[David603]

You can create a template for a ship and do the skins yourself or partner with somone to do at least some of them. A few modders allow aircraft templates to be used by anyone for skinning, a kind of Open Source. This can be done with ships, too. The extent of this kind of thing and who may do ship skins can be determined by you.

Fireskull:
I'm in the midst of trying to make accurate skins for the CVLs involved in Operation Hailstone - the attack on Truk Lagoon Februrary 17-18, 1943. I figured to put the skins in a folder and activate the folder before the missions start.

The problem I have is that when I get the skins to work in PhotoShop by going through the ViewIMF tga converter, I get a change in file size from 1026 to 1025 and then the game won't read this file and reverts to the file deeper in the game. I've converted the skin1o.tgb into a tga file by the simple expediant of changing the 'b' at the end of the file extension to an 'a' and then going through ViewIMF and PhotoShop. When this file is saved subsequently the file size drops from 4099 to 4097 but the game still reads it successfully. Any idea what I'm doing wrong and/or can you point me in the right direction?

Thanks all for any help.

Great days all.

Can't PhotoShop use and save .tga files anyway? If it can't I would recommend getting Gimp. You could save your skins in Photoshop as a PSD file, then open them up in Gimp and resave as a .tga. I have used Gimp myself to make ship skins, and it works very well. To import .tgas to PhotoShop you would reverse the process.