I’m not sure if this is the right place to posit this. Mods, please move if not. Thx.
I’m flying the Just Flight PA28 Warrior II. It comes with a “paint kit” in its Documents folder. This is a zipped file containing two PSD files, with views of the aircraft sections. I presume this file is intended for customisation. I would like to produce a livery more like teh aircraft I flew IRL.
How do I use the files? Can somebody point me at website/YouTube, anything that is good for a complete newbie to liveries. There must be more to getting them working in the sim than just colouring the files in with the electronic paintbox, aka Photoshop…
I’ve searched but I’m not coming up with anything suitable for me.
Thanks in advance,
Nick
Your best bet to start learning is to download a livery of the same plane you want to paint and study the package. I started writing up a compendium on the steps, and realized it’ll take quite some time. But you can learn a lot from studying other livery packages.
One tip, a lot of people include the model directory on top of the texture directory in the SimObjects\Airplanes\LiveryDirectory. It depends on the plane, but you most likely won’t need to in
For tools, I use a combination of GIMP to edit the PNG files and Paint.net to convert to and from the .DDS format required for the textures.
Thanks for the reply. Sorry for my late response - I’ve been snowed under with all sorts… 
Is there no documentation anywhere? I wasn’t expecting to have to start reverse engineering someone else’s work.
Not from Asobo, no.
The SDK does discuss the subject, but not in enough detail to actually do anything if you don’t already know what you’re doing.
For instance, the Normal file has to be saved in a particular format, (there are a whole bunch of DDS formats), but the SDK doesn’t say what that format is. I’ve found it once in my googling, but I haven’t been able to find it again. In fact, they don’t discuss which DDS format to use for any of the files. It doesn’t seem to matter for the Albedo and Comp files, but it definitely matters for the Normal file.
As far as other tutorials, I’ve written a bunch on here on different livery subjects. You can search YouTube, but it’s really hard to find up to date tutorials. The process has changed quite a bit in some aspects over the years, and tons of people do things wrong.
And then, I’m still working in the FSX style of livery painting. The new way is to use Blender and create decals, but you need access to the model to do that. Which is fine for packages in your Community directory (using ModelConverterX to get the data from the gltf and model files, and then open that with Blender), but the models are encrypted for planes you purchase from the Marketplace, and Asobo has not yet created a tool that allows you to create liveries for planes in general or from the Marketplace in they’re preferred methods.
IOW, the SDK is written for experienced aircraft developers, not for us plebes who just want to paint.
Thanks both.
Looks like it’s wet towel round the head time…
All I want to do is paint the aircraft so that it looks like the Warrior I used to fly back in the day…
Learning to paint liveries to produce just one livery you would like to fly would take a large amount of research and learning. It’s not rocket science but it’s quite convoluted. If you study the video you are well on your way to your first livery. Alternatively you could put in a livery request on Flightsim.to and hope that someone will paint it for you.
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In principle, I don’t mind teh effort… Even at my advanced age, learning new things is part of the fun of a hobby.
But I was hoping that there was something structured to look at rather a detective trail.
I’ll start with the video.
It’s a bit of a detective trail , like you say. You only need two applications. Blender and GIMP. Blender to paint and GIMP to organise the files for MSFS.