Conspicuous by Their Absence

Hello Hubbabubba,

The term "Ameiro" may or may not be correct. I am not trying to be a Japanese language analyst here. The link you posted was actually the main site I used. Note that they have many profiles of early Zeros. I took RGB values off their images also. They looked too dark to me. I was at a Hobby shop on Tuesday and checked the Tamiya Imperial Japanese Navy Gray and even Japanese Army Gray. I took photographs of the paint. None looked yellow or green enough to suit me. I also found a sight that gave RGB values for FS colours. That didn't quite look right either. The colour I ended up using is entirely a judgement call by me and gotten by adjusting Hues and Saturations of the earlier screenshots and then taking a sample which was then adjust some more as well.

You are correct, most of the Japanese aircraft of this type ended up destroyed as did most of the aircraft of all the other nations. There ARE however several wrecks, lots of pieces and even some that were shielded from fading by sunlight. When analysed via GIMP, most of them do not look right.

Either way, I like this colour and we agree it certainly isn't Kosher or even Halal.

Hey No Dice,
I have certainly messed with well over 50 shades of gray for this exercise.

- Ivan.
 
Ivan,
I think something got lost in my cold attempt at humour, 50 shades of Grey is a huge selling book that I think only women purchase and read,
nothing to do with your A/C. Just a poor attempt at humour, no insult intended............sorry if it read that way.

Dave :salute:
 
No Dice said:
Ivan,
I think something got lost in my cold attempt at humour, 50 shades of Grey is a huge selling book that I think only women purchase and read,
nothing to do with your A/C. Just a poor attempt at humour, no insult intended............sorry if it read that way.

Dave :salute:
Click to expand...

To be absolved, No Dice, you will have to say your Act of Contrition ten times and send a copy of the book to Anna Honey.:icon_lol:

P.S.- I just realized; you have to be catholic for it to work. If you're not, then hell awaits you.
 
Hello No Dice,

I KNOW about the book. Eventually I will need to get a copy to see what all the hype is about. The same goes for the Harry Potter series. I just don't want to do it when everyone else is interested.

I just thought it was a good joke that the title is an appropriate phrase to use in describing this paint job for a Japanese Zero. This is more about MY poor sense of humour than yours!

For this exercise, I even tried photographing my laptop's screen because the colour looked right on it. The problem was that although the photograph gave something passible, it didn't look right either. In any case, the paint is done for now until I get dissatisfied again.

Now I just need to get make a panel for the A6M2.

- Ivan.
 
hubbabubba said:
To be absolved, No Dice, you will have to say your Act of Contrition ten times and send a copy of the book to Anna Honey.:icon_lol:

P.S.- I just realized; you have to be catholic for it to work. If you're not, then hell awaits you.
Click to expand...
i figure i should get this out of the way first.
i'm toast. :ichile:
and not just because i'm not catholic.

okay,now that that's taken care of,
in my color searches, i found some work
that a guy did for IL-2,
they are color swatches for the WWII era.
broken down into national categorizes.

problem is, the swatches are aco files
for adobe photo shot.
do you know if you could open them with gimp?
are you interested in them?
i could forward them if you are.
 
this morning, while browsing through
my latest issue of Aviation History magazine.
i saw an article about the recent recovery
of a he115 from a norwegian fjord.

looked like an interesting aircraft
that i had not heard of.
fits the criteria of my two favorite types,
big twins and floats.
might have to look into that one.
 
well, i googled it. interesting aircraft
and potentially, an interesting project.
especially after figuring out how to
deal with resource limitation issues.

although, i wouldn't say it was
Conspicuous by it's Absence
as only 138 were built.

then again, i still have the 196 to finish
and two others on the back burner
waiting patiently to be moved forward.
 
Heinkel 115

Hello Smilo,

I know I have had this discussion before though I don't remember if it was with you:

A fellow named James Ellwood built a He 115 way back. It can be found here:

http://elwood.www4.50megs.com/aircraft.htm

I downloaded it way way back. This fellow Ellwood is a pretty nice guy but I don't think he builds for CFS any more.

- Ivan.
 
i have, most likely, just suffered
an attack of old man disease.

you are absolutely correct.
i have that model.
i even have his site book marked,
even though i have not been there
in quite some time.

sheez_______:sheep:_______

now, where was i?
 
Just a piece of my memory from way back.....1970s at least. I used to build plastic kits and a few famous writers in the magazines of the day said that using the exact colours produces an incorrect effect because they appear too dark. A shade or two lighter was recommended, I did try this and it appeared to improve my results in the Air Training Corps wing competitions.
 
Hello Womble55,

You probably are way ahead of me on plastic models. I haven't actually completed one in at least 10 years (since my second child was born). FWIW, Monogram and Early Minicraft - Hasegawa kits are quite good enough for my skill level. Even the Airfix kits are suitable. Notice the 115 on the tail? The reason for this number was because my old Monogram A6M5 still has this decal on it. The tail wheel broke off a few months ago and I am trying to figure out how to make a retractable version to replace it. This is one of the cases where plastic modelling is more difficult than computer modelling.

The issue with CFS models I believe is due to the lighting and highlights being supplied by a simulator rather than the image being a simple unhighlighted profile. The panel lines are also exagerated on the computer because otherwise we would see nothing at all.

Do you think this model is still too dark? It still seems that way to me.

- Ivan.
 
I haven't completed a kit in twenty or more years and the reason why I could enter the ATC wing modelling competions was that Alan W Hall ( a very well known contributor to the modelling press at the time) was an officer at the squadron.
I had a little foray into steam locomotive preservation, a different approach to the use of my skills as a toolmaker. Fat lot of good it did me cos redundancy from my job at the time helped to put me on a different career tack.
I couldn't comment on the lightness, darkness, tint or shade of any of your paints because my monitor on my main PC displays different to the screen on the wife's notepad. I have tried to get the greens and browns close to what they should be for my RAF colour schemes but failed dismally. I have got, in Paint Shop Pro, a complete set of colours in a palette. The Dark Earth is a little light - which displays great, the Duck Egg Blue is pretty close but the Dark Green is a bit dark. The Light Stone is way too orange and needs considerable input to get right. I also have the next shade darker and lighter for these colours too.
I feel a lot of our work revolves round the old addage......If it looks right then it is right. The number of times I have rebuilt parts and components because of this...I wish I had a pound (1.5 dollars) for every time that has happened.
 
There actually IS a way to compare: Do the colour check against a scanned photograph.
If the computer image of the photograph agrees with a CFS Screenshot the textures are presumably correct.

As an afterthought, I actually tried this and basically it is a pretty good place to start. Even if the colours match, the textures still may not look right with the simulator's lighting and rendering.

- Ivan.
 
Thats a good way for correct colour rendition but, and its a big but, the photo has to be correct in the first place. Do a google search for a lesser known aircraft, i.e. Short Shetland. I said a less well known aircraft because the same photo will come up from many websites. Note the difference, its amazing. There is also the early Kodak colour film giving slightly off colours. In the long run though, if its close then a couple of tints away doesn't really matter. Incidently, I've scanned the correct colour shades from an old RAF paint booklet and none of the colours looked right.
 
Hello Womble55.

You make a pretty good point. Sometimes we don't know if the original photograph was accurate. Then again, 60+ years later, if all that is left is vague memories and bad colour photographs, then who is to say that we are wrong?

The Japanese Naval Green-Gray has been debated endlessly. It is one of the more difficult discussions to prove one way or another. I have Internet photographs showing examples of the paint in varying states of deterioration. Just about everyone has been painting plastic models and simulator planes simple gray for years.

With the AVG Hawk 81 that I did earlier, the supposed colour done by Curtiss was RAF camouflage. Paintings and photographs of the planes show the RAF Tan / Brown colour as more Red-Brown unlike the typical RAF scheme seen in the ETO.

I believe my colour choice in the end was pretty good, but I DID make some compromises by using the FS5 palette. I thought that was reasonable because the technical exercise was to figure out what would happen by picking a colour scheme, overlaying panel lines and then squeezing the result back into the FS5 palette. The end result was much better than I expected but also differing greatly from a European RAF fighter.

The basic point I am trying to make is that when colour photographs of unknown quality, Illustrations drawn at the time with veterans to object if necessary and countless profiles since the war are the only surviving references, How can one argue correctness?

- Ivan.
 
Macchi C.205 Veltro

After running into a bunch more AF99 Barfs while texturing the model at "Only" 1185 polygons, it appears to me that perhaps I am being a bit too ambitious.

The idea was to have an animated Spinner and a non-animated Spinner. This can be done using AF99 with some difficulty but in this case there are not enough resources left to accomplish this without seriously degrading the model elsewhere. I have tried quite a few convoluted assembly schemes, but the none have worked thus far.

I always do a little SCASM final processing but it appears that this time, the final processing will also include the non-animated spinner. Removing the non-animated (AI) spinner saves about 65 Polygons from the design. Perhaps I can use these resources to improve the model elsewhere.

What a shame.
- Ivan.
 
It certainly is a shame, Ivan.:173go1:

As I see it, something causes polygons' coordinates to get at least one vertex out of place. These elongated polygons, in SCASM, are caused by a bad point declaration, sometimes simply because a coordinate had one zero too many.

In AF99, I suspect that some "dummy jump" (what an aptly named piece of... code) is doing its bad deed here. Cleaning your model of all that crud could be worth a try. It is SCASM, but more as a "cleaning device". If it doesn't work, then the only other thing I can think of is a misplaced coordinates and, quite frankly, coming out of you, that is next to impossible.

Good luck.
 
Hello Hubbabubba,

I believe the issue is just some size limitation in AF99 data structures. Perhaps a memory / heap allocation limit. I have hit similar situations at least twice already on other projects (A6M Long Wing conversion from A6M5 and The infamous B-25C Mitchell). There were ways to work around those and reduce the resource usage. In this case, I am still ADDING to the resources used because I still have more parts to texture.

For what it's worth, the current appearance of the model is MUCH worse than it is here. There are LOTS of missing polygons all over the nose. I also don't really see how additional textures can mangle existing unaltered components which is why I believe this is a memory or resource allocation issue.

Removing the AI spinner which can be added via SCASM also allows me to properly assemble the nose in a cleaner manner without relying on "Automatic Glue". It also allows me to add wheel wells and perhaps a couple other parts as well.

This is getting to be an awful lot of effort spent on an aircraft I really don't much care about.

- Ivan.
 
Sorry for hijacking the thread

Ivan, and others

I'm in Washington on holiday and just been to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. I took some pictures of the C202 that they have their, but I see that Ivan is building a C205.

Does anyone have any picture requests? I am here until Sunday and can revisit the museum easily.

David
 
Hello Dave,

Thanks for the offer. FWIW, a C.202 Folgore is VERY close to a C.205 Veltro. Many were converted after the war. The only real identifying feature is the non-retractable tail wheel on the C.202 Conversions.

What colour are the flap wells? They are either Gray / Silver or Medium Chromate Green.

BTW, what the heck are you doing on THIS side of the pond?

- Ivan.
 
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