I have been trying my hand at painting on both the 707 and 727.  I note that paint kits don't have alpha channels included in the textures.  Do I need to add one for a good quality paint? My understanding is that an alpha layer will control glossiness or reflections and that the separate specular texture only affects only the nature of the specular reflections.  Is that right? There are some bits of my textures that should be matt and some bare metal parts that I want to be more reflective than the painted parts.

here is an exsample of one part of the c130 paint kit with alpha , spec and spec alpha

main painted file C130_1_T metal with red strip now i only wanted the metal parts to shine


the alpha shows white for parts i dont want to shine and gray fo the rest
c130_1_T_alpha


now you add the alpha to the paint file when rendering in to dds format

next if the aircraft uses spec you can add a little blue tint to the metal look but this time on none reflective parts i turned them gray and the tint area blue
C130_1_T_spec


now the spec alph would look some thing like this to compleat the look this time you will see it is almost black in some places this color on the spec alph helps push the tint through
C130_1_T_spec_alpha

now add the spec alph to the spec the same way you would with alpha to paint
add the new spec dds to your paint and see how it looks

end resolt is on this page http://www.captainsim.org/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1296511438

any problems just ask

Hi Nathan.

That is fantastic information to know when doing repaints or (in my case) doing original textures for the aircraft I am making. "Attempting to make" would be a better description of my works-in-progress.

Mark

So is this a way to make the whole aircraft fuselage look shiny and glossy, also the painted, areas?

Watch out on the 707.  The Alpha also controls the transparency of the cabin windows too.