Generic Pilot texture

[Creature_1stVFW]

Can anyone tell me where I can find this .dds file? I've been searching for it for a while with no luck. Also looking for the A10CII pilot texture. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Nightstorm]

They will generally be found in the textures for the aircraft and they are unique to each aircraft.  There isn't a single "global" pilot texture that I'm aware of.

 

For example the F16C default pilot texture is in the zip file F16C_bl50.zip at .\CoreMods\aircraft\F-16C\Textures in your main folder.  You'll have to poke around for the one you're looking for.

 

.\CoreMods\aircraft\A-10\Textures\A10C_II.zip  In there is pilot_a10c.dds.

[MorrisTheCat]

Razbam's pilot in the AV-8B is well done.  Is there a way to put that model in another plane?

[Morpheus]

12 hours ago, MorrisTheCat said:

Razbam's pilot in the AV-8B is well done.  Is there a way to put that model in another plane?

No

[Wrench]

There's a trick with the model viewer (it's in the root dir/bin where dcs.exe is) you can load the edm file, either external models from coremods/aircraft,  or cockpits from /mods/aircraft/%aircraft name%/cockpit/shape(s)

 

Then there is a ui window called "textures" in the main view window. From there you can click on any texture in the list and select a "navigate" button, which will open the directory or zip file the texture is in.

 

You can also generate a description.lua file from the MV to be sure you know what the material is called.

[MorrisTheCat]

Wrench, I'm not experienced with coding and all that.  Is there some tutorial that walks through the steps?  Honestly, I'm not well versed enough in this and I would need some more guidance to get this to work.  LOL.  

[Wrench]

The easiest way is to download some livery mods and look at what they did. I'm sure there's a guide out there, but it's not too hard to learn. The quick-and-dirty version is that you:

1. Get notepad++ (a text editor that won't break .lua files)
2. Open the aircraft in MV and press this button to save a "description.lua" file, save to desktop. 
3. Open that file in N++ and add two hyphens (--) to the beginning of each line (attached example)
4. Find the right folder name of the aircraft you want to create a livery for, by either
   1. Either go to D:\DCS World OpenBeta\CoreMods\aircraft\<whatever aircraft>\liveries and look at what the next folder name is e.g. A-10CII, FA-18C_hornet, or
   2. Check someone else's livery mod for that plane
5.  Create a folder of that name in C:\Users\%username%\Saved Games\DCS.openbeta\Liveries
   1. e.g. C:\Users\%username%\Saved Games\DCS.openbeta\Liveries\FA-18C_hornet
   2. note that if you copy and paste that address into windows explorer it should take you there
6. Create a folder for the livery you're making, name it what you want the livery to be called. e.g. "MorristheCat Custom Pilot"
7. Copy livery textures and description.lua into that folder (don't change the .lua file name, leave it description.lua)
8. Uncomment and change each line for which you are including a texture, and change the second string (in " quotes) to match the texture's file name. e.g.
   1. {"pilot_a10_body",    DIFFUSE            ,    "morrisTheCatCustomPilot", false};
   2. Don't include ".dds"

Once you've done that, it'll show up in the list of available liveries in the mission editor. Once you've done it a few times it's actually not that bad.

In order to test your liveries in the MV, you'll have to set it to look in the saved games directory for liveries, for some reason it doesn't by default any more.

 

To do that, copy the attached autoexec.lua to C:\Users\%username%\Saved Games\edModelViewer2

Then load the model in MV, open the liveries tool (from the "tools" drop-down menu in MV) then find the plane you're working on in the list, find your livery and double click.

A few more MV tips:

You can reload the textures if you're iterating changes, there's a small blue button with the tooltip "reload textures" that started working again about a year ago.

If you change the description.lua file you'll have to restart MV.

 

As for navigating to where the texture is stored, that's this button here:

PS

after typing all that a realized you weren't really asking about how to create a livery. But it took a long time and it's good information so I'm not deleing it. lol

description.lua autoexec.lua

Edited March 31, 2021 by Wrench