Paint Kit

Side tracked you say? Hehe, yep ... you, me, and a lot of other folks know that feeling all too well. Welcome to the hobby!

Removing windows is easy for the normal DAYTIME paint. But what do you see when you view this aircraft at night? Are the windows still lit up? I will bet that they are.

If they are, then you also need to paint the night-time textures and black the windows out as well. However, the problem with doing that is there is usually only one night-time texture for each model type, and it's used for all of the planes of that type. In other words, if you paint the night-time textures for the Bae-146 and black out the windows, you would be affecting the night-time textures not just for your Royal Mail plane, but also for every other Bae-146 aircraft that flies in your skies ... meaning that none of the Bae-146's, for any airline, would have lit up windows at night.

So you'll need to create a specific night-time file, just for Bae-146 cargo planes. Here's how ...


•     Have a look in your "C:\...\SimObjects\TrafficX\JFAI-AllAircraft\texture.Night" folder. This folder contains all of the night-time textures for all of the Traffic X AI planes.

•     Find the one for the Bae-146. It will be the "JFAIBae146_l.dds" file.

•     Make a COPY of this file on your DESKTOP (or some other appropriate temporary folder).

•     Open this file, and paint the windows black.

•     Save the repainted black windows file using the SAME NAME ("JFAIBae146_l.dds"). To be honest, it's probably not necessary to use the same name, but I think it is better for consistency.

•     Now create a new FOLDER. Call this folder "texture.Night" and copy the newly saved night-time paint with the black windows ("JFAIBae146_l.dds"), from your desktop and in to this folder.

•     Place this new "texture.Night" folder, containing the night-time paint with the black windows, in to the same Traffic X Bae-146 folder that has your Royal Mail repaint. For example, that might be "C:\...\SimObjects\TrafficX\JFAI_Bae146\texture.30" or perhaps "C:\...\SimObjects\TrafficX\JFAI_Bae146\texture.RoyalMail" (if you [re]named the folder when you first created your repaint).

•     So now you have your normal Royal Mail repaint file in there, and also now a folder called "texture.Night" which contains the blacked out windows for night-time.

•     Finally, open the TEXTURE.CFG file that's in that folder and change the fallback= line. This line tells the simulator where to look for the night-time paint. If your Royal Mail repaint is saved in the texture.30 folder as per my example above, then you would change the fallback line to read fallback.1=..\..\JFAI_Bae146\texture.30\texture.Night ... or ... if your Royal Mail repaint is saved in a folder called texture.RoyalMail, then you would change the fallback line to read fallback.1=..\..\JFAI_Bae146\texture.RoyalMail\texture.Night


It's easy once you wrap your head around it. But it can be complicated the first time you do it. So I hope this all makes sense.

And, remember, this newly created night-time file can also be used and will work for any other Bae-146 cargo planes that you may decide to repaint, and which have no windows ... just copy this "texture.Night" folder in to the cargo plane's folder, and change the TEXTURE.CFG file as appropriate.

Done!

Ahhh. Now THAT is looking damn close to the Google image pictures ... with the yellow stripe bending back up over the top of the fuselage at the front of the aircraft, the Royal Mail logo on the engines, white door trims (they look much better now), and no orange on the wheels.

Careful, you'll become an expert at this pace.

I hadn't actually checked for an image of a Royal Mail aircraft, just looked and will update my version to match!

Steve
p.s.
The orange on the wheels are labels that the mechanic forgot to take off the new tyres

Not a very good screenshot, but it gives you an idea of what it looks like.


Steve

It's all your fault Freddie, you have got me hooked on AI traffic and now painting and it's getting me in trouble with the wife!! 😀😉😉😉