John or Ray or Mike . . . . .

I've read that by using vector graphics one can increase the sharpness of of the decals/logos on a repaint of an aircraft.
I have an aircraft I want to repaint but the single 1024x1024 sheet of the paint kit really restricts how clear the markings show up in FS. I have tried increasing the size of the image to 2048 applying the logo, etc. and then resizing back down to 1024. That sort of works but not to my satisfaction. I'm aware that FS9 can only handle 1024 textures and FSX can go as high as 4096 (?).
How do you fellows manage to get clearer/sharper logos/markings on your paints ?

Joe

I am not sure whether a vector graphic will help in this case because in the end the simulator will use a raster graphic - a bitmap file. Depending on the size of the texture file you will only have a certain amount of pixels available, that's it.

When using texture sheets larger than 1024x1024 pixels for painting and scaling them down afterwards you might try to use a different interpolation/resampling setting.
I am using Paint.net for all my paints.
In the resize window there are 4 different resampling settings to choose from (Best Quality, Bicubic, Bilinear, nearest neighbor).

Also when I resize textures I do this by resizing the whole image instead of selecting parts of a texture and resizing them by dragging the mouse. From my experience this also results in much better clarity of the resized texture.

Sometimes I also sharpen the texture again after resizing.

When for example fine line details are lost after resizing a texture I will redraw these lines on a layer above the original texture, then I adjust the opacity of this line layer and finally merge it with the layer below.

I agree with what Hartwig says!! i personally wont work on anything less than 2048x2048 and if the original paint kit was made in 1024x1024 i will resize it using Bilinear! if the panel lines become jagged i will generally make a new layer and redraw all the lines again or make a new layer and a new updated set of lines!! When dealing with logos/decals always try to find the biggest size you can and then resize it to your needs!

Much thanks

Mark

Thanks for the reply, fellows. Most of what you've said is what I had surmised. I will give the resize settings a try. I hadn't even thought of trying that; and redrawing another layer afterwards. I may resize the kit to 2048 and redraw the whole thing !

Cheers

My 2 cents....
IF you are taking logos, decals etc off the net then resizing them.....

I can't see the point of resizing them to fit a 2048x2048 only to resize them yet again when you 'shrink' the whole texture.
A double shrink has to be worse than a one time shrink.

Try it...
Grab something off the net shrink it by 50% twice then compare it to a 1 time shrink to 25%.
Look especially at edges were they will be more blurry on the double shrink.

I try to make a point of downloading the largest decent logo/decal I can find. Most of the time I have to shrink it over 70% to even fit a 2048. I cannot remember ever having to enlarge one for any paint I've done. What would be the 'sharpest' shrinkable format to have for the original logo . . . .tif, .png, etc. ?

i work the other way, i will download or find the clearest "small" image i can, place it in the texture, set the transparency to say 30% and hand draw the image where possible, it takes some time but it works for me.