Hi. New to this forum and returning to FlightGear after about a 2 year hiatus. I sat down today to create a new livery for the Saab J-35 Draken, as there is only the stock one that comes with the download. I wanted to create a personalize Draken aircraft for myself. I am familiar with GIMP, but not really the process in how to do what I wanted to do. But this is how I often learn stuff, I just jump in and start flailing away, .
The stock J-35 is an RGB file, so I opened it up with GIMP, and started creating layers; 1 for the panel lines, 1 for the main body colors, 1 for the aircraft ID graphics, etc, etc. (Am I making a paintkit doing it this way? ) I got my livery looking close to what I wanted and went out to test it. I saved my file and dropped a copy into the ..FlightGear/data/Aircraft/SaabJ35Draken/Model directory. I launched FG and only the stock livery was available. I checked the file sizes; stock was 2177 kb, mine was 1044 kb. I couldn't figure out how to get GIMP to save my new file in a size similar to the stock livery. I looked at the 737-200 liveries, because I knew it had a bunch, but they are in a PNG format and have a corresponding XML file.
I even created a new Liveries folder (FlightGear/data/Aircraft/SaabJ35Draken/Model/Liveries thinking that in doing so, a Liveries option might show up on the Menu bar to allow selection, but no, that also did not work.
SO..... I'm stumped. Can somebody enlighten me in the ways of livery and or paintkit creation? Is there a tutorial about how this is done? If so, can you point me to it?
Thanks in advanced.