If you mean you want to have a shiny, relective effect on the bare metal, you need to edit the amount of grey in the alpha channel. I use DXTBmp from MWGraphics which is freeware ( http://fly.to/mwgfx/) which allows you to load the alpha channel seperately into your bitmap editing program to amend the amount of grey that is there. Basically any areas you want o have shiny should have a corresponding grey "mask", the darker the grey the more shiny it is, too dark and it looks like a mirror, so it's trial and error to get the right effect. DXTbmp also allows you to create an alpha mask from the basic livery texture, so you can use it to create a new grey mask, ideal where you want to apply say just a shiny effect to parts of the belly, wings and engine, but leave the rest as normal gloss effect, all you have to do is go over the areas to be shiny on the new template in grey, and colour the rest of the tex white, then using DXTbmp export and save to the original file overwriting the originals. DXTbmp is a very intuitive and easy interface program to use and helps getting the shiny metal effects in a very painless way, especially if you are using an old clunky (but very familiar) version of PSP as I do which doesn't understand multi layering like some newer graphics editors do!Kevin Farnell wrote:One thing that I appear to have missed ( as pointed out on Retro AI), is addition of metalic textures to the engines.
I have no idea how to achieve this. This is my first paint, and what I have produced is simply from opening the paintkit in Photoshop Elements 3 and seeing what I could do by trial and error.
If someone could describe how to do the engines, or point me towards a guide, this would be much appreciated.
Having spent a good deal of my Easter weekend, working on the paint, I decided to have an evening away form the PC tonight.
Thanks in advance for any help.
Kevin
Was that what you were referring to?
