Conspicuous by Their Absence

I still believe that constant scales over adjacent objects is the best way to go. Another useful thing is to use square textures. This makes drawing roundels and circular wheels and such a whole lot easier. On my Veltro, the Fuselage and associated parts have two scales thus far: 10.24 feet for most things and 8.00 feet for the Spinner, Exhausts and the Tires because these are relatively small objects and could use a bit more detail. The inlets of the Oil Coolers will likely be set to an even larger scale.

As for correcting the bleeds you mentioned earlier, you have a LOT of resources left on this project.

- Ivan.
 
The wheels and exhausts on the Macchi 205 were finished today. They share Texture File 5 for the Left Side and File 6 for the Right Side.

It also occurred to me that the same method would work for the cockpit walls just behind the control panel. I had them set up to use the mid fuselage texture for the outside and simple gray for the inside by using insignia parts. By changing them to use a separated Left and Right Side texture, I was able make the parts regular parts and remove 4 insignia parts and the 4 glue parts they used. What is even more interesting is that the offsets remain unchanged so that aligning the texture with the rest of the fuselage should be very simple.

The oil coolers and tail gear forks will also need to be added to the Left-Right texture pair.

Identical offsets and scales make for much easier alignment of irregular camouflage patterns.

- Ivan.
 
Textured the Oil Coolers a little while ago. There are still the TG Forks remaining on these textures.
I also adjusted the exhausts a bit since they didn't quite agree with the photographs I had. They still don't but it is much less obvious now.

I also included the texture for the Left Side pieces of the paired texture files I have been describing. Note that there is enough room in many places for something the size of a tail gear fork.

Good Night.
- Ivan.
 
Did anyone notice the bleed from the opposite side exhausts in the screenshot?
I don't think I can fix that, but it will only show up on the AI airplane in any case.

I finished texturing the tail wheel and struts this morning. I also found out that the TG Forks didn't need any special consideration because they are insignia parts anyway.

Womble55,

How do you go about testing flight models? I am finding that I need to go back to edit a bunch.

- Ivan.
 
Nakajima Ki-43 Hayabusa - Army Type 1 Fighter

In the spirit of the original topic "Conspicuous by Their Absence", I have been looking at the Japanese Ki-43 Hayabusa. I believe this fighter never got the credit it deserved because it was seen as an inferior to the Mitsubishi A6M Type 0 fighter.

While its straight line performance may have been somewhat less, it had other redeeming qualities such as a fantastic roll rate at low airspeed (1-2 seconds for a 360 degree roll) and agility that was superior even to the Type 0. Also, its roll rate did not degrade as much with increasing airspeed. The early aircraft were structurally very weak but later versions were able to carry drop tanks and 500 pound bombs on the wings.

I have handled pieces of aluminum skin from the wings of a Ki-43 though I don't know if it was from a a Ki-43-I or something later. The skin was amazingly flimsy.

All I have ever of this plane for CFS1 has been a couple rather crude examples.

- Ivan.
 
My test flying is done after most alterations, especially after an addition of a new texture. I usually do a full 360 degree sweep horizonally and vertically but I still manage to miss faults at a stage when they would be simple to correct. I'm currantly building the radiators as a component to see if they will display better than a straight texture, I have just enough free components left to do this. I've been lucky on eBay and managed to get a 'Warpaint' for the Lincoln which details how the other four aircraft of 151 squadron should have been painted. As 151 squadron was totally Top Secret, these are only a guess using the details of other aircraft with the same additional markings.
 
I hope you are doing better than I am with painting. Attached are a couple screenshots. This situation happened just after I textured the cannon barrels. I kept on adding textures (Flaps were last) and the situation actually seems to have improved.

I figure I can't really leave this beast partially textured though it may end up a bit simpler than I had intended when all is complete.

Cool situation, huh?

- Ivan.
 
Aircraft not covered, or just not covered well?

I seem to recall a Brewster Buffalo someplace, but it was not the greatest.... An IL-2 would be nice...
 
Hello RNZAF Gooney,

The original intent of this thread wasn't all that specific. You be the judge. Either case is worty of discussion. We have been going for a while now and digress all over the place which is just fine with me.

Here is yet another digression: A6M2 Model 21 Rei Shiki Sentoki. T
his is my first try at a proper colour for the beast.

- Ivan.
 
that looks very, very good.

me thinks you're getting the hang of gimp.

are those panel lines half pixel?
 
Thanks Guys.

Actually the aeroplane is about two years old. I wasn't really trying to show off the actual model.
The interesting thing is the paint job. Remember Hubbabubba and I were discussing how to modify the palette of a BMP file? This is a demonstration of actually doing the modification to the standard AF5 Palette.

The Panel lines look very narrow because they are very close to the regular texture. The basic colour is called "Ameiro" by the Japanese. It is VERY hard to pin down. I just eyeballed the version here. It looks a touch too green now that I see it on an aeroplane. It should be a touch more Cream coloured or more Gray. RGB vales are 165-175-125. This works out to a Value (Light-Dark) of 69. I just scooted the Value down to about 54 or so for the panel line colour.

Maybe I should have used another 50 shades of Gray?
- Ivan.
 
In this Forum, We should leave 50 shades of gray to the women....If I would have been the author they would have called it porno!! Go figure.

Dave :sheep:
 
Here is a minot shade adjustment. It is still a bit too green. The problem is that it looks good on THIS monitor but not the othe two I use often.

- Ivan.
 
Nice colors, Ivan. Certainly not AF5 kosher...

There is serious doubts about the very existence of the Ameiro color (see HERE).

I don't know how GIMP deals with colors but with my own SaintPaint, I let the algorithms do the conversion for the same reason you stated; monitors' inconsistency display. One of my "tricks" is to choose a representative portion of the color I want, add a very contrasting color in a portion of the selection, and turn it from a 24 bits to 1 bit palette (True colors to two colors). GIMP must have something similar.

What it does is render an "average" color of the chosen portion, without subjective guesses. You can then return that portion to 24 bits and "hover" over the picture you started with to see how well, or bad, it "blends" with it.

Unfortunately, most IJN aircraft ended at the bottom of the Pacific or gobbed-up by sub-tropical jungle. Probably the toughest "color subject" there is...:kilroy:
 
That last screenshot was a cheat. I just took the screenshot and adjusted it using GIMP until it looked like I believe that it should. There were no textures that looked actually make a model look that way in the simulator.

I then took the modified screenshot and did pretty much what Hubbabubba just described and checked a couple places. The shaded areas were simply too dark. The optimal place to sample appeared to be the upper surface of the wing or stabiliser. I then took the RGB values from those places and did a Eyeball average to get value to use for texturing.

Attached is a screenshot showing the new texture in use. I may yet modify it but it looks good enough to me.

- Ivan.
 
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