navigation etc. etc.) But thumbs up for the tutorials, well done!

Beautiful aircraft by ED :thumbup: I am just learning to use the DDS textures and I am rather new to DCS, it's great stuff and Pony is fun to fly. Find attached a skin of a USAF F-51D deployed in Korea, this particular aircraft, FF-736, was flown by Colonel Milton Glessner. The skin is finished and works OK, I consider it WIP because some details are rahter confusing and are being depicted different in various sources (e.g. colour of the canopy frame, details like serial number on wheel doors, fonts etc. etc.) If you happen to have any further information about the aircraft or if you find anything wrong, feel free to comment. I'd like to release the final version and some more Korean 51s at some point. Enjoy. DOWNLOAD HERE (DCS psd template has been used)