I started to do it by modifying a copy of the original white tug texture, and the big pieces are not too difficult to find in the dds file, but the smaller parts are driving me crazy. That's just not doable right now.
Is there such paintkit available to us? If not, are you planning to release it someday? What we already have is nice, but being able to repaint the vehicles in a reasonably easy manner would be nice
In order for you to understand the issue, and why our PaintKit is made that way, you must know a bit of history of modeling 3d objects in the game industry.
Originally, textures were made by hand, and still today, many modelers still use that approach, so they start with some kind of layered Photoshop file, and doing all textures, layer by layer, mostly by hand.
SOME of the GSX vehicles were made like that, the earliest we made.
However, technology is always progressing and, in order to increase visual quality, to add things like pre-baked shadows and ambient occlusion, we switched to a technique called "Render to Texture", which basically means the modeling program ( 3DS Max ), is rendering using its own advanced lighting engine, which is far more advanced than the FSX one, to "project" light/colors on the textures themselves, rather than on screen. And, in order to have everything fit in the smallest number of textures (usually just one), it distributes all UV islands in a way that would be impossible to easily recognize.
Just for your reference, this is a software we sometimes used to create textures:
http://www.texturebaking.com/This results in the highest possibly performance efficiency, since we can squeeze the most of the available texture space, usually on a single texture, which is the fastest possible way to made an object in any game engine, with FSX being no exception.
This means, we cannot release any "Layered Paintkit", because we don't have it ourselves, the source textures are generated automatically. Which also means, that whenever we change even a *small* thing in the modeling of the vehicle, the texture might change entirely, making all the existing repaints useless, because the texture is created on the fly starting from the actual 3d model.
That's why, our way of "Repaint", is limited to the company Logo only.
What we CAN do, with future versions, is providing with different pre-made base textures in several colors so, you would still be limited in Painting the logo only but, at least, you might be able to select the base colors from a list of pre-made liveries, in order to better match the logo with the base color of the vehicle.
Which is already available for some vehicles already: the baggage loader, for example, is available in several variations, as the ground crew clothing colors.
