Texture editing tips

Some good practices will facilitate your texture painting.

Tip 1: separate your working folders from livery folders

Your working folder may lay inside your project directory, but you'd better use folders not used in the livery itself, e.g.:

• "blender" or "3DS" for 3D models, instead of the "model" folder.
• "photoshop" or "gimp" for your texture painting work, instead of "texture".
• "original textures" for original textures.
• Use the "texture" folder only for modified textures: the simulator loads original textures according to the needs and your livery configuration. Separating image files like this will make your livery smaller and faster to pack. You may want to do this separation only in an advanced stage of livery painting, though: your experience will tell how it works better for you.

Tip 2: UV maps and masks

Use the provided tool (Tools -> Create texture UV map) to create a texture map that will guide your creative work. After that, import the saved UV map to your image editing software and use it as a mask for your painting. It's advisable to let the ink spill over the mask into void spaces.

Tip 3: organize your texture file

Use layers to organize your painting work:

You may follow a structure like this:

• Upper layer group with mask and UV map.
• Another layer group for albedo (light reflection, that is, the painting properly).
• A third layer group for composite texture (ambient occlusion, roughness and metalness).

Tip 4: the components of composite files

Composite files are used to tell the graphics board about:

• Red channel: pre-calculated shadows (ambient occlusion). The brighter the red channel, the more light reflected – shadows are represented by dark areas.
• Green channel: roughness of the surface – the brighter, the rougher.
• Blue channel: metalness – the brighter, the more metallic the reflection will be.

You may divide them into separate layers to facilitate visualization:

In Photoshop (GIMP and other software work similarly), you may change the layer merging options and select only the corresponding color channel:

Since you're probably working over an existing composite file, you may triple the composite layer and adjust each of the resulting layers to zero the levels of the unused colors.