Magic Tutorial: How to get your own War Thunder base skin

(the result could be something like this, I prefer to leave some space on the skin to apply ingame decals. A reason for shame is that I choosed the wrong plane for this tutorial. This way my fantastic Do 217 looks a bit strange but that's a different topic).

This is the professional way of quick modding. You can now easily skin every plane with the best result. It also helps a lot when creating your own paints / skins – having a base texture without preset markings and disturbing paint.

Requirements:
- Photoshop CS2 (at least) or Gimp
- A War Thunder installation
- A Plane of your choice

Step 1:
Select a plane and click 'Customization'. Now enable the User skin by pressing the arrow button on the right. It will create a subfolder with the planes skin name inside WT's User skin folder. A dialog screen will appear, click OK. Allright, done?

Step 2: 
Go to the WT folder and enter it's subfolder called '\UserSkins' and enter the newly spawned subsubfolder (you may have to reload the folder with keyboard 'F5').

Open this file by right clicking and selecting the graphic software of choice: Grab the file with the ending *_n.jpg or *_n.tga (wait, you don't have name suffix activated? Uhhh, common hehehe – well, just grab the '_n' file ;)

Example: do_217j_1_u.tjpg 

And now open: _c or _a or whatever else theres a file for. Open it the same way you opened the previous file (don't worry if theres only a _a or only a _c along with a _n).

Step 3:
Gimp or PS is running and you opened both files. Make sure the layer module is visible under 'View > Layers'. Now unlock the layer by doubled clicking on the small locked icon (counts for PS). Do that for both images (wait a second Gimp users. ;)

Make a duplicate of that image (also counts for Gimp's). Okay, now you have two images. Activate the movement instrument and drag-n-drop one image into the other in this order: Drag image _n into image _a or image _c. 

 (image _a)

Position it exactly over the other layer (tip: position it to the top left corner and make sure it has the same position as the layer below).

(image _a with overblended image _n)

Step 4:
Heres the special trick. Simply 'desaturate' the upper layer by changing the layer option dropdown to 'luminace'.

(upper layer set to 'saturation' layer mode)

Now even the national plane markings should be no longer visible, it's just like magic (should work with almost every WT plane skin). All the so called grills and fins are blended into the other image. Sidenote: Those _u files are Bump-Map shaders and those are always handy. Now we will take a look at improving things.

When viewing the details of that image we assume that we could do better, so simply make a copy the upper layer and desature it. Finally change layer mode to 'colour' and flatten the image to be only one layer (click on Menu > Layers > "Flatten layers". That's it, were almost done. Notice that every colored part of the image turned to be a perfect base template? What we now may need is some good contrast, so open the brightness/contrast dialog of your graphic software and play around with the contrast till so have a nicely saturated image (a slight lowering of contrast, e.g. +50 %). And by changing the brigtness to some plus range you can create silver shining iron but it will make dark areas looking grey, e.g. wheels.

 (dark is a start)

Heres where second method is a big help (not mandatory): Once or twice again copy the last remaining layer. Play around with one of the layer options of your choice / choose one that fits best for you. By overblending and overblending many layers with diferrent layers you can also achieve great results.

(Simply played with brightness/contrast, copied the layer and set it to 'hard light'). 

Step 5:
Looking good for a overall base texture, it's done for the first instance right? Ok, now click save as and overwrite the following file in the User skins subfolder of that plane you edited:  *_a.jpg or _c.tga (you could do a backup before but it's not mandatory).

Go back ingame, WT will reload your skin ingame but you need to go to the 'Customization' screen again and press the little reload icon. Make sure to select the User skin in your favorite planes customization setup. Take a look at your new base skin, awesome looking – if you followed all the steps you sure be happy with the result!

 (both you look even good in ultra low quality)

[- Now you know how to handle layers and it needs just a little of practice to get something like this -]

(work in progress, unfinished but allready made of carbon)

Hint: You can even set the output format in the game options to be a lossless TGA file format or a JPEG. It depends on how long it should last looking good (a little insiders jocke). ;)

However, those skins are only visible to the player and can not be viewed by other players ingame multiplayer. But anyway, this skin is now a great template for you and it looks good ingame without further modifications. You could simply apply two decals on it to at least have something to show to the other players. You can play them and maybe a cat near you is looking at your new plane skin. Note: Do not use too much white paint, the render engine of WT only looks half way ok when making some kind of grey paint. Different to that, dark stuff has brilliant detail.

(limited support for white: Details on the planes skin are not visible, almost plain white actually beeing a grey base template to not bloom the overall appearance)