Consolidated PBY-5 and Catalina MkIb

Right folks!

Just finished the PBY-2 version. I was tweaking the engines again, with more detail on the spinner bosses, and resizing the engine cowlings etc. Also I've added cockpit detail to the exterior view model, so you now have moving throttles and control-wheel as well, strange as Alpha didn't add any cockpit detail to the original exterior model?

I have de-flak-jacketed the crew, as pre-war they wouldn't have been worn, and now you can paint any colour flying suit you like. You now have a co-pilot buddy in the VC cockpit, and a couple of simple LODs to help with the FR's...I think that's all.

Off to the painters and then if all goes well...................

Cheers

Shessi
 

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Very Nice, Shessi! :encouragement: Like the view of the pilots in the spot view through the cockpit glass. Hopefully a PBY-5A mod is in the works...

Cheers mate!

BB686:US-flag:
 
Shessi, That is a fantastic skill you have! And thanks for working on such a neat plane! :applause:
If I had not spent spent my life developing flying scale RC
models I would be very keen to learn this too!
 
BB,
Yes to other models. I'm going to do a PBY-4, PBY-5, PBY-5A, PBY-6A, Catalina MkIb, MkIII, MkIV, most is done it's just getting them right and with all the tweaking for each version, along with weapons/ordinance etc...as said before no time-line on all these.

Thanks SD, glad you like it. As said, this is a major re-vamp of Alpha's model, I didn't build the main model, that's down to Alpha, but still quite a lot of work to get it to this.

Cheers

Shessi
 
Ok. I've got the PBY-2 model and my spray gun is clean and ready.

The first step is the hardest. Because the rudder on the early versions had a completely different shape, and the tail markings fit perfectly on the rudder, never extending onto the fin, I have to identify and mark on the textures the three lines that comprise the fin/rudder separation lines. That's going to take a lot of tedious, time-consuming trial and error, and since I'm having a frantic week without a lot of desk time, it probably won't get done really quickly (unless I get lucky and find those lines with much less fiddling around than I expect to do. (A little less than the usual amount of "help" from Rowdy the cat might move the process along too, but alas, "My Little Helper" will probably be on the job.)

Once I find those lines and make a vertical tail template, new skins should be quick and easy to produce.

Watch this space...
 
I've had to do that a few times for various locations on airplanes. Make bright pink or green lines on the original textures, look at the plane to see where the lines are, go back and adjust the lines a bit, look at the plane again, repeat as required. :banghead: Press on Mick, we're patient.
 
Paint by the numbers

Painting the round-tailed Cats reminded me of something I found rather annoying when I painted the original AlphaSims -5 and -5A last year. The texture files are not square, or in any proportion that FS works with, and the result is that images on the texture files are stretched or compressed when they go on the model in the sim. That has the effect of turning roundels into ovalels, making code letters and numbers look like they were applied in the wrong font, and so on. One must stretch or compress anything going onto the textures in order to have them look right on the model in the sim.

I know I'm not the only one who'll be painting Shessi's Cats, especially after he gets to the later versions. So, for the edification of other painters, here's the math:

Anything on the wings will be stretched laterally, so to prevent a roundel, for example, from being rendered as an ovalel, the image on the texture file must be only 84.75% as tall is is it wide. Reciprocally, if you prefer, the image on the texture file must be 118% as wide as it is tall, in order to appear round on the model.

On the forward or mid fuselage, markings will be squeezed to 73.20% of their height on the texture file, so an image must be 137% as tall as it is wide on the texture file in order to appear round or square on the model.

Obviously you don't have to get it down to the exact decimal places to have it look right. These happen to be the numbers that came up when I counted the height and width in pixels for a "neutrality star" on the forward fuselage and for the national insignia on the wings.

The tail texture is square and markings on it are not distorted, except that the rudder is stretched on the round tailed cats. I suspect that when the -6 comes along, markings on the vertical tail might need some adjustment due to the extra height.

I hope to have some practical applications of this mathematical exercise before too long...

 
I am simply curious since Shessi is doing all this wonderful modeling work, why not just remap the models properly for new textures.
 
I know nothing about building or mapping models, so I can't answer why that wasn't done in the beginning.

If it was done now, weeks of intensive work on the textures would be lost, and I don't think I could come up with the time or the motivation to start over right away. I'm sure I would in time, but not right away. It would probably not be until next winter, since we're already into the time of year when I try to spend as little time as possible indoors and especially at my desk. I don't stop doing hobby stuff completely during the warm seasons, but I cut back drastically compared to what I might do in the wintertime.

As it is, there is still a lot of work to do before any paints will be ready, and a lot more before they'll all be ready. But things are coming along steadily and should be ready before too much longer.
 
It also occurs to me that a complete re-texturing would've rendered the AlphaSims paint kit useless for those who plan to paint the later models that Shessi is planning. Unfortunately for me at present, the paint kit is of no use for the early models, as it doesn't provide for silver airplanes or yellow wing tops, but it will probably be very useful when it's time to paint wartime and post-war -5As and -6As.
 
Just thought I'd do a drive-by on this thread to see if we could get an update on the PBY project from Mick or Shessi. :untroubled:
 
TARPSBird said:
Looks great guys! Thank you for the responses. :encouragement:
Click to expand...

Well, thank you for asking! Your inquiry improved the final product!

As soon as I saw that screenie I just posted I spotted an error that had escaped me. The blue in the rudder stripe is much darker and more purple than the blue in the national insignia. They should be the same color, Insignia Blue. (The section color is True Blue, a completely different color.)

I didn't notice this when I painted the skin, or when I took a screen shot, or when I corrected the Insignia Red and Insignia Blue in the national insignia, or when I corrected the Insignia Red in the rudder stripes, or when I took another screen shot after those changes. Somehow I neglected to do it, and despite looking at it several times I never spotted the error. Then I looked at the screenie here in the forum and it reached right out and poked me in the eye.

Now it's fixed. I don't know if I'll bother to take a new screen shot, but in the texture it's been fixed.

I might never have spotted it if you hadn't inquired and I posted the screenie in reply.
 
Mick, you have good attention to detail, I would not have even noticed the tail stripe. Sometimes I lighten colors a bit more from what they should be, just so they show better. Glossy Sea Blue (USN late WWII, Korea) has always been a tough one for me to work with. It's darn near black but visually it usually shows up lighter because of sky reflection.
 
I just downloaded this bird from Virtavia, but it has no gauges for the panel. There is a note on Alphasim which says they have uploaded the files with the gauges, but it doesn't seem so.

Any help?

Thanks.
 
TARPSBird said:
Mick, you have good attention to detail, I would not have even noticed the tail stripe. Sometimes I lighten colors a bit more from what they should be, just so they show better. Glossy Sea Blue (USN late WWII, Korea) has always been a tough one for me to work with. It's darn near black but visually it usually shows up lighter because of sky reflection.
Click to expand...

Well, I almost didn't notice the tail stripe either!

Shessi has really good eyes. These skins are much better than the ones I painted for the -5 last year, and he should get most of the credit for it. There are two kinds of improvements, and I suppose that the need for them was partly because those -5 skins were the first paint jobs I'd done since getting FS into my current confuter and becoming active again in the hobby. I missed a lot of little things that I like to think I would've caught in the old days, or in the future. For example, I'd painted the upper wing stars in pre-war colors, but left the underwing stars and the bow stars in AlphaSims' original WW2 colors, with a dark brick red/brown center and a virtually black circle.

The other kind of improvement has to do with the use of color, and it was Shessi's sharp eyes that picked up and tipped me off, or reminded me, as the case may be, that colors might be chromatically correct on a texture file but not look at all correct on the model in the sim. For example, the colors Insignia Red and Insignia Blue were much lighter and brighter in the pre-camouflage era than they were during WW2 or today, but they were not nearly as bright as I had painted them. Even such basic colors as black and white needed considerable toning down. The result is colors that look much less garish - and much more right - than the colors I'd been using before. Shessi deserves most of the credit for those improvements.

As you mentioned, Dark Sea Blue has always given me fits. That's a great example of a color that can be right on a texture file and all wrong in the sim. In my early days I released some paints that had a really bright, garish Dark Sea Blue. Over the years I've gotten better with that color, but I still find it very troublesome. As you said, it's virtually black yet it still looks blue. And it was used almost universally on Navy planes in the post-WW2 era, one of my most very favorite modeling genres.

Another troublesome color is that early Navy camo color Blue-Gray. I could never get that right, not in enamel on plastic and not in digital bits on texture files.

I won't even get started on Olive Drab...

What's always been the most difficult finish for me is the one these PBY's all wear: aluminized silver paint! I have never, ever been pleased with any of my attempts to reproduce that metallic-but-not-metal "radiator paint" finish. These skins are the best I've ever done with that finish, and some credit for that goes to Shessi too, for doing some fine tuning on the degree of reflectivity in the model, which saved me probably days of fiddling with the alpha channels and then adjusting the alpha for hundreds of individual texture files. But it's still not perfect, and I think silver paint will always be the hardest thing for me to paint realistically. And of course it was the basic finish of virtually all the aircraft of the naval services during my other favorite era, the Golden Age.

And commenting about Dark Sea Blue and then Golden Age Navy planes reminds me of another tricky one - Admiral Blue, or VIP Blue. It's as tricky as Dark Sea Blue, though it's a different color, more purple-ish. Since it's the only one of the pre-war Navy's colors that didn't survive in the form of baked ceramic plates, there is no surviving document of the exact shade. All we have to go on is the recollections of some folks who were in the Navy at the time, who said it was very dark with a little bit of purple in it.

Speaking of documentation, until some time well after WW2, the only definition of the colors Insignia Red, Insignia White and Insignia Blue was, "the colors of the American flag." As if all American flags were the exact same colors, and as if those colors were defined anywhere. Augh!
 
Enough ranting about colors! Here's another picture.

And yes, Scale Dail, there is also one in the set from VP-10 with black checks.
 
KellyB said:
I just downloaded this bird from Virtavia, but it has no gauges for the panel. There is a note on Alphasim which says they have uploaded the files with the gauges, but it doesn't seem so.

Any help?

Thanks.
Click to expand...

The gauges will be included in the release. They're the same as the originals, so they'll work on both the old Alpha models and Shessi's improved versions.
 
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