Greg Pepper's Grumman Albatross

O

OBIO

Retired SOH Admin
Since I had to stay up for a while to let the ferrets have their daily time out of their cage to run, romp and attack my toes...I spent some time looking through the huge folder of Photoshop repaint templates, sorting out the ones that I am/will be using and those that are no longer active. Found a partially completed paint kit for Greg's Albatross...and that got me to fire up the big beautiful amphib. While I had it in the air, I got to thinking about how much better the bare metal skins would look if the MDL were to be tweaked for reflective texturing.

So, that's what I did. Adjusted the glass and gave it a bunch of specular shine, then ran the MDL through MDLC117 to add reflective texturing. Still need to take the MDL into a hex editor to fix the prop disk material and the vc thingie (have to remove the reflective from those areas to make them work properly, otherwise the prop wash is way wonky and the vc gauges don't look right).

Would anyone else be interested in having a reflective MDL for the Albatross? Would any of you skinners who are very adept at bare metal work be willing to put such an MDL to use and whip up some nice new skins for the plane? Who else would I need to contact for permission to upload a tweaked MDL file?

I will also put together a dedicated sound pack for the Albatross...a true twin engine number with individual left and right engine sounds.

OBIO
 
The reflective MDL is now complete. The dedicated Albatross sound pack has been set up, now I need to begin tweaking and enhancing all the individual sound files....65 of them....to give left and right engines slightly different sounds.

OBIO
 
Hi,

ferrets

You have this at home ?

2hi2ivo.jpg


That's nice but not common pets ( at least in my country) :)
 
common pet here in the UK, my mum used to have 2 white Chinchillas :icon_lol: those got out you'd be chasing the things for a good hour...

anyway back on topic, OBIO yeah a reflective 'batross would be cool, gotta dig up the model again but yeah :jump:
 
Ferrets?! Cool!

I've met some, but never had the opportunity to know one well.

A woman I know who has all three types of critters tells me that if you tell a dog what to do, it will make every effort to understand and comply. If you tell a cat what to do it will ignore you, pretending not to understand. If you tell a ferret what do, it will actually laugh at you! And then do a little happy dance if you let on that you're annoyed.

I think a reflective Albatross would be neat! I wish I could volunteer to do some new paints, but my computer time is very limited and I'm already extremely overcommitted. I can't even keep up with my end of the projects I work on with David. I never get to work on anything of my own, and I never, ever get to just boot up and fly.

I can suggest that even the existing paints could be jazzed up nicely for a reflective model simply by adding a solid, very pale gray alpha channel. That would give the silver parts a bit of shine without making the painted parts look too shiny.

A slightly more ambitious job would be to make an alpha template (DXTbmp will do that with a click), reverse the colors (MS Paint will do that with a click) and then tone the whole thing down a bit with the photo processing program of your choice.

Any of the Air Force paints and the early Coast Guard one would benefit from this treatment.

Doing this will definitely go on my list, but alas, that doesn't mean that they'll get done anytime in the foreseeable future.
 
Mick said:
... if you tell a dog what to do, it will make every effort to understand and comply. If you tell a cat what to do it will ignore you, pretending not to understand. If you tell a ferret what do, it will actually laugh at you! And then do a little happy dance if you let on that you're annoyed.
Click to expand...

ROTFL!
As an owner of two ignorant Maine Coons, I do exactly know what she's talking about. Sometimes it's like talking to an answering machine... :icon_lol:



A slightly more ambitious job would be to make an alpha template (DXTbmp will do that with a click), reverse the colors (MS Paint will do that with a click) and then tone the whole thing down a bit with the photo processing program of your choice.
Click to expand...

I did this on some bare metal paints before.
The rather annoying thing about this procedure is to except all markings, letterings, roundels etc. from the shine created this way...

Cheers,
Markus.
 
I was looking at the paint template for the Albatross....it is a total paint template I downloaded from somewhere...though I will go in and change out the rivets...the ones in the kit look like the bolts used to hold together bridges and stuff.

Can't say that I will have any new skins done anytime soon...but I will work on some.

OBIO
 
Wild Bill Kelso said:
ROTFL!
I did this on some bare metal paints before. The rather annoying thing about this procedure is to except all markings, letterings, roundels etc. from the shine created this way...[/QUOTE]

Almost all of the markings on the liveries I'm thinking of are black (as is the anti-glare panel.) When you reverse the colors after you make the template, those markings turn from black to white, and they become non-reflective.
Click to expand...
 
My Uncle flew these in The USAF. This aircraft is very close to my heart. Any sound mods would be sweet! Mike :applause:
 
GAEC Albatross sound

OBIO, don't know how -- or if -- you can incorporate this.....

The Albatross had a very unique sound: when it ran up the engines or started to roll, it put out a throbbing beat unlike any other aircraft I have heard. I'm guessing it was those enormous "slab" sides of the fuselage having a harmonic excited.

Without looking, you could always tell it was an Albatross just by the throbbing beat.

- H52
 
I was without internet for 12 HOURS....darn near killed me....but during that 12 hours I made this progress on the Albatross:

1) I discovered that the stock MDL already has reflective texturing! Sure enough...it does. It also had way too much specular shine for my taste so I cranked that down by about 70%.

2) Working with the pre-made paint template was not too my liking...so I started from scratch and made my own layered paint templates....still have a few small areas to hit yet, but it is close enough to done to say it is done. I did not like the rivets on the plane...not a big fan of rivets for some reason...so I replaced the rivets with simpler and cleaner panel lines...looks better in my opinion. Will begin doing some new paints "soon".

3) I wanted to create a dedicated sound pack for the Albatross using one of Lawdog's many Wright R-1820 Cyclone packs...but they are so close to being maxed out in terms of amplification that any changes I did to them resulted in the sound becoming very flat and monotone. Not good. So, I am using one of his Pratt and Whitney R-1830 sound packs (F4F I think) to construct a true twin engine sound pack....left and right engines have their own files. The sound files in the F4F pack had plenty of room for me to go in and add some amplification and bass to the external sound files to really make them loud and proud. The internal sounds are the stock F4F external sounds...so inside plane is a head ache inducing environment as well. The R-1830 isn't accurate....but I think once you folks here the sound pack...no one will find it necessary to count rivets with it.

Tim
 
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