Step 5: Preparing the fuselage

So, after creating the element-masks, we can move to the first step that will give the basic skin a new look. For this task, you have to openthe P109Gtex.pcx and our Sahl-109 color-plate.

Ok, what comes now can sometimes tear at your nerves, and sometimes you just want to throw away everything, because it does not work as good as you want it. But anyway, we'll give it a try now!

What I do is a very simple job, at the first look. I attach the plate to the texture of the Bf 109. This sounds very easy, and if you try to make this by simply selecting the fuselage-plate with the Magic Wand and pass it to the EAW-texture, you'll find out very quickly that there is a lot more to it that that. Let's start.

Homogeneous Background:
First of all, we need a homogene background of the plate.To achieve this, we have to flood fill the background all white with the Floodfill-tool. You can adjust the features of the floodfill-tool by pressing the button indicated in this picture, it opens a detail-box for every tool, so you can edit the preferences:

Use opacity 100 and about 20-40 tolerance, then chose the color white and fill up the background. If you chose too much tolerance, some parts of the plate will be filled as well in white, so you may need to adjust the tolerance from case to case.

Color Depth: 24bit!
This is essential. Go to the colors and select Increase Color Depth, choose 16 Million colors (that's the Alpha and Omega), the secret that serperates the 'hack-skins' from fine skins, in my opinion. Now all tools can be used, and the picture looks just the same. But the effect will be great, as we will see.

Preparing the plate
Now the first difficult task starts. When you look at the plate, you can't just copy/paste it into the EAW-texture, not only because of the size and the colors, but also because the wings are shown! They have to be removed, and I will show you now how to do this...the secret lies in the Clone-Brush. You will have to practice this technique a bit, or better still, a lot, until the result looks good enough for your needs. Sometimes it just doesn't work, but in this case it does, as I chose the plate on purpose, man! .

1.: First thing to do is to select the plate exclusively, not a single part of the background. Use the Magic Wand for this, adjusting as required the tolerance to get less white areas on the edges of the fuselage-picture.

2.: Zoom in, at least 2:1, and choose the Cloning Brush, in our case this means : Shape: round, Density and Opacity: 100, Steps: 1, Hardness: 0, Size about 9.
The clone-tool takes the part that lies under the crosshair (set with right mouse button) and copies it to the place where the mouse-arrow is. This means that you can use the texture to extend areas with the same parts. Now it's a bit difficult, but you have to clone several texture-parts from the plate to cover the wings well. Never use the cloning tool for a long line, make "sparkles" of the cloned texture-parts, so the effect of the camouflage gets more natural:

3.: When you encounter hull-lines, use other lines to make them longer with the cloning brush . If this does not work, use the Paint Brush (density 1, opacity 1, size 1, steps 25, my tip for that) in black to draw them with a few steps, similar to the the first one in front of the green heart - oh yes, avoid cloning the markings!

4.: Remove the wings and the little oil cooler, otherwise it will look quite funny on the final skin. Note that you should make the imagined part behind the wings in the same style as the rest of the aircraft. If you have sharp lines that disturb you in the camouflage, you can soften them with the "Finger", the Retouche-tool, style "Soften". The left picture is before the finger is used, the right afterwards, you see the effect:

Finally, you should get a plate that looks something like this (below). I have also removed the drop tank, spinner, cockpit and all antennas by drawing white squares with the Shape-tool, as we do not need them for the skin:

You see that I have also made a kind of wing-basis, we'll see what this is for...mostly for nothing, but it looks a bit more finished like that...
Save the picture as a 109_big_profile.psp file, for example. Never save these files as jpeg- pictures, because jpeg uses an algorithm for packing pictures so they are smaller in data. This causes a loss in detail that is adjustable, although this is just a surface-theory about jpeg. If you save them as PSP-pictures, you will have big files, but the same quality as when you closed the picture.

Resizing the plate
The whole plate looks fine now, but it is still too big. Now we have to adjust the size to the EAW-skin, and we do this as follows:

1.: I do this, quite honestly, by trial and error. Go to the menu "Image" and use "Resize". Make the picture about 50% in size, and you'll see that the picture shrinks, and the details, too. Select the background now with the Magic Wand, tolerance maybe 50, press [Ctrl][Shift][I] and copy the selection by pressing [Shift][C] (useful to learn, so it' becomes a reflex...).
Now open the P109gtex.pcx file and increase the color depth to 24bit. The fuselage faces in the same direction as our plate, so let's move on - press [Shift][E] to pass the plate into the texture-file. Oh man, far too small, isn't it?
So, undo this procedure, back to the plate and resize to 65%...finally, you'll find out that 55% is good for this plate, but hey, it does not fit exactly! Man, is EAW wrong, Claes Sundin, or I? I would guess it's me, but this time it's nobody: The texture projection of the skin is not "flat", therefore it's possible that the exact shapes are not shown in the texture projection. Another fact is that the models in EAW are not 100% accurate...ok, then it's EAW's error...

2.: Before we adjust the plate, we have to remove the white border that it always gets when we copy/paste it to the texture.
Fill up the background with pink, use the tolerance for adjusting it, until you found out how much it needs so the whole palette is framed with pink. Sometimes elements of the plate can get pink, too, so draw a thick fat line in pink with the brush between the parts and the background, to keep the flood away. Finally, it should look like this:

Now take the tool that draws lines. Select under the properties size 3, no anti-alias, and draw lines sharp on the edge of the plate-plate, like this:

To avoid the lines destroying the plate itself, draw them parallel to the border. When you encounter round shapes, make shorter lines - finally, the white border is removed, also some shadow-shadings, and the plate looks like this:

Save it again as a PSP-file.