LM night textures

[emmemm]

Hi,
I've repainted a Viscount 700 of the model by Rick Piper as Aloha Airlines in the early livery. Ok, I know there is a repaint by F. Gonzales for JBK's Viscount. But that's for FSX and I'm a dedicated FS9 user. I also like the Rick Piper model better and I love the complex 2D panel from Fraser McKay with real fuel trim, fuel management, JPT management, propeller lock system, anti ice and so on.
When I finished the repaint I got a problem. The Rick Piper model has as night textures _LM. textures! I've already done a lot of repaints, mostly classical Propliner, using DXTBmp and MSPaint. But never before have I dealt with _LM textures and I've no idea how to make it. My question is: how to you make such night textures?
Can someone explain in simple words (my English is not the best) how to do that? Or maybe make these night textures when I send my textures to him?

Manfred Meyer
Attachment Deleted

[Tom/CalClassic]

It's not that difficult.

1. Create a copy of the day texture.
2. Make the windows a yellow color (i.e make them brighter).
3. Darken the entire texture down until it's quite dark.

Use an existing night texture as a guide for these things.

You can also copy and paste things from the existing night textures, like panel lighting on the fin texture.

Hope this helps,

[emmemm]

Hi Tom,
many thanks for the tips, but I think it did not really work.
I tried to darken the textures in Photoshop with the function Brightness and Contrast. This was difficult as all three fuselage segments darkened differently, despite the use of identical values. So it took a lot of trial and error to achieve reasonably uniformity. But the quality of the textures has deteriorated dramatically, it does not look too good.

MM

[Tom/CalClassic]

Hi,

Night textures are always displayed at a lower quality. Look at other liveries and you'll see much the same thing. If yours is worse, then you probably saved it in a format that causes losses like DXT3, instead of using a high quality format like 888 32 bit.

[Dennis the menace]

Hi

Maybe I can be of some help. As Tom said, night textures for anything are always lower quality with 256 colors displaying the worst quality, followed by DXT1 or DXT3, and 888 32 bit the best. For my flyable aircraft, I only create 888 32 bit textures for both day and night. 15 years ago it might have been a problem, but with even the cheapest computers today holding many hundreds or even thousands of movies, storage space is no problem whatsoever. So always go with the best.

Rick Piper makes strange textures. So strange that I've only come across aircraft textured like he textures them a few times in 20 years of simming. He basically textures them the same way you texture a building or object as you would do for scenery.

Normally with scenery objects, FS displays only a day texture during the day, and only a night texture during the night. At dawn and dusk there is an overlap where both textures are displayed. This explains why airports at dawn and dusk require more framerates than they do at daytime or nighttime when both sets of textures are displayed. Textures that have a name like "terminal.bmp" and "terminal_lm.bmp" are treated in this manner in FS. This is how for some unknown reason Rick Piper decided to texture his aircraft.

Normal aircraft will use a day texture at all times of the day and night. But at some point at dusk a "mask" will be placed over the day texture. This mask is what we call the "night texture". Textures like "fuse_t.bmp" and "fuse_L.bmp are treated in this manner by FS. When you are flying your Delta DC-7, day or night, the day texture is always displayed. But come evening, FS will place the "L" texture over the top of the day texture, and the darkness of the night texture will darken the day texture, and the windows, if bright, will appear lit.

Here is how I make a Rick Piper texture. I create my day texture in the normal manner. Then I copy that day texture and name it to become the "LM" texture. On that texture, I create a new layer, and that will be my window layer. Copy, or create, a window for the viscount. Then colorize it to you satisfaction as you would like the window to appear at night. Now place that window over the top of the existing windows in that top layer. Now go to the bottom layer and darken it to however dark you like. Save and look at it in FS. As long as you still have that paint file open you can unmerge it and then change the darkness or your window colors/lightness/darkness to you satisfaction. If you wish, you can save that file as a PSP file in order to preserve the layers so you can paint another aircraft.

In short, copy the day textures and darken as you like, plop your night windows on top of that in a new layer, and save the whole thing as an 888 and that will be about as good as you can get!

Mike