sa63114200

Six new skins for the Remastered F-5E: Download from: https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/3345515/ Needless to say, I strongly favor ED to either add support for ModelViewer of the encrypted modules, or at minimum, support ability to refresh textures in the missions.

I am excited about this mod. I am ready to create an Iranian IRGC skin based on the following livery to complement my other skins (see: https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/3320065/).

I hope so too. I very much appreciate you sending this invite. Will post my question over on Discord soon.

I created a livery for VSN F-84G several years ago and just went back to revisit it but noticed that the bare metal finish is now completely matte! There is no reflection whatsoever. I double checked everything but none has worked. I cannot get the shine back! The issue even extends to the two default liveries that come with the mod. This might be as a result of the last revision I downloaded and upgraded to (without actually flying it) which is v2.8.1.01. Has anyone run into this issue and knows what the solution is? I wish I had kept my previous release that seemed to work but unfortunately it's gone. Thanks!

I am looking for the texture template files to create a few liveries for this mod. I appreciate if anyone has a link to please share it with me. Thank you!

Replicating colors correctly (mostly from a bunch of photos taken at different hours of day) is an essential part of livery making. This becomes more challenging with multicolor camo skins that I usually have to contend with. The time of day slider in the ModelViewer is a huge timesaver in that regard. Subsituting that with changing the time in a mission for hours on end to finally match a color is simply unthinkable to me. This is yet another reason why the old school way of painting without ModelViewer is just not going to work for me. I would rather spend my time creating skins for mods/modules I can utilize the ModelViewer for, and also have full access to their textures files that I would need.

I am not sure this is just about ED being slow, as it does not explain their total radio silence on the subject despite repeated requests from the community to give more information, something that honestly should have been provided with the release of Remastered F-5 on day one. This makes me worried.

This is little to no help when a skin in the midst of development when pixels needs to line up and so many other things to come together. In addition, as mentioned by others, there needs to be access to default texture files. Without those, quality of work will suffer. This is all bad news for skin creators in particular, and users of those skins and DCS in general.

Well said. It's not just about the ModelViewer. It's also having access to the core texture files which thusfar we've had access to, and enabled us to do so much in terms of livery creation. I am wondering about ED's direction going forward. If we lose this access and capability, then DCS will lose a lot of its appeal and therefore success.

As someone who has produced many skins in DCS, including five for the legacy F-5E, I would like to chime in and let ED know that without the ModelViewer support of this encrypted module, I will NOT be redoing/porting my skins for the Remastered F-5E. It is simply impractical that for every step in the production of a skin, we have to launch DCS, start a mission / the Mission Editor, pan around and zoom in for literraly hundreds and hundreds of times to finally achieve the end result we expect. Even with the ModelViewer available, producing certain skins can be timeconsuming, challenging and tedious (Chinook is a good recent example for me with all those many rivets that took forever to find - and some still remain unknown!) You remove the ModelViewer support, then the work becomes that much harder. In short, no ModelViewer support, no livery production for me!

The following lines do work but you are right, it remains extremely glossy despite a proper matte spec file! livery = { {"a29b_01.bmp", 0, "a29b_01", false}; {"a29b_stores.bmp", 0, "a29b_stores", false}; {"a29b_stores.bmp", SPECULAR, "a29b_stores_spec", false}; {"a29b_stores.bmp", NORMAL_MAP, "a29b_stores_nrm", false}; } Many thanks again for your help.

Thank you so much for commenting. I was more looking for something that included the name "tank" in it versus "stores"! Anyway, I got the files from the zip file and copied them over to my livery folder. However, I cannot load them with the line added to the description file (see below). I looked at the master list from the ModelViewer but it was not included! Could you please help me with the last part of this dilemma? I can modify the glossiness to match my livery I suppose. livery = { {"a29b_01.bmp", 0, "a29b_01", false}; {"a29b_stores", 0, "a29b_stores", false}; }

I am looking for the texture file for the external tank for this mod. Any pointers to the file and the part number in the description.lua file is appreciated.

Wonderful. Will buy the upgrade as soon as the tweak is available. Thanks!

If the capability is there, then wonderful. Problem solved. Where exactly do you disable that? Thanks!

The antenna on top of the fuselage is a problem here. Many countries with F-5E do not fly the version with the antenna, therefore this addidtion breaks the realism. I wish ED had either given the option to remove/disable it from the remastered model, or treated the module like A-10C II with two different models so that users can choose which varient to fly. New users to DCS are now stuck with the antenna in the remastered module, and all the previous skins will have problem.

Found them! The wheel textures that I was searching for are in tex20. I should have spotted them earlier. Don't know why I missed those obvious black round shapes!

Hmm, I actually did not change tex10 at all and left the Markings in tex11 as default, and I am fine with how it looks since rubbers are usually black. If you download my livery, you can see and compare with yours.

No I did not label them. It's near impossible to do so. Way too many items. I use the coloring method to find the location. It's doable but very time consuming. If you open the "TEXTURES" tab in the Model Viewer, it shows all the files that it opens for the loaded model and you can simply click on each line and visually see it. It did look at tex18 for sure (and every other file in ~\textures\ch-47f.zip file) but that is not it! In my dream, Model Viewer would support a feature such that when I click on any part of a model, it would tell me to which texture file it belongs to.

Thank you for this. It was a huge help. I found this module to be incredibly detailed. Every surface, nuts and bolts and rivet is textured - and there are hundreds and hundreds of them! This turned out to be a bit of a challenge for a dual tone paint scheme as I had to find the location of every rivet to match the paint (something admittedly is not complete yet.) I just have one question; I could not find the texture file that contains the black wheels as I need to paint them with the base color. I searched all the pertinent texture files but did not find anything that resembled the wheel! Appreciate if anyone can point that to me. To download this livery (if interested) see: https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/3320065/

Looking forward to the release of paintkit on: https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/downloads/texture_templates/ When can we expect that? Thanks!

Couldn't wait any longer for the official paintkit to come out and went ahead and used the homemade one (thank you!) to create an IRIAF Sky Camo Reconnaissance skin standing for RF-4E. See: https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/3320065/

IIAF/IRIAF Tomcat skins have been available for a long time. See: https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/3320065/

Last post... The path to my Saved Games wasn't corrupt but it was pointing to D drive where in my gaming desktop I have a second SSD to house DCS and MSFS. When I cloned the Windows SSD, I debated whether to create two partitions in my laptop SSD or have everything in one. That decision is where things went south in regard to Model Viewer. At any case, with the huge increase in sizes of DCS and MSFS (300G and 600G respectively for me), we are all adding second or third SSDs and "moving" our Saved Games folder to new location. If we ever need to restore the Saved Games path, we need to have this little batch file handy (I am saving it for future for sure.)

Problem has been solved! When I did a fresh install of DCS, and went to Mission Editor, it pointed to my "Document\My Games" folder instead of Saved Games - which I know is default. This was certainly peculiar, but since my "DCS Updater GUI Utility" already had a folder under Saved Games and was working fine (able to clear and re-add paths to DCS and Saved Games folder many times over), I did not suspect it much. Out of desperation, I tried to understand why DCS would not pick that folder, so I searched for default location of Windows 11 Saved Games folder and came across this article (https://www.elevenforum.com/t/move-or-restore-default-location-of-saved-games-folder-in-windows-11.8717/). When I typed shell:SavedGames in file Explorer, it did not do anything! Only after downloading the batch file and running it (which opened up my Saved Games folder with "DCS Updater GUI Utility" in it) that I was able to run Model Viewer without crashing! Model Viewer then came up and I was able to load a model without any issue. I then moved DCS's user folder to the same Saved Games and it loaded my config and liveries, etc. This shows that somehow the Saved Games path in the Windows registry must have been corrupted or otherwise become unusable, which resulted to Model Viewer to ill behave and crash. Obviously, in my opinion Model Viewer should handle this more gracefully and in case it does not find a path to the Saved Games folder, it should print a clear message and terminate.