Getting the Most out of Eagleskinner Liveries

[One-Eye]

Some may eventually wonder at the sharpness of some of my screenshots when compared to their own.

I have long gone over to creating high and super-high resolution aircraft textures. I now create my work (mostly) on texture sheets that are 4096 pixels square, i.e. there is 16 times the detail in my textures. Now these large sheets don' hurt "normal" users because FSXX automatically re-compiles textures to 1024 pixels square, but you do lose out.

Getting detail is all about how may pixels the artist has available per foot. For example, I get something like about 7250 pixels to cover the Aerosoft Beaver wingspan (48 feet) - that's about 150 pixels per foot. It all depends on how the model has been mapped by the maker. The tiny Bede BD5 for instance, could give me 4000 pixels for its' 12 feet wingspan - 333 pixels per foot.

But as I said, FSX resizes any larger texture sheets to 1024 square, so how do we tell FSX to allow it to load super high resolution stuff? You have to change the texture max load value in the fsx.cfg

Anyway, I discuss and describe large size textures on my website and there is a free and very simple little addon to use that automates resetting your FSX.cfg. Follow this link and all will be revealed (saves me writing it all out again)

[Avian]

Handy, I just got a new card that should be able to handle these OK, and the REX clouds. Thanks for the Heads Up!

[fltsimguy]

Thanks Chris, this is why I love these forums.  I have reset my TML to the higher value, and it of course keeps getting changed back to the default.

Now I have your suggest and the little app to remind me to check this regularly so I get the most our of my textures.

[One-Eye]

By the way, apart from a very slightly longer load time, my 4 year old nVidia card hackles it nicely.

I should also add, that I do use super hi-def sparingly. The Aerosoft Beaver is fine, only two textures are pushed that far. Default SHD paints only usually get one sheet. After all, each 4096 texture is 16 MB compared to just 1 for a standard sheet. Now if I had to do the Aerosoft Cataline, then at 13 sheets, we're talking mega! But then that many sheets are an alternative way to get as many pixels per inch, so we don't 'need' the large texture sheets.

I promise not to go overboard with too many SHD sheets - simply because I have to use TGA graphics for the conversion - but you don't need to know all that techy stuff, as long as the planes look pretty - and that's my aim!

Enjoy! and thanks for flying Eagleskinner paints!