Livery Painting

Is there an easier way to paint liveries for helo’s? I’m trying to do a repaint of X-tridents bell 412 and the livery I’m attempting to paint has lines that cross the fuselage into the tail and I can’t seem to get them to line up.

Edit I think maybe i should be a little more specific. I am just using GIMP on the .PNG files.

A lot of work with liveries is trial and error. Sometimes the developers provide us with paintkits that gives us hints to the location of things in the model but it’s really hard work to get things such as stripes, lines and text to line with the other side.

What I find helps a lot is to use a checkered texture such as the one below to see where the parts of the helicopter match with which parts of the texture.

I usually have a livery with that texture so that I can refer to. I always have 2 keys bound to select the next and previous liveries (I use numpad / and *) to cycle liveries easier.

It’s been a life-saver for me.

So do you just load xplane everytime you change the livery to see if it lines up? I’m not understanding how you are using the checkerboard to paint the liveries. I guess it’s just a lot of trial and error to get the lines to line up all the way around the aircraft?

Yeah it’s trial and error. A lot.

The checkered texture helps me find out, in the sim, which parts of the texture cover what and how.

A small additional tip for X-plane. I use planemaker to make paints visible.
By reloading a plane you can see the effect of the livery chances and zoom in an rotate on all around the plane to indentify all the parts and the what part of the livery paint effects the parts.
And it is a hit and mis and trail an error process.
This is how I did the Huey RDNavy repaint.

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