[SKINS] What will the constraints be on making skins

[SOLIDKREATE]

I know that these are all naval aircraft and skins aren't really needed. Heck you can choose a ship and a squadron and the game an make you plane and auto assign a number and a serial. In that will regard will it be in the style of DCS and how they apply aircraft numbers? Or will we get full controll over the livery much like every other traditional flight Sim game?

If that route is to be taken I'd like to put an idea out there to the community. I think it would be great if we can make individual bomb skins and external stores skins. I feel it is a detail that is often missed or overlooked due to time and money constraints. The cockpit is another area that can be available to us. More over the skin should be broken up into sections, i.e. Fuselage, Wings, Stabilizers on a separate .PSD, Stores and detail parts like the proeller blades, hubs engine componenets ect on another .PSD. 

I feel that being able to do these things will add a level of immersion not seen before in other Flight SIM's. What do you all think?

I will see myself out 😆

Edited August 11 by SOLIDKREATE

[wheelsup_cavu]

I think for screenshots what you are describing might be OK but my first thought is how will having that many individual high resolutions textures impact playability?

CPU's and GPU"s of today are head and shoulders above those that were state of the art in 2001 and 2013 but sims of those eras can still brings current systems to their knees.

 

Wheels

[MustangMike]

Hopefully we get a system for automatically assigning numbers and serials to aircraft, Heck, I'd consider that almost mandatory for a new game, and I'm surprised that some other sims didn't have that feature until quite recently.. 

In terms of more "wishlisty" things, I quite enjoyed IL-2 1946's style of applying nose art, would love something like that in a modern sim! And of course, custom cockpit photos are lots of fun and I enjoy it in all the games that have them.

[Major Lee]

"Strike Fighters: Project 1", back from 2002 had individual serial numbers on all flying aircraft, allowed for custom skins with nose art per SN, and had dynamic kill markings in campaign mode. Decals were assigned via aircraft ini files, and were in TGA format. Using a slight transparency allowed for a more 'painted on' look, rather than looking like a stuck on decal on a model plane. You could adjust the size of each decal via a scale line on the ini file, per decal, and, of course, locate each decal with an XY coordinate with extreme precision. "Strike Fighters 2" allowed a JPG format for skins (as opposed to BMP) which lightened the memory load quite a bit. (No pun intended...) One can only expect that 22 years later, we would see similar details, especially given the ultra fidelity of the 3D models. 

Edited April 11 by Major Lee
Correcting autocomplete...

[F19_Klunk]

@Major Lee I wouldn’t get my hopes up just yet on All of the above. It took years before the “Battle of…” series made it possible to have individual numbers, as it also was possible in the 1946 series. Again,  from what I have understood, we can probably expect very high quality of the things that Is included in the first iteration of CP, but decals, numbers, skins, are not critical for planes to fly, fight and land on carriers and with a limited group of developers I would Guess that those things are way back on the scope list. Maybe later on after we help this title to become a Huge success ? 😎

Now why would I answer your speculative answer with My speculative answer? Because it’s one of the only things we can do in between news updates or Jason’s input, and it is one of the things that keep the forum alive…. AND it’s fun 🙂

 

S! sirs.

Edited April 30 by F19_Klunk

[JG1_Vonrd]

On 2/26/2024 at 7:42 PM, SOLIDKREATE said:

the skin should be broken up into sections, i.e. Fuselage, Wings, Stabilizers, Stores and detail parts like the proeller blades, hubs engine componenets

Absolutely! Please avoid chopping structures to bits in the UV map. Cut them where there are actual divisions in the RL model, i.e. along well defined panels or seperations like wing to fuselage. I've struggled (and I'm not alone in this in any means) with alignment issues where the 3D model maker just decided to cut the UV right in the muddle of a panel. It's nearly impossible to make it look seamless on the skin (it "can" be done but only after wasting hours of time trying and erroring).

[Major Lee]

On 4/29/2024 at 10:14 PM, F19_Klunk said:

@Major Lee I wouldn’t get my hopes up just yet on All of the above. It took years before the “Battle of…” series made it possible to have individual numbers, as it also was possible in the 1946 series. Again,  from what I have understood, we can probably expect very high quality of the things that Is included in the first iteration of CP, but decals, numbers, skins, are not critical for planes to fly, fight and land on carriers and with a limited group of developers I would Guess that those things are way back on the scope list. Maybe later on after we help this title to become a Huge success ? 😎

Now why would I answer your speculative answer with My speculative answer? Because it’s one of the only things we can do in between news updates or Jason’s input, and it is one of the things that keep the forum alive…. AND it’s fun 🙂

 

S! sirs.

I don't really think it requires hope to enquire about something that a small one man shop built into a sim 22 years ago, and that the current unReal Engine supports natively in its existing form (and has for years).

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/decal-materials-in-unreal-engine

[Boo]

On 6/25/2024 at 5:33 AM, JG1_Vonrd said:

Absolutely! Please avoid chopping structures to bits in the UV map. Cut them where there are actual divisions in the RL model, i.e. along well defined panels or seperations like wing to fuselage. I've struggled (and I'm not alone in this in any means) with alignment issues where the 3D model maker just decided to cut the UV right in the muddle of a panel. It's nearly impossible to make it look seamless on the skin (it "can" be done but only after wasting hours of time trying and erroring).

That then becomes a design choice between something like Heatblur's F14's multiple templates and something smaller on the disc but requring more careful skin prep.

As far as I know there are already forum members who have producted skins for the demo, so it likely not an unknown quantity and its also likely already set. 

If it is that matching off panel lines is a thing, it would be nice if CB skinners were more open to share. I totally get why one would want to guard their work but, ultimately, its a better and faster way to get to a really good template especially when it comes to weathering and noise layers. 

 

[SOLIDKREATE]

On 7/7/2024 at 3:52 AM, Boo said:

As far as I know there are already forum members who have producted skins for the demo, so it likely not an unknown quantity and its also likely already set.

 

I will be one of those. I just became employed again and were all done catching up on bills. So, I'm going to get Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and Substance Painter and Designer.

[Stick]

I hope to also skin in Combat Pilot.  I was wondering if the file format will be .dds.  I recently upgraded my computer and as a result moved to the latest Photoshop, version 26.1.0.  I was always able to use the legacy dds plugin to produce skins on previous versions of Photoshop.  With the latest version I have been unable to get the legacy dds to work and an Intel dds version does not show dds in the "Save As" or "Save a Copy" to produce a skin. 

If anyone has solved this issue please let me know how you did it.  Thanks

[Mysticpuma]

Just download the latest version of Nvidia Tools, (I had to sign up), it works fine with the latest Photoshop.

I use it and it works fine.

Here they are:

https://www.mediafire.com/file/f4i1i499g49xr8h/Nvidia_tools_with_file_names.rar/file

Edited November 27 by Mysticpuma

[Stick]

11 hours ago, Mysticpuma said:

Just download the latest version of Nvidia Tools, (I had to sign up), it works fine with the latest Photoshop.

I use it and it works fine.

Here they are:

https://www.mediafire.com/file/f4i1i499g49xr8h/Nvidia_tools_with_file_names.rar/file

That did the trick.  Thanks so much for the tip.