Help with

[lifejogger]

diagonal lines in fsx. Seems that in repainting the WACO for FSX my diagonal lines are rather ragged, never had them look this bad in FSX.
Could it possible be because the textures are bmp files and not dds?

from a distance they look okay.



But close up they are ragged.



Any ideas on how to straighten them up?

[lifejogger]

I've been searching the net trying to fine a way to straighten up ragged edges and found that the uneven edges might occur because of the way the textures are mapped onto the aircraft and if that is the case there is nothing you can to do fix it. I did some tests on other aircraft and some of them the diagonal edges were straight and on others they were uneven. Probably on the WACO UPF7 there just going to have to be uneven when you zoom in.

[Deleted]

If I create textures in Corel Draw all of my edges are beautifully smooth. However, if I use PaintShop Pro (for example) the best I can do if I have straight lines like those is have antialiasing on when I draw the lines.

[jimslost]

Uh, oh. All I've got is PSP.

[lifejogger]

Yes, all I have is Paint Shop Pro and I did have anti aliasing turned on. I might have to load the Photo Shop I bought of off e-bay and see how it works.

[windrunner]

lifejogger said:

I've been searching the net trying to fine a way to straighten up ragged edges and found that the uneven edges might occur because of the way the textures are mapped onto the aircraft

You got it! I call it the painter "Greatest Nightmare". MDL are obscure things for us when it comes to mapping ( show our limits). This is when you'll have to be creative and to decide if to leave it like that or find another livery...looks good enough to me.

Oh! Welcome to the world of Photoshop!

[Chris B]

How strange... yet the lines on the fuselage look perfectly fine. I don't know the Waco personally yet, but even the screenshots in the simflight shop and from Peter McLellan's screenshots don't show that level of jaggies. Re-reading your message though - the textures are bmp? Is this the payware Golden Age Waco? The sales blurb does say it is basically an FS9 model that works in FSX.

A couple of questions/ideas to play with perhaps:

(Forgive the questions - it's like the roadside assistance guy asking "is there any petrol in the tank?")

1. have you inadvertently reduced the size of the images? Say from 1024 square to 512?

2. have you inadvertently switched of "smoothing" or "AA" in your paint program?

3. have you saved in a different format - FSX 'prefers' DXT5 or 32 bit 888-8 (check against the original textures in the aircraft texture folder.

4. have you saved and converted your textures with mipmaps on? (turn 'em off)

5. just out of curiosity . how big are the wings in relation to the rest of the texture sheet. If they are only small, then you don't have that many pixels to spread detail on. Could you drop a screenshot of the wing texture sheet. You can reduce it, I'm just curious to see the relationship of sizes.

You can try this:

FSX textures can be 2048 pixels square. Do your painting at this resolution. You don't need to do anything to FSX to tell it the new size. Maybe it'll work on an FS9 model in FSX too?

Is there a separate paintkit to download?

[lifejogger]

cbris said:

4. have you saved and converted your textures with mipmaps on? (turn 'em off)

Hello Chris,
Thanks for your response, looks like I am guilty of number four above. I re-saved the textures without mipmaps and that did the trick. All your suggestions were good, you should right a book.

Thanks.

PS this is Tim Conrad's WACO.

[Chris B]

Good lord! It worked...

Now that Waco looks prettier than before. Piglet's eh? Very interesting. Makes me want to go dig out the Buecker again and go for a fly.