Abacus Blog

NOTICE: FS Repaint has been updated on November 18th, 2009 to version 2.22. Check the version you are using in the Help | About menu. If you are a registered user of version 2 and are using a version lower than version 2.22, you can download and install the new version over top of your current version. You will need to enter your registration key/serial number during the installation.

• NEW - Support for more folders under SimObjects including Vehicles, Animals, Boats and Misc.
• NEW - Fine-tune the zoom using the mouse wheel (useful when very close to the aircraft)
• FIX - Maximum Screen Rosolution is locked to 2048 pixels wide to prevent crashing with large Desktop displays and the Matrox TrippleHeadToGo setups.
• FIX - Clipboard was not working on Windows XP when exporting to some graphic applications
• FIX - Access Violation when using the internal editor’s flip image
• FIX - Texture display with some ATI cards is imporved

If you are having trouble getting started in FS Repaint or to find in-depth information on FS Repaint, visit our FS Design Blog by clicking HERE!

Q: How can I make a logo on an aircraft in FS Repaint v2?

A: The latest version of FS Repaint has the ability to open separate images like images with a logo on it. To do this in FS Repaint v2, follow these steps:

1. Open FS Repaint
2. Load a plane
3. Open a texture (using the built-in editor)
4. Click the File | Load Image menu.
5. Select and open the image containing the logo you want to use
6. Use the Selection tool to select the logo.
7. Select Edit | Copy
8. Close the window with the image that has the logo selected
9. On the window that has the texture loaded select Edit | Paste

This will put the selected area in the top left corner. Click and drag it to move it and/or use the ‘handles’ to reshape it.

You can also do logos by setting up an external paint program like Paint Shop Pro, PhotoShop, or similar image-editing software. When you do that and double-click a texture, it will open in the program you selected. You can then do essentially the same thing - open an image with a logo, copy it, paste it on the loaded texture, position/shape/scale it, save it, then go back into FS Repaint.

Q: Why when I add text to a texture is it appearing backward on the aircraft and how can I fix this?

A: This is not a problem with FS Repaint. It is due to the way the aircraft was designed. Most likely the designer of the plane painted one side of the aircraft on the texture. The designer then mapped that side of the aircraft on the texture to both side of the aircraft. This works fine for colors and some shapes, but not for text. The text obviously appears normal on one side, but backward on the opposite side. There is no way to prevent this. The author would have to use either:  a) a separate texture for each side of the fuselage, or b) have both sides of the fuselage painted on the texture separately. There is no way in this circumstance to add text to the aircraft and have it appear properly on both sides of the plane.

If the texture in fact has both sides of the aircraft on it, then you can do it. You may need to “mirror” the text in the FS Repaints built-in editor. You add the text and press enter. This will create a selection around the new text. You then use the Image | Flip Horizontal menu to mirror the selected text. Again, this will only work if you have both sides of the aircraft represented on the texture(s).

1. Update your Video Drivers. Check the website of the manufacturer of your video card or video chip (nVidia or ATI typically) for updated drivers.
2. Update DirectX 9. Microsoft has released updates to DirectX every few months. The version has remained at 9.0c, but there have been monthly or bi-monthly updates to DirectX on www.microsoft.com in the Download Center.
3. Check your screen resolution. FS Repaint requires the screen resolution to be less than 2048 pixels. If you have  large monitor with a very hig resolution setting, you will need to decrease this to 2048 or less to use FS Repaint.

Q: How can I make “metallic” paint jobs with a shine (like American Airlines)?

A: This might be a limitation of the plane. Textures can have a alpha channel on them. A standard bitmap image has a Red Blue and Green number assigned to each pixel called RGB. These numbers range from 0 to 255 and when mixed allow for the various colors. Each pixel has it’s own RGB value. Since 3 is an odd number and computers work on bits that are 2 bytes long, you have to have an even number so it uses 4. The RGB use up 3 and the 4th channel is left blank - usually. This 4th channel is often called the Alpha Channel. So instead of RGB, we call it RGBA. Flight Sim can use this fourth channel to set either the level of reflection or transparency.  The model file (MDL) has coding in that tells FS what to do with the alpha channel. If no information is present in the MDL file, it uses the alpha channel as transparency. If information is present in the MDL, it uses is as reflective.

Open the texture and look above the color selection. You’ll see 2 icons - a pencil and an eyeball. These are settings that tell which ‘version’ of the texture you are looking at - the main RGB channel (note the red, blue and green icons) or the alpha channel (The alpha channel is grayscale).

Click the grayscale icon next to the eyeball to view the Alpha Channel. A solid white alpha channel is pure solid or no reflection and a pure black icon is invisible/transparent or pure reflection (mirror surface). To have the FS Repaint Editor’s tools work on the Alpha Channel, click the grayscale icon next to the pencil. This will push the icon down. You may want to click the RGB icon also to turn it OFF or lift it up so you don’t edit both the main texture and the alpha channel at the same time.

If the plane is set properly, you can paint the plane gray and then paint the alpha channel very dark or black. If it does not work, then the model is not configured to support reflections and there is no way to add this to the model.

A: It may depend on the plane, but the typical method is to select View | Virtual Cockpit from the menu. You will need to reload the aircraft (press F4). There are instances where FS Repaint is not able to render the Virtual Cockpit.

FSX also supports Fallback textures. This is where a plane may have 10 different paint schemes, but each of these schemes will have the same virtual cockpit textures. Instead of duplicating the textures in each of the 10 texture folder, there is a texture.cfg file that FSX reads. This texture .cfg file gives FSX alternative folders to looks for the texture. Currently FS Repaint does not support these alternate folders. The solution would be to copy these ‘missing’ textures into each of the texture folders of that aircraft.

Q: I deleted a variation from my aircraft using FS Repaint and it deleted other variations that I did not want to loose. How can I get them back?

A: All variations of an aircraft are saved in a file called the aircraft.cfg file. This file contains different sections for each aircraft variation that defines the manufacturer, variation name, aircraft type and so on. Each of these sections is numbered starting with zero (0). FSX requires that all of these definitions be sequential with no gaps between them. If there is a gap in the number sequence of these sections, FSX will not load or recognize any of the numbers after the gap.

The only solution at this time is to manually open the aircraft.cfg file for the aircraft you are working on with NotePad. Look through the file for the different sections. They typically start at the top with [fltsim.0]. Locate all of these sections (note that new variations created with FS Repaint may appear at the bottom of the file) and make sure that the numbers are in order and none are missing ({fltsim.0], [fltsim.1], [fltsim.2] and so on. Be sure to save the file.

Q: What image formats does FS Repaint support?

A: FS Repaint only supports the textures associated with aircraft, which are bitmap (*.bmp) format and DDS compressed textures (*.dds). The image editor built into FS Repaint can also load in JPEG (*.jpg) file. The Load function in the File menu is used to load JPEG files and select an area such as a logo to be copied to an existing texture.

Q: Does FS Repaint support layers?

A: The editor that comes with FS Repaint does not support Layers. You can however us an external program like PhotoShop that does support layers. All images should be flattened before saving and viewing them in FS Repaint.

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