Reskinning advice please..........

[92212]

Hi all.

We're in the process of putting together a series of locomotive reskins for my Great Central route. Tom(BristolCastle) has done a great job so far with his 8F. He's now worked on black 5's 45305 and 45231.

We'd like some advice:

How do we take some of the shine off of the loco? The tender is perfect! But we want the loco to match! They're both painted the same but the loco shines too much. We're inexperienced in this i'm afraid so any tips on reskins would be useful. Pictures are below. Please comment..........................









Regards

Matt(92212)

[Tankski]

you change the shine by adjusting the alpha channel in the .dds/tgcpx file

[g0fthick]

As Tanski said, you need to bring down the levels in the Alpha. The brighter it is, the brighter your model's going to be. Black is dull and white is brasso finish.

[BristolCastle]

Thanks but how can you adjusting the alpha channel in the .dds/tgcpx file?

[ChrisBarnes]

Tutorial (you need PhotoShop CS):
When you've opened up the file in Photoshop, look towards the 'layers' window in the bottom right corner of the screen. In that window, select the tab 'Channels'. You should see 5 channels: RBG, Red, Blue, Green and Alpha. Click on the Alpha channel and you will notice you're entire texture will go black and white (greyscale). Looking at the shine of the above black 5, it looks like the alpha is block white, so you're entire image will look like a plain white sheet when the alpha channel is isolated. To tone down the shine, use a solid brush or pencil and go over the entire white sheet in grey, so you will retain some of the shine. I would experiment with the different tones, as the darker the grey, the less shine and the lighter the grey the more shine. Save it and apply it to the loco as normal, then check out the results.

Hope this helps, if not or you want further assistance send me a pm
Chris

[nattydredd]

Hi Matt

Also, it mite be a good idea to compare the alpha channel of the loco with the alpha channel of the tender - so you can get a good match.
When reskinning, i always use paint shop pro, and i use TgaTool2 to adjust the alpha, to and or create a new one if needed.
Also I use DDS converter 2 to convert to a tga file.

Hope it goes well mate,
Nat.