Dear developers,
I normally try to be as constructive as possible, but I have wasted a whole night trying to repaint your Asobo_Generic_Airliner_TwinEngines in a Japan Airlines livery as part of a freeware project to give your AI traffic real life-ish liveries and it proved absolutely impossible because some elements (doors, rudder, and more) aere mirrored while some aren’t, and things are weirdly split in many different areas like the vertical stabilizer, which actually has a mix of split areas some of which are mirrored and some are not, resulting in a messy puzzle that actually cannot be solved for both sides of the aircraft.
I’ve been doing repaints for the Microsoft Flight Simulator series since MSFS2004, and never, ever I saw such messy texture mapping, which mind you, applies to most of your flyable models as well.
I understand this is Asobo’s first time as a flight simulator developer, so the oversight is forgivable, but ya’ll need to realize how important the ability to repaint aircraft conveniently is to this community. It’s absolutely critical.
Trying to be constructive, and I know this isn’t the easiest thing to do, I believe the texture mapping of nearly all the airliners needs to be redone, The only one that I have tried that is mostly fine is the 320 Neo, but the rest requires extensive redoing according to the following parameters (and this includes AI planes of course).
1: large surfaces need to be as much as possible consecutive, without jumping all around the texture file. For instance, the vertical stabilizer should be one piece. It shouldn’t have the rudder somewhere, the front somewhere else, the top in another location, and the middle somewhere else. The same goes for engines, wings, horizontal stabilizers, and parts of the fuselage as large as possible.
2: there should be absolutely no mirroring in areas that usually carry logos, writing, and details on real-world airliners. Mechanical parts that normally don’t carry logos like landing gear structure, wheels, spinners, fan blades, and more, can be mirrored, but every painted surface should never be mirrored because you can bet that there is an airliner somewhere that has painted a logo on it, or has written something on it.
Hopefully, this can be corrected sooner rather than later, when the community is still young, and not much time has been wasted on trying to work around the messy texture mapping.
Thank you,