garykidman
Charter Member
RAF BRADWELL BAY
Nice piece of work can't wait to fly around it
Nice piece of work can't wait to fly around it
RAF Bradwell Bay WIP
- Thread starter htpcorsica
- Start date
Some were flush, others weren't: lines of rivets across the wingspan were flush, those in line with the airflow were often conventional. Same for the fuselage; vertical rows of rivets were flush, horizontal rows were mostly conventional. Using all flush rivets gave little improvement in performance, so the cheaper conventional rivets were used where practical.
htpcorsica
Charter Member
...more than happy to wait for as long as it takes! BTW, in what era have you pictured this amazing airfield? -also, would it be possible to get a screenie/close-up of these 5 layer rivets? -Plus, didn't the Spit have 'flush' rivets?
--thanx in advance from your friendly neighborhood pain in thee neck (lol)
Hi Popsaka,
Thanks for your interest, here is a pic of the rivets I hope i have zoomed in enough. I got the idea from someone on simmerspaint shop his tutorial on rivets and wanted to have a go but its hard work with coral paint shop pro XI as you have to copy and past them all the time. It looks good on the a/c in the game but i will have to make the wing tips rivets bolder to they show up better.
Here's one of the exhaust dirt marks on the fuselage that I think looks realistic?
and another one showing bare aluminum, I think I need to do more work on this as it looks like ice!
ndicki
Charter Member 2016
Using the _s.dds layer will cause it to be more reflective and look less like ice!
This looks promising - it'll be useful to have another skinner on board. But whatever John says, the best tool is Photoshop - you have a greater range of possibilities than with other programs. In Photoshop, I use a white 1px pencil to brush in the rivets directly at 600 or so 'pas' - my copy is in French, but it's a setting on the brush that controls the separation of each mark of the brush on the surface - and then using the layer attributes, I put a 1px black edge around the rivets before reducing their opacity to around 6 or 7 %. Don't forget that on most British and German aircraft, and later US ones, the rivets were flush-head and barely visible. If you go to an air museum and look at the aircraft, you'll see they really are extremely difficult to see, and are visible only by a slight difference in the way they reflect the light. On the other hand, on things like the Wildcat or P-36 Hawk, you can really go to town!
This looks promising - it'll be useful to have another skinner on board. But whatever John says, the best tool is Photoshop - you have a greater range of possibilities than with other programs. In Photoshop, I use a white 1px pencil to brush in the rivets directly at 600 or so 'pas' - my copy is in French, but it's a setting on the brush that controls the separation of each mark of the brush on the surface - and then using the layer attributes, I put a 1px black edge around the rivets before reducing their opacity to around 6 or 7 %. Don't forget that on most British and German aircraft, and later US ones, the rivets were flush-head and barely visible. If you go to an air museum and look at the aircraft, you'll see they really are extremely difficult to see, and are visible only by a slight difference in the way they reflect the light. On the other hand, on things like the Wildcat or P-36 Hawk, you can really go to town!
Erm, not half! I've only recently been learning to use the beast and it puts anything else I've tried completely in the shade. But it isn't something you learn in minutes...
Bravo/4
Charter Member
Hmm couple of PSP bashers hey?
I do agree though, PSD is the way to go, it'll take longer to learn it, but it's much more powerfull than any other paint proggy!
I have both PSP, and PSD installed trying to use PSD more often nowdays!
Spit skin is looking really good, keep it up!
John
I do agree though, PSD is the way to go, it'll take longer to learn it, but it's much more powerfull than any other paint proggy!
I have both PSP, and PSD installed trying to use PSD more often nowdays!
Spit skin is looking really good, keep it up!
John
htpcorsica
Charter Member
Thanks very much ndicki, I will have a look at sorting out the _s.dds layer (alpha layer?). In the past I have generated one using mw dds tool but didn't really know what to do with it as it became all rather complicated. One thing I have found out is that if you enable shinny surfaces, reflection by changing the "shaders" file in the main dir. then the s.dds file works.
One thing I have never worked out is how people are able to use the _s.dds layer to overlay all the lines and dirt to their newly modified skin to save many hours?
About 5 years ago I downloaded a trial version of Photoshop CS and used that and found it good but didn't buy it due to the cost of it at £300 or £600, cant remember exactly and bought PSP instead. I have been looking at buying PSPX3 but I think now I will try and get a second hand adobe PS from ebay simply to make life easier.
The rivets do need tweaking a bit so the skin looks uneven. One thing I have learnt skinning this is that if you dont have lots of dirt all over the skin then all those lines that you have drawn will become intermittent some just not showing up. To get around this I used much thicker lines until I discovered this.
Why is one side of the wings bigger in the dds file than the other side? Is this a fault of gmax when UVmapping or what ever its called?
htpcorsica
Charter Member
Hmm couple of PSP bashers hey?
I do agree though, PSD is the way to go, it'll take longer to learn it, but it's much more powerfull than any other paint proggy!
I have both PSP, and PSD installed trying to use PSD more often nowdays!
Spit skin is looking really good, keep it up!
John
Thanks John, I must admit I have tried to paint some of the effects you have done but just cant find a way of doing it, I don't think I will quite make the grade some how! May be its a case of making custom paint brushes?
It's possibly a lot closer to home than that: when UV mapping the modeller has scaled one wing's mapping a little different to the other. There may be good reasons for this but I don't know the reasoning behind it.
I was going to suggest you look into custom brushes, PSP does support them. A rather old tut can be found here:-
http://www.baycongroup.com/paint_shop_pro/p07_6.htm
Combined with vector-style lines you should be able to slap lines of rivets on with wild abandon. I'd also check out the nVidia plugin for DDS export, I use it and it works with both Photoshop and PSP.
ndicki
Charter Member 2016
To start the _s layer, I slide a solid layer of mid/darkish grey over the basic camouflage layers, but below all layers of dust and dirt, shading and highlighting, and panel lines and rivets (which is the order you generally need to put the layers in anyway). Then it's a question of desaturating the visible layers, and adjusting their brightness/darkness as a function of the degree of shine you want them to have. Darker = matter, lighter = shinier. So exhaust stains need to be darker, oil stains perhaps lighter if recent, darker if (as is usually the case) filthy dirt, panel lines stay darkish (about 30% visible for _t layer, and play with the _s layer settings until you like it) and paint chipping goes to almost white. I often make rivets very bright as well, since they are frequently subject to scuffing and chipping. And so on and so forth! If you look at one of my Bf109Gs, you'll quickly get the idea. It's easy once you know how.
The Zuyax Spitfire isn't a good aircraft to begin with, precisely because it isn't symmetrical. Normally, to make a texture sheet map you take screenshots of the parts at 0 degrees in GMAX, and simply mirror-invert each part for the corresponding other side. He clearly hasn't done that, and has preferred to take a screenshot of each separate part instead of mirroring them. Result, a dog's breakfast that practically doubles the workload. By the way, I'm perfectly happy for you to follow the panel lines on mine if you like - it might make things easier!
One point where John and I may differ is whether to back the dark panel lines with a "white" (toned-down) copy. I think John does - he'll be happy to tell you more, I'm sure! - but I don't. Different techniques, different styles... But you do need a sheet of dust and dirt effects, and that you'll have to work out by yourself. I have several pre-made layers I save separately, which I can drop onto a template and adapt - you need to be extra-careful anywhere where two parts join, to make sure it stays continuous!
I don't normally use the Photoshop DDS plug-in... Just Martin Wright's program. That helps me to avoid absent-mindedly fusing the layers and then saving it in psd format, thereby destroying several days' worth of work! Never, ever work on a sheet that has already been saved into dds format, by the way - always keep back-ups in psd (unfused) and bmp (fused).
Any more help you might need, just yell!
I think it's "Select Brush Tip Shape/Spacing" you need to set to 600 or so for rivets. Difficult to tell precisely as mine's in French. Must get a real one one day...
http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/Pho...WSfd1234e1c4b69f30ea53e41001031ab64-77fb.html
The Zuyax Spitfire isn't a good aircraft to begin with, precisely because it isn't symmetrical. Normally, to make a texture sheet map you take screenshots of the parts at 0 degrees in GMAX, and simply mirror-invert each part for the corresponding other side. He clearly hasn't done that, and has preferred to take a screenshot of each separate part instead of mirroring them. Result, a dog's breakfast that practically doubles the workload. By the way, I'm perfectly happy for you to follow the panel lines on mine if you like - it might make things easier!
One point where John and I may differ is whether to back the dark panel lines with a "white" (toned-down) copy. I think John does - he'll be happy to tell you more, I'm sure! - but I don't. Different techniques, different styles... But you do need a sheet of dust and dirt effects, and that you'll have to work out by yourself. I have several pre-made layers I save separately, which I can drop onto a template and adapt - you need to be extra-careful anywhere where two parts join, to make sure it stays continuous!
I don't normally use the Photoshop DDS plug-in... Just Martin Wright's program. That helps me to avoid absent-mindedly fusing the layers and then saving it in psd format, thereby destroying several days' worth of work! Never, ever work on a sheet that has already been saved into dds format, by the way - always keep back-ups in psd (unfused) and bmp (fused).
Any more help you might need, just yell!
I think it's "Select Brush Tip Shape/Spacing" you need to set to 600 or so for rivets. Difficult to tell precisely as mine's in French. Must get a real one one day...
http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/Pho...WSfd1234e1c4b69f30ea53e41001031ab64-77fb.html
Things have moved on in modelling and we have the more much sophisticated LithUnwrap method for Gmax nowadays. This gives pixel-perfect mapping and more flexibility in mapping techniques, but it's up to the modeller to use it!
Steve and Ted use this - see recent WIP pics of the Buffalo for an example - but I'm getting far away from Bradwell Bay...
ndicki
Charter Member 2016
Shows how up-to-date I am! Must make life a great deal easier all round. But the Spitfire was done by hand, the old way!