TL:DR Textures are split up and scattered into different sections in game assets. Need a way to align the sections for design work and quickly get the sections back into their scattered form for the simulator to load.
I am trying to design a livery for an aircraft in X-Plane. The way people do it is by taking the blank white textures and painting over them. Here is an example of the finished livery, and the image below is the actual file that gets loaded to produce the livery.
So as you can see, the image can be edited in PS or GIMP, but I am having a lot of trouble getting lines to, well, line up. Right now, it takes a ton of trial and error to avoid super obvious seams where the parts of the image connect. The way I've had to do it so far has been to create multiple different paths for a single line, export the image, load the aircraft, look at it, move the line a few pixels at a time, and try again.
This takes forever to get a result, and I'm wondering if there is a way to do this faster.
Is it possible to maybe create an "aligned" file, where I can do the paint work with all the sections neatly arranged as they would be in the simulator, and then reference sections of it in the "texture" file that the simulator actually loads? A lot of video games load textures in this way, so I imagine there must be a way to do this without losing your mind. Any help is GREATLY appreciated as this is super frustrating.
TL:DR Textures are split up and scattered into different sections in game assets. Need a way to align the sections for design work and quickly get the sections back into their scattered form for the simulator to load.