Looks good, Junior! I would have 'aged' the conduit but that's just me...

Awesome, JC.

Neos Xtreme Finished Now gotta hunt down Dani

Hey are you updating it to windows 7 also ?
I already asked Dani about it but he didnt knew when he would find the time let me know bout it.
Thanks

I havent spended a lot time recently on wincustomize since my kid is starting out to be quite interested in photoshop illustrator and everything that goes with it.
And since im addicted to these progs i started to make some tutorials with her. Note she is only 4 and a half but she already knows how to copy and paste how to pick diffrent colors and filters and she understands how to group things while i never do that and of course the basics of ZBrush im very proud of her. This is what we have done so far.

Still skinning my planes....this one was done from scratch...took about 4 days...when I 'should' have been drawing....

@Jafo looks real good what program do you use to skin them is it based on a 3d model if so do you wrap it with texturesor  simply paint it directly ?

FSX plane skinning is [mostly] an extensive series of  DDS Alpha channel 'bitmaps' [compressed - DXT5] or extended 32 bit bitmaps 888-8, combined with additional bump-mapped images and specular shine images.  That plane has 130 bitmaps.

Tools used are simply PSP6 and a proggy called DXTBmp used for converting between formats.  Some models have 'paintkits' in PSD format with several layers for rivets, panel lines, etc so I also use Photoshop Elements [2] for those.

Texture aligning can be at INDIVIDUAL pixel level, and whether it's a bezier curve or a push brush, the closest thing to a 'filter' is applying overall changes to colour saturation or lightness, etc.

The texture 'mapping' of the models varies and many induce 'distortion' when 'flattened' to 2D...so that requires 'practice' to overcome....

Huh? What you say? I don't know how you did it but I would love to have it. How much? Name your price?

The plane is a commercial addon to FSX so some of the 130 bmps belong to Lotus Sim.  The modded ones amount to 9, with a few tweaks here and there on others....so 'mostly' it's not distributable...

There's 8 of the main images that make up the skin...each is 1024x1024 with an alpha.

The wall is another skin....camo more reminiscent of Vietnam vintage [unlikely as its first flight was '69 - and it's Russian]...

ohh ok get it, im just asking sine the results look really nice
here is something i have done today I might make a wallpaper out of it.I tryd to conecentate on a clear ice effect for the text the background was just set to get a bit more frost feeling to it and i might also enhance the ice text and add some cracks to it...

Current on my first theme , still lots to do but its been fun so far 

Love the vivid color with the black.

I forgot all about this thread. There's a lot of good stuff here still.