discoveries during repainting + questions

[glenn68]

Good Afternoon,
I am still at a learning curve with some touch up and repainting but also reading alot that is posted at this forum.So far I am learning.
I do have some questions to ask;
1. How do you remove the "shine"?
2. What size is standard for the picture to be in pixles? (1024 x1024?) RWBin tool was giving me a warning : "the picture apprears to be too big" When I checked the properties it was at 2048 x 2048. I did resize down to 1024 x 1024 and worked ok, but I feel this is not the proper settings.
This is what I was working with;
Dick Cowens GP9 basic kits low short hood, used RW Tools to clone the locomotive which work out good. Checked in RW editor and everything was fine. Dick Cowen's kits use PSP multi layer so I opened my PSP 9 and resaved it to a PSD for Photo Shop.(I cant get the .DDS to work properly in Paint Shop Pro.) Reworked the the file for I wanted and tried to save it to .DDS but a warning poped up saying cannot save, too many layers. So I went and saved the file as a .BMP. Reloaded the .BMP file in to Photo Shop then saved it to a .DDS and it worked fine. Converted the file to TGPCDX with RSBin tool, opened up RW editor and my locomotive is there but shiny. I feel it is too shiny.
The only thing I did was remove the Family Lines logo's and stripes. This is what I called BBLX (fictous leasing line BBLX=Basic Black Locomotive.). I did this during the times I had with MSTS.


Glenn


Glenn

[PapaXpress]

Unfortunately you need to use the same texture size mapping that the model is looking for. I tried this out on Trainguy's new Box car with over sized textures to work around an issue. I was able to force a conversion using RWTools, which does not check the sized like RSBinTool does. The end result was that much of what I repainted was mapped off the model.

The shininess comes from the alpha layer. I generally set this to black, but I have heard others used various shades of gray.

[ATSF3814]

Yeah by default the new template you make will have a pure white alpha channel and that's what causes the shiny look to happen.

To get rid of it, I open the template in DXTBmp and under alpha click on Create Alpha Template. This automatically creates a greyscale alpha channel based on your repaint template and should eliminate the problem.

[Kali]

2. What size is standard for the picture to be in pixles? (1024 x1024?) RWBin tool was giving me a warning : "the picture apprears to be too big" When I checked the properties it was at 2048 x 2048. I did resize down to 1024 x 1024 and worked ok, but I feel this is not the proper settings.

Dick's templates are 2x the size of the required texture - I don't know if this is so you can control how sharp your texture is by reducing it with a sharpness filter, or if you want a double-sized texture ( you can do that, you just have to make it from scratch ), or whatever reason. Anyway just do as you've done & reduce size before you export.

[glenn68]

I want to thank all of you who responded. I admit my skills in repainting are limited but I am learning and I am not afraid to ask questions, which brings me to a comment. I get better results asking questions on this forum than any place else.
I am going to give the alpha channel modification a try tonight.

The help is really appreciated!

Glenn

[Kali]

Are you using the full Photoshop? If you are then you have full control over the alpha channel right in the program, no need to go messing around with DXT2BMP or anything. Go to the channels window and clone one of the channels, call it Alpha, and try that. If you click on it you can edit it as a greyscale image just like editing anything else.