DCS: How To Edit Cockpit Textures

hey guys I've been actually getting a lot of requests about how to edit the cockpit Textures in DCs first things to start with is you're going to need a few pieces of software um ideally you're going to want paint.net and your photo editor of choice which could be Photoshop I personally use Affinity photo the first thing you need to do is go to Windows Explorer go into your DCS installation folder for me it's DCS World open Beta next go to your bin folder and open up model viewer 2 first things first click click on file load model go to your installation folder then go to mods aircraft and then pick the one that you want click on cockpit shape and you'll see this is the cockpit model here now keep a note this is very important this file name you're going to want to copy it go back to your Explorer and you need to go to your saved games DCS if there's not a liveries folder you need to make one next you're going to do new folder paste that name that you copied from model viewer take out the extension. EDM this is how you get the correct folder name for your aircraft do another folder name that default now all textures need a description. luua file um it was initially really confusing how to get this file I learned that you can go to model viewer and once you load that shape you can export the description. Lua file to do that you need to click here on the blue icon it says generate Livery file now we need to export this to the correct location remember it's under your username saved games DCs delies cockpit default save the next step you need to do is go to your DCS installation folder and then go to mods aircraft F16 or whatever aircraft you want cockpit textures and now you'll see a large zip file full of textures we're going to copy that and paste it on the desktop now you'll need to extract that and you'll see this folder here now here are all the default cockpit textures with what's going to be really confusing is knowing which textures to edit I can tell you at least in my case with the F-16 the ones that I primarily edited were right here look closely for CPT and then a number so cp1 cp2 CP3 I believe there's a04 five and six in here and you can see what most of these textures are so if any of these are specific to what you're looking to edit then you would open those let's try cp1 we're going to open this with make sure to click okay when it asks to load the DDS now it looks pretty confusing because it's blank file right wrong you need to go to channels un check the alpha Channel go back to layers and now you can see this is your main surface so we know that this is the interior of the F16 if we zoom in and look closely you can see where some of the panels and gauges might fit in this should help you get some kind of references to where you want to edit so I'm going to go down here click on new layer I titled it it work let's say we wanted a photo of somebody here I'm just going to go to Google Quick type in a random name right click an image or save an image whatever and now I've pasted that with contrl v into now I'm no expert with I personally don't like it I use Affinity photo but it does not support DDS files so make sure to click the move tool place it where you want and you can see that it's going to clash with these gauges so you'll next want to do the scale two and we can shrink that down we can rotate it with shift R and move it again with the m key now you'll notice here in the layers it says floating selection you're going to want to right click that to new layer now I don't know if you have to do this but I've been doing it I'll right click merge visible layers merge I also go back to channel and I turn the alpha Channel back on now go to file you can either overwrite or export as I'm going to show you export as because there are a few steps you'll see we're in the original folder that we're editing the textures from click on select files by type scroll down to the first DDS and Export it's going to ask if you want to replace of course I don't use compression and I don't do M Maps export now if we go back to our textures folder we can see the edit of the texture here so what we're going to do now to test this out is I'm going to hit contrl a I'm going to copy all of these and I'm going back to that saved games DCS liveries cockpit default folder this this is where all of your edits will go and it goes in the saved games folder that way it's not conflicting with the original files now let's launch DCS and take a look so what I've been doing is basically going to instant action cold and dark this Miss start cold and dark put may fly the planned route or just explore the area there are no threats let's back out of here for a second and go back to our files let's take a look at cp2 make sure to load DDS and go back into turn off your Alpha Channel and we can see here this is generally like the top of the glare shield now what's really confusing is trying to figure out where all this is in the cockpit because some of it's not very obvious one trick I've kind of figured out on my own was to create a new layer and you're going to want to go to the gradient tool and I have it set to this rainbow which you should be able to pick from this list now I'm going to drag from a corner to another corner again I'm going to merge visible layers turn that Alpha Channel back on if this is not necessary please comment I'm going to just overwrite and now we can see the file is overwritten now you'll see that this is in deliveries folder and I already did a change that's okay cuz if I want to undo it I can just go back into and undo let's go back in the DCS and take a look now you'll see this funky Co C and dark aircraft parked on the ramp and what you're going to want to note here what color these elements are so we can see that the glare Shield is purple and some areas underneath it are green and some other bits and Bobs are green so basically what this is telling me if we go back into gim so now if you look along the purple band and the green bands keep in mind where that is located over the texture let's do it again so here you can see the purple line covers most of the glare Shield the green area covers all the other bits and Bobs you'll have to figure out which ones you want to paint exactly but it at least helps you get in the right spot another thing you can do is go to the paintbrush and just paint dumbers on different spots that you think you want to paint this way you can easily identify them in the cockpit let's overwrite go back into DCS you'll have to reload the plane this Mission starts with a cold and parked on the ramp the new text do not update just explore the area there are no threats this happens occasionally but not every time you're going to have to quit to desktop and relaunch it now let's take a look at our numbers we can see the number three is beneath the glare Shield there number four is on the armrest and number two is back there on that piece some of these files are a bit confusing but if you look closely you can kind of tell what they are so right here glass canopy gold ref would be the reflections that you see in the gold canopy if you have that option turned on here would be the reflections for the clear or transparent canopy this file here I believe might be the external model of the glare Shield if you just poke around and open these files go into turn off the alpha layer you'll begin to see what they are for example here are the throttle and stick textures let's say we want to edit the buttons on that stick where would we find that well with the F-16 it's actually a separate knobs texture so if we go here cockpit knobs load that in turn off the alpha layer do a new layer and let's zoom in real close here we can tell that these knobs are from the stick and the throttle let's say I want to put a little emoji on the missile button right click copy image that one doesn't really work out as well because of the white background let's try a different one that one doesn't work either let's try another one once again I'm going to the shift tool or shift s Keys the m key to move and let's scale that down just a little bit again there remember to do two new layer turn that Alpha Channel back on overwrite and go back to your folder and double check that that's been modified and you can see here in the corner it has let's go back into DCS okay we're back in the Viper I'm going to click down here to turn the stick back on and let's zoom in and check out our work and you can see here it fits quite nicely That Just About Does it for the video if you have any questions feel free to comment I'll try to help as best I can but I am definitely no expert

Channel: Angle of Attack Simulations

Views: 2,845

Keywords: flight simulation, flight sim, simulator, flight simulator, digital combat simulator, dcs world, dcs, graphic design, graphics editing, gimp, paint.net, affinity photo, liveries, game textures

Id: 9ifRMiY8WyY

Length: 16min 20sec (980 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 07 2024