• There seems to be an uptick in Political comments in recent months. Those of us who are long time members of the site know that Political and Religious content has been banned for years. Nothing has changed. Please leave all political and religious comments out of the forums.

    If you recently joined the forums you were not presented with this restriction in the terms of service. This was due to a conversion error when we went from vBulletin to Xenforo. We have updated our terms of service to reflect these corrections.

    Please note any post refering to a politician will be considered political even if it is intended to be humor. Our experience is these topics have a way of dividing the forums and causing deep resentment among members. It is a poison to the community. We appreciate compliance with the rules.

    The Staff of SOH

  • Server side Maintenance is done. We still have an update to the forum software to run but that one will have to wait for a better time.

Virtavia AJ-2 Savage is out!

I saw potential with this airplane, so I've been adding necessary layers that will be generic for all paints. These are bump and specular files that are, at this time, works in progress but as shown here the AJ-2 Savage is coming into focus.

I couldn't resist doing this skin...it sets off the lines so beautifully.

24573299250_845e628e1e_h.jpg

Wow, nice work there! See, this is exactly how I expected a product of this price point to look in the first place.
 
THAT does it...I've had it "up to here" seeing all of these excellent screenshots! I'm going to buy this one....:encouragement:

Kent
 
THAT does it...I've had it "up to here" seeing all of these excellent screenshots! I'm going to buy this one....:encouragement:

Kent

LOL! Repaints, certainly works of art as gman produces, do a lot for models. I love this plane. It has a lot of the lines of a Mustang. Look at the wings and the tail.

:applause:

Cees
 
LOL! Repaints, certainly works of art as gman produces, do a lot for models. I love this plane. It has a lot of the lines of a Mustang. Look at the wings and the tail.

:applause:

Cees

I'm doing more detailing on the bumps and spec. You're right Cees, the wing/fuse joints and many of the small items are difficult to nail down...no labeling.

This plane is really fun to trap.....:encouragement:
 
Will you eventually share the paint?

Thanks in Advance

Roland

Absolutely Roland,

The paints, bumps and the specular files will be available on this site only. Just to keep everyone up to date, the bumps and specular files will go into the shared folder, so all paints by all authors will be upgraded by installing my mods. If a painter does their own specs and bumps, those will go in the actual texture folder for that specific skin and will override the shared folder.
 
I think I've worked out a good generic specular map, as well as detailing out the bumps. The gloss blue looks just about right from what I can gather from source photos.

I went back and tuned up this skin, changed a few details and pointed it at the correct model.
Thought I'd throw in a couple of final shots before I hand the prelim bump files off to Cees and anyone else wanting a set to work with.

Prepar3Dv3.1 | REX TD w/Soft Clouds | ASN Live Weather
24886375555_b8ae87cb3c_h.jpg


24258466624_683467f3e2_h.jpg
 
That is a very cool paint scheme. Also, thanks for the texture upgrades as well. I'll definitely be looking forward to it's release.
 
Cees, I think I got the shine a bit deep, but it's a first rough. I also noticed that the bomb bay inner doors are white, and the landing gear doors are zinc. I'll have to dig a bit and find some dates, but the spec would probably call for all white at the time the airplane saw service. White was for identifying hydraulic fluid leaks easily. After the aircraft had been in service, there will surely have been maintenance paint work done as specs changed. Later aircraft would have white wheel wells.
I provided the specs during development but...

Anyway, "Going into the 1950's, the floors, walls, pedestals, control stick up to grip, and console sides were painted an "Interior Green" color similar to but darker than zink chromite green. All surfaces from the bottom edge of the main instrument panel and up were to be a flat (non-specular) black.

"Navy Air Directive 01.1, March 25, 1954 revised the colors to be used in aircraft cockpits to replace the green with gray. (You can do this easy enough with a color replacement tool to change the green to a gray)

"Navy aircraft go in for a PAR (Paint and Rework) service about every two years. So anything flying by 1956 would have had the cockpit color changes. That said, a directive in 1955 changed all exterior coloring from Sea Blue to the new white and Light Gull Gray (FS17038) scheme. So by late 1956/early 1957 any aircraft that flew would have been repainted to that new scheme. At the same time as the exterior color change to gray/white the gear bay interiors and struts were changed to glossy white to make hydraulic leak spotting easier. Prior to that the bays were the green color (then gray for a couple years) and the struts were the "same color as the nearest fuselage"."

If someone feels adventurous I did some testing before release and changing the green bits on AJ-2_gear_1 and AJ-2_gear_2 in the shared folder will give you the white gear bays that the gray/white aircraft would most definitely have had. (Actually I'll ask Phil for those two masters and do it the easy way.)
:ernaehrung004:
 
With all these repaints I'm thinking of buying the Steam Edition for just $12, and if I like it I can always add the DLC later. :encouragement:
 
I'm doing more detailing on the bumps and spec. You're right Cees, the wing/fuse joints and many of the small items are difficult to nail down...no labeling.

This plane is really fun to trap.....:encouragement:

Indeed, she is fun to trap!

Cees
 
Cees, I've got a good prelim set of bump, panel and spec files for you. I'll zip those up and send them.

After working with the PK further, I discovered multiple layers of parts files for the various interior parts that might have been green or white, depending on when the airplane was in service. Nice of the Virtavia team to provide those. :encouragement:

Screenshots:
The early Sea Blue with specular files working alongside the texture/alpha setup. The light rendering with DR enabled is extremely effective and really responds to specular/alpha combinations. As the airplane moves in and out of clouds, the color/light thrown by the layered textures change dramatically. Learning this new "canvas" is becoming very inspiring.


Prepar3Dv3.1 | DR Lighting Enabled | ASN Live Weather | REX TD/Soft Clouds
24898754265_f684b8d0ad_h.jpg


24898756295_9c8f17086f_h.jpg


24270613124_58e0efb0d2_h.jpg
 
I've fixed the white gear wells and struts using the master textures. Since these textures
weren't a part of the paint kit I'm just awaiting the go-ahead before making them available.
:ernaehrung004:

savage_white_gear.jpg
 
i may need to get this now The screen shots on the website didnt make it look so great now the user pictures on here really show how nice the model really looks :biggrin-new:
 
I'm not a painter. Following these posts and looking at the screenshots has me in awe of what you guys are doing. These new skins look fantastic, and your discussions are adding a whole new awareness and dimension of what goes into them. Thanks for everyone's efforts. Much appreciated.

Cheers :very_drunk:
 
Back
Top