B-29 Superfortress

[f4nutter]

Finally Giorgio, i have uploaded these paints thanks for the reminder Martin.

[gsnde]

Very much welcome, Ray. Remember the Excel sheet I sent you some time ago, will you?

[bismarck]

Thanks Ray.

Giorgio

[bismarck]

Hi Ray, has someone noticed this?
I'm on FS9

[f4nutter]

yeah my one does that or looks like that ? not had time too look into it yet though.

[campbeme]

Does it have a prop animation value in the cfg.

[RKE]

That's probably the culprit, as there are none in the supplied aircraft.cfg.

[bismarck]

Does it have a prop animation value in the cfg.

Looking at the texture in DXTbmp I think it is related to the alpha channel, but I don't know how to fix it. The prop animation is absent also in the original John's cfg.

Giorgio

[fishlips]

Large Prop textures are better displayed in 32 bit colour, but it does look like an alpha channel issue.

[John Young]

The alpha channel works fine on my PC. Texture is saved as Dxt3 in FS9. Testers had no problem either.

John

[gsnde]

Ray,

i think your paints are missing the alpha channel. By the way, I have converted them to FSX format. Is that okay for you if I make them available?

[f4nutter]

yes you can share them martin, i never included the alpha channel with the paints, as i don't use any in my sim, not a great fan of the shiny

[gsnde]

In this case this has killed the prop, Ray. At least this part should go back in to restore Johns very nice propeller

[bismarck]

Sorted out with DXTbmp.
Ray, do you want I send you the new textures?

Giorgio

[f4nutter]

yes please Giorgio, then i will update my site

[John Young]

The alpha channel serves 3 purposes: the natural metal reflections, the props and the glass.

Also, if FSX .dds conversions are being made from Ray's Dxt3 published repaints or if alpha channels are being added to the same, then does that not degrade the image which is then compressed twice? To keep the original quality, the conversions need to be made from 24 bit masters I would have thought.

John

[fishlips]

Normally, yes on the 32 bit!
The only other thing that came to mind was that two prop disk parts may had been named the same such as Prop_blur and Prop_blur.1, "being for one of the engines" for example. As a duplicate layered over the other one, it could have made a similar darkening effect of the transparency.
That is an error that could easily have occured without much notice when changing between FS9 and FSX.
But good to see the issue was a simple one!

[John Young]

It's not an issue. Gmax flags up duplicate part names before exporting. It's not the name that's important in FSX in any case, it's the animation and visibility tags applied to animated parts. They are absolutely fine in the model or my props would be dark too. What would make the FSX props dark is a change to the base colour of the texture and/or a change in the grey value in the area of the alpha channel over the prop discs. If the FSX (.dds) texture sheets are being produced from the FS9 dxt3 sheets and not the source bitmap, then the double compression may have altered something.

John

[gsnde]

John,

the issue described above is FS9 only. I am aware that the conversion of Ray's FS9 textures to FSX is sub-optimal - it was done for me personally in the first place. The results are still looking quiet good as you can see in the B-29 section of the Screen Shot Gallery.

But Ray and I have already taken this up together to bring it to a 100% solution for everybody

[fishlips]

It's not the name that's important in FSX in any case, it's the animation and visibility tags applied to animated parts