-furball Updated slightly 2-07-6
First and formost, find a template. Xaero's site, linked to the right, has some of the planes featured in Warbirds III but, its an old site. I'll add files at the PDC site when I have time. Once you have a template and a program that can edit TGA files ( I prefer Photoshop) then you can begin the journey to your own personalized aircraft.

To talk with others doing the same stuff, visit the FORUM.

Panel lines can make or break a design, some pointers and a couple of downloadable PSD layers to help you along the way. First and formost, don't get out of hand with this stuff. Yes, there were panel lines on all these WWII birds but most of them were so silky smooth you couldn't see them beyond 10 feet from a/c. Keep that in mind! That said... How do you create good looking panel lines? Layers my friend. In Photoshop go to Windows/Layers. A box will appear showing you your layers palette. The arrow to the top left of the box facing out will present a list of options. Select "New Layer", click Ok. Paint a while and then hit the box at the top of your layers palette that has "Normal" selected. Scroll down to "Multiply" and select it. You see how your color is basically the same, but the black part of the lines underneath show through? There ya go! There is another way, you can create a new layer and paint the panel lines un useing the line tool. Try it but remember to bring down the layer's opacity before using it. For the 109E I've already done all the grunt work. If you have the bandwidth download my zipped PSD file containing an entire 109E paintjob, seperated into labeled layers. Feel free to alter it in any way you see fit. Remember this though. In my version the "lines" of the a/c are on the top layer. You need to drag down the Opacity slider (on the top of the layers palette) for that layer and leave it on top when your are done. I find anything between 10 and 25% percent opacity to be just right. More than that and they just get too thick and obvious looking which they frankly weren't in real life.

Weathering effects can be tricky, but can add a lot to skin, if painted correctly. If you are interested in finding a good weathered look, the first step is research. Find a nice selection of photos, yes, black and white pics will do. Compare all the pictures of your a/c to find the oil stains, gun powder stains etc that are common to each aircraft. Those are the ones you want to render. As always, getting that effect requires layers. I suggest you build up, layer by layer a good smudge with your airbrush tool. Use mulitple kinds of brushes and not just basic 256,256,256 black. Throw some rust colored red in as well, maybe a little grey on the edges where the paint has worn off. Just like panel lines the trick is to not get "out of hand" with these effects. I have a rough motteling layer in the zipped PSD file of the 109E that gives an overall impression of wear to the entire skin. You can see how it's put together when seperated into layers.

How to paint a Warbirds III plane using a custom viewer.

Step One Download a viewer especially set up for one of the AC in Warbirds III, should be findable somewhere on the PDC site. I suggest you save the unzipped files to a folder marked by the a/c name. Most importantly don't get the VFC files confused. The viewer uses this file to figure out how to render the 3-D model. If you have a 109E VFC file in your P38 art folder, things will get confusing really fast.
Step Two Open the Fuse and Wing TGA files in your graphics program of choice. I prefer Adobe's Photoshop, but there are less expensive options that people seem quite happy with. Quite a few of the best skins in Warbirds have been made using Paint Shop Pro. Make a change, a small one, anything you like... Get your squadrons logo and paste it onto the aircraft skin somewhere. Now, save the file as the same name it was originally. If it was the fuse.tga file save it as fuse.tga in a new folder called "custom". Then copy and paste the other TGA file, plus the viewer.exe, and viewer.vfc into the new "custom" folder. Open the custom folder and double click the viewer.exe icon. Blamo! Your squadron art on the fuselage! Cool huh?
Step Three Get used to the viewer. Here's a little guide to all the different commands available in the viewer. Thanks to VOR for the info!

Still confused? Ok, check out these frequently asked questions.

I get this error, "Error Starting Program The VIEWER.EXE file is linked to missing export DDRAW.DLL:DirectDrawCreateEx." What's that mean?

In this case, I found a fresh install of DirectX7.0A or higher will patch it right up for us PC users.

What do I do about all those lines? It's hard to paint around them!

Layers my friend. In Photoshop go to Windows/Layers. A box will appear showing you your layers palette. The arrow to the top left of the box facing out will present a list of options. Select "New Layer", click Ok. Paint a while and then hit the box at the top of your layers palette that has "Normal" selected. Scroll down to "Multiply" and select it. You see how your color is basically the same, but the black part of the lines underneath show through? There ya go! There is another way that is too complicated to show you. But I've already done all the grunt work. If you have the bandwidth download my zipped PSD file containing an entire a/c paintjob, seperated into labeled layers. Feel free to alter it in any way you see fit. Remember this though. In my version the "lines" of the a/c are on the top layer. You need to drag down the Opacity slider (on the top of the layers palette) for that layer and leave it on top when your are done.

What if I don't want a yellow nose on my a/c, how do I get rid of that!? (Original Templates that came with the 109 E Viewer Had a Yellow nose by default.)

Too complicated to go into here, but I and Azael have you covered. Download either my zipped PSD for photoshop use or Azael's blank bird for general use and you'll find the yellow nose is gone.

How do I keep all this stuff straight? I've been working for two hours and I've got files everywhere!

Here's how I did it. I setup a directory called "Viewer" on my C-Drive. Under that I put another directory called "InProgress" I also put in a targets_109e_ver1. I kept all my PSDs (Photo-shop-documents I.E. Layer filled images that hadn't been flattened and saved as TGA's yet) into the InProgress directory. Then, I copied the viewer.exe and the viewer.vfc to my targets_109e_ver1 directory where I saved my first set of completed TGA files. That way, I could navigate to whichever a/c I wanted to view at the time rather than copy and paste wing.tga's from all over the place to my main Viewer directory and hope I wasn't overwriting something important. It's just easier to copy the small program than the bigger image files too. I know have a few subdirectories from a/c others have sent me. If I want to look at their a/c, I go to their directory and open the copy of the viewer that the directory has. It's a little clunky way of doing it, but until I hear of something better, it keeps all my files seperated, and I havn't overwritten any hard work yet.

What colors should I use?

I've been back and forth and sideways on German colors but the best thing I've found so far is e-b-o-'s Photoshop Color Pallette. Sweet!

Weathering? How do I get that beat up look?

I'm still a novice at this but this is what I've got so far. BTW, a good example of what I'm about to talk about is in my Psd file. I suggest you download it and see how mine works. It'll give you an idea of what to look for in a "texture" layer. Anyway, in order to add dinks, dings, streaks and just plane mottled appearance to an a/c, find something that looks dinked, dinged,or mottled and scan it, take a digital picture of it, or download it off the web. However you get it, make sure it's big enough in file size (pixel depth and physical width very important, you don't want to have to "stretch" your texture layer a lot or it will look pixilated, and so will the texture on your a/c) and that you have sucked all the color out of it. (IMAGE>>>ADJUST>>>HUE/SATURATION) When the box pops up pull down your saturation slider to 0. Whalla, no color to distort the look of your historically accurate paint job. There's lots of options for fading this layer in order to get the proper effect. My Jackson Pollack painting looked just fine at 10% opacity. Others will differ, depends on what you choose. Smoking guns are easy, on a layer above everything else, start hitting the area behind the guns with your airbrush tool set to 100% black. Work it until your happy. That simple.

My squad logo looks.... weird... in the viewer?

HINT! Keep your logos "flat" in appearance, the lighting effects you may be striving for in Photoshop may not look right on the side of a 3-D aircraft. Try it flat and see if the lighting effects of the viewer do the work for you.

My wing struts and gear looks all screwey!?

HINT! The grey looking square on the fuse.tga file is not just the back of your cockpit seat, it is also the braces for your wings and the wheel brackets. Don't paint over this box unless you want your texture to cover ALL of those areas. Take a piece of advice... Familierize yourself with the areas of the tga files and where they "wind up" on the a/c. A good test is to place different colored dots in different areas of your new tga files. Then going back and finding out where those dots form in the final product.