Question about panels

[aregorn1]

I am rather new to skinning and my question has to do with finding different items in the skin, I have been using the panel finder. I was wondering if there was another was to find them. the bird I am working on has a lot of little pesky parts that I just cant seem to locate . I was hoping that there was a way to open the MDL file and ident them that way but I doubt that that will work well. Any ideas???

[aregorn1]

An additional question in this same area, is there any way to make parts of a skin transparent? if so i could make the entire skin transparent accept for the parts i want to locate. to clarify i know where they are on the skin, i want to find there location on the plain.

[Serval]

Which flightsim are you talking about?
Whether things are possible or not, often depends on the sim.

[aregorn1]

i fly FSX and skinn with Fs repaint for viewing and photoshop cs4 for skinning.

[Serval]

I don´t know much about repainting for FS.
Here is at least how making things transparent works (the same technique is used):
Night Light Alpha Maps

Maybe Adlabs6 or someone else can give more details.

[adlabs6]

Hi,

I'm not very familiar with FSX, in fact have never played it.

The best suggestion I can give, is to try something very high contrast to locate where part of a skin is on the model. Say, paint the entire skin white, with a bright red color on the parts you want to find. This should stand out very brightly. Be sure to check the virtual cockpit too, as I've built FS2004 models that had VC texture elements on the same skin file with external model elements.

On transparency, I have no idea with FSX. I do recall that FS2004 could do this with some models using alpha channels, though FSX may now make use of alpha channels on the skins for bump environmental mapping (IIRC).

Sorry not to be of more help.

[aregorn1]

Thanks Much for the answers, the idea about the contrasting colors is one that I have been using already but I was using black and white, I think that the red will show up better, have to give that a try. Perhaps you can tell me one other thing, what is the purpose of the alpha channel. Is it's purpose for reflexivity or some other reason?
I have an idea that the bmp file is for contour shading. but the spec file has me a little stumped, is it just to show items like dirt and rivets?