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Repainting question

falcon409

falcon409

SOH-CM-2025
I'm close to finishing the Navy version of the new PAD Seabee Amphib, but I've hit on a problem you don't ordinarily find in most textures. The Seabee has aluminum formed wings and elevators and in real life, those ridges are very obvious and a recognizable part of the "look" of the Seabee. I thought I could solve that by simply making the blue layer set to "multiply" maintaining the correct color and allowing the ridge effect to come through. That hasn't happened as you can see in the images.

My other thought is that I may have to go section by section and apply an "effect" to each ridge that makes it appear to be raised. "verrrrrrrrry" time consuming, unless someone has a better idea. This is probably the only livery I'll do that has this problem because of the dark color. . .light colors won't have this problem.
 
Very sorry to state the obvious, not being much help, but that would be one of the 'benefits' of FSX. Having a FSX native model with bump mapping. :salute:
 
I am working on it with the Stieglitz falcon.

It does not look like the ridges are showing, so really that is good. Ir means the contours are not in the model file. In FS2004, one must use artistic optical illusions.

It does take time. I get a three-view, cut out the wing, and paste it to my texture as a layer, then Free Transform the view to fit. Using that, I start with ridge lines, which are beveled and contoured with a slight curved slope. I then rastisize and apply duplicate ridge lines to all and merge visible (be sure all other textures are unchecked when you merge visible). I then make a new layer and call it gradient and apply a gradient in between the ridge lines. Opacity and fill for all can be played with, as the Seabee you're doing is dark blue, you'll ant your gradients more opaque. Any gradient that over runs can be easily erased without harming any other texture.

Huub led me to tutorial on doing this when he was doing a bunch of Stuart Green's Pfalz D.IIIs. I used the same technique on Stuart's Fokker D.VII and the Aeroplane Heaven F3F-2.

Labors of love take awhile, but the end product is worth it.

Caz
 
Thanks for the suggestions all. . . .to be honest, with everything I have going on this week and next (2-"day" surgeries and recovery time) I won't have the time or the desire to really get into what needs to be done to make this "as real as it gets". I'll post the finished texture set and if anyone wants it, great. . .if not, that's fine too. It looks good as is, but to get the ribbing effect to look the way it should. . .it's not worth the time I would have to spend doing it.

Any other liveries I do beyond this one will not include an overall dark color scheme like this one.:salute:
 
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