Creating Prop Disc

[bridon bear]

I am looking for a bit of guidance here....as you may know the FS9 Auster by Dave Molyneaux has been released and it is a dinky little aeroplane but I thought I would make a new prop disc for the FS9 model as the one supplied shows no blur and appears as just a disc.

The easy way of course is to pop in a prop texture from another model which I have tried and it works but I wanted to have a go and make my own replacement texture so that in the future I may upload it with a repaint or two.

I have DXTBMP and Photoshop 7 and want to know how you designers generate the initial texture and then add the blur via the Alpha (presumably).

As an example I looked at several other prop textures and noticed that in every case that the texture bitmap was without blur and that the corresponding Alpha in the top R/H side in DXTBMP had the desired blurred prop in white or grey on the black background.

I understand how Alpha works with these shades ok but when I try to edit the Alpha in Photoshop....I am unable to apply any filters such as Radial Blur nor can I add a new layer as all selections are greyed out.

OK, I can edit the texture bmp and put the blur on that and then generate the Alpha but somehow that sounds incorrect to me as all the other prop texture .bmp's show no prop blur...just the Alpha is showing it...so what am I missing here any pointers?

Regards

Bridon (Dorset UK)

[adlabs6]

I did this in FS9 long ago, repainting the default DC3.

Sounds like your exported alpha channel is in grayscale, which is why all the Photoshop filters won't work. Try converting it to RGB color to use the filters and such on the exported alpha layer.

Note that before you send it back to DXTBmp for merging with the rest of the prop texture, you might have to convert back to gray scale again.

[bridon bear]

Many thanks for that Adlabs

Absolutely bang on....did what you suggested by converting to RGB and voila!.......thanks once again.

Bridon Bear