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Repaint for the LES DC3

Muwahahahahahahahaha!!!!!

Dude!!!! We're gonna call you EnviroMAXX soon. =) - CK.

Hi, Okay the search is on for WMKK. I'll have a chat to the chap who had developed WMKK for FSX and see if we can go further with it. I see through threads, you can transfer his work over to X Plane, which is a positive. Its just convincing him to release it to us! Let me work my magic. Bennett. Then finding ortho's of WMKK is tricky.

New blog is up on the subject of Lateral Navigation (LNAV). As you can see, we are not cutting any corners.. http://www.ixeg.net/blog/item/24-navigation-polar-cosines-and-newton-rhapson

Hi Chris This is looking very good. I downloaded all 3 Christchurch packages earlier in the week and I think you have done an outstanding job of these. Keep up the good work, my X-Plane world on 'the other-side of the world' is starting to look 'very plausible'. Cheers Simon

It has come to my attention a thread just as this is much needed for our community of developers. It is very important that we all know the tools at our disposal and how to use them properly to better our products. Normal maps and Specular maps have recently been added to our set of tools we can use as of X-plane version 9.41. For some these two things may seem very unfamiliar and I hope to help everyone reading this better understand what these are and how to use them. X-Plane uses combined normal and specular level maps in a single texture. This means, one image map, separate from the color maps we are all familiar with, uses the Red,green, and blue(RGB values from the image to make up the normal map and the alpha channel(transparency) for the specular maps. We have 3 types of maps now at our disposal, a color, normal and specular maps, all of which if combined right give a greater effect of realism to our airplanes. Now what is a normal maps? Simple put a normal map is similar to a bump map but goes beyond using only 8 bit color(black to white) to give depth, but instead it uses full RGB to give each pixel on the surface of a polygon a direction to point in without adding more geometry. Unlike bump maps, normal maps don't use brightness values to define depth but use a color system to define the angle at which the polygon reflects light. If this explanation did not help you understand a normal map then please visit http://www.bencloward.com/tutorials_normal_maps1.shtml where you can find a bit more in depth explanation. Here is a bit of extreme example of what a normal map might look like. Normal maps can be very useful in making rivets and aluminum deformations pop out as the light or shine casts over the mesh in sim. Any kind of dent that you don't want to add in as geometry you can do easily with a normal map. To give you another example, here is a link to the normal map I am using for the back half of my Q400. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3449179/_FuseBack_NML.jpg Notice, its not as extreme as the first example. Subtly is the key, we don't want the rivets popping out like they are gashing holes in the fuselage. More on this later. Specular maps, are the maps we use to control the specular highlight or shine spot on any given spot of the object. With them we can make scratches stand out with a larger shine and we can make dirty smudge marks look less specular. These maps use the alpha channel of the normal map, using 255 values to tell the in game rendering engine what pixels have to be given a harder shine and what not to have any shine at all. For the values 255, all white, means it will shine 100% were a value of 1 almost black, will gives it almost no shine at all. Though not completely true, a specular map could be thought to be similar to a reflection map. When making them, one would think what pixels should be shinier then others, etc. Now you may be thinking, geez, how do I even go about making normal maps. Do I bake them? Do I need a fancy normal map generator? Do I need to make a high rez mesh? Fact is, none of those seem to be the best for our situation. I have tried a ton of different ways in making normal maps already, and for the most part i have found only one way that is both simple, and very effective. Start by making a bump map. yes that's right, we use a bump map to make a normal map. We start by making a simple map that uses a neutral color, 128,128,128 is the most neutral color you can get. then we paint on in which ever way we want the highs and lows of our texture. If the panel you want to pop out pops out, then take a white color or any value greater then our neutral gray and paint it on as such. And if that panel is suppose to sink in then make it a dark color. When done a bump map may look similar to the one I used on the back half of my Q400 linked here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3449179/_FuseBack_Bump.png As you can see, its subtle. Not everything is all white nor all black. Now for the tricky part. We need to convert this bump map we have made into a normal map. I do this by using the Photoshop plugin made by Nvidia found here: http://developer.nvidia.com/object/photoshop_dds_plugins.html Gimp also has a normal map plugin for those who don't have Photoshop. Gimp is pretty cool and can be found here: http://www.gimp.org/ Note: if you have the 64 bit version of Photoshop, the Nvidia plugin wont work for it, but thankfully it will work with the 32bit version which should also have been installed with Photoshop. These are the settings I used in my normal maps but you can test out several options and see what works best for you: This is the end result: Since Version 9.50 we have not had to flip any normal maps around at all so the end result here works fine right inside the sim. This has been a big time saver for me and surely everyone else using them. Now if you followed that ok you are probably now wondering how do I make specular maps and how do I fit them into the normal maps texture. First, we start similarly to how we made our normal maps. We need to think how specular the paint is on our planes. I used between 60%and 70% on mine. So we take out our calculator and find what value between 0 and 255 makes up 70%, or whatever value you wish. we take 256 and times it by .7 to get a result of 179ish. So this tells me I want the value of the specular map to site around 179,179,179 color value. I can set my canvas to a matte 179,179,179 and start paint now my scratches and smudge marks in. Make dirty, worn, smudges areas a darker gray and any scratch marks a brighter color. My specular map before i applied it to my normal map looked something like this: Now time to make both the normal and specular maps into one map. We start by opening both our images in photoshop, and dropping our specular map into our normal map as a second layer. So in our layer window we have the purplish normal map below our specular map. hide the normal map layer and select our specular map layer. Go up top to our menu bar and go to the "select" pull down and click "Color Range" Use the settings in this image then press ok. You will end up with a selection with the values of your spec map. Now we need to apply that to a layer mask. Hide the spec layer and make the normal map visible again and select it. Now click the Add layer mask button on the bottom of the layers area. Now we should have a layer mask out of our spec map that will make the normal map partly transparent. Now it would be nice to say we are done but we have one more step. We need to make sure there is no black values in our layer mask. To do with we simple select the mask(not the image, but the box that is the mask) and go to menu "Image" -> "Adjustments" -> "Levels..." and in that window under the "output levels" under the black side change the 0 to a 1 and press ok. If we did not do this last step some of our normal map values may be lost, this is just a thing Photoshop dose and may be different if you are using a different program. Now the very last thing we need to ensure is to go into out obj file in a text editor(notepad works fine) and edit the shine settings. go to the bottom of the text file and find the command, if you have one that reads ATTR_shiny_rat and makes the numbers after it be 1.0 This will set the scale of the shine to what we desired from out specular map. 1.0 being 100%. if we set it to .9 we should get 90% of the spec map, and so forth. further reading on normals maps can be found in the X-plane wiki here: http://wiki.x-plane.com/Normal_Maps Thanks for reading, and i hope this has helped anyone who reads it in understand these two maps a bit more.