• There seems to be an uptick in Political comments in recent months. Those of us who are long time members of the site know that Political and Religious content has been banned for years. Nothing has changed. Please leave all political and religious comments out of the forums.

    If you recently joined the forums you were not presented with this restriction in the terms of service. This was due to a conversion error when we went from vBulletin to Xenforo. We have updated our terms of service to reflect these corrections.

    Please note any post refering to a politician will be considered political even if it is intended to be humor. Our experience is these topics have a way of dividing the forums and causing deep resentment among members. It is a poison to the community. We appreciate compliance with the rules.

    The Staff of SOH

  • Server side Maintenance is done. We still have an update to the forum software to run but that one will have to wait for a better time.

Shining versus flat military aircraft. The undisputable truth!

T

tigisfat

Guest
Shining versus flat military aircraft. The undisputable truth!

Hello everyone, Tigisfat here; and this thread has been coming for a while. It's about time this got settled, because I've heard perfectly good sets of textures from great painters questioned over this.

I'm in military aviation. In my side of the house, (and it's similar in most modern militaries and branches, just at different time intervals) our aircraft get painted every six years, coinciding with more serious scheduled inspections. Paint jobs are planned just often enough to make the most of taxpayer dollars; The oldest paint gets so old it looks horrible, but still protects from corrosion, the primary purpose of painting anyway.

Getting more to the point: Six year old gunship gray is so light it's almost white and ghostly, and it's baked on looking and flat. Brand new gunship gray is so bright it's almost blue. Furthermore, the brand new gunship gray looks varnished and lacquered it's so shiny. In recent years they've experimented with even shinier coatings just to see how they hold up. Do you remember the first Alphasim C-17 screenshots? They were right on for a jet right out of the paint barn.

Instead of telling people they painted a jet the the wrong color, take it from me that as long as it's close, they got it right. Different painters look at different photos; many painters simulate brand new aircraft and others go for weathered. The current real world fleet where I work (all gunship gray) has just about every color of gray imagineable. I promise. This is true even in military aircraft that aren't painted gunship gray. Some super Hornets are painted a lighter almost tannish gray, and they start out shiny for the first few years as well.

Thank you for your time. :ernae:
 
But, I can also tell ya, that on the AF side for aircraft like the F-16 and F-22 shiny is a no no. When our aircraft came back from Hill after going through Depot to be repainted, among other things, the paint surface was a matte finish, so putting a shine on most AF aircraft (Fighter types) would be incorrect.
 
tigisfat said:
The current real world fleet where I work (all gunship gray) has just about every color of gray imagineable. I promise.
Click to expand...

Couldn't agree more. I was on the flight line at Robins AFB today. C-130's, C-5's, C-17's, from all over the place, with all different shades of gray.

I like the 'used' look myself
 
But guys, you forget MSFS is not real!!!

I although I agree with you 100% (I flew in matt military aircraft for the whole of my air force career), some people here want 'shiney' and if they re-paint them themselves I guess that is up to them!
 
I can't say anything about these oil burners. I can only attest what it was in the US Navy at the end of the war from 1944 on when they flew real airplanes. All Navy planes were as shiny as a new car.
Now I don't know what the Army Air Corps used as recyling time. But in the Navy it would be anything from a month to six menths and back to A&R it went. The longest one I saw was eight months. You can only bang an airplane so many times on a flight deck and it's bound to get bent.
The Navy found there was no advantage in flat paint and on the F6-F there was a gain of 12 MPH with the smooth finish.
 
Not to mention the infinite variety of light levels that affect how we view the color. I've agreed with this viewpoint for some time. Finding the correct paint chip RGB value is good to find a place to start, but from there, "art" takes over.

Up until the early 1980s, US Navy planes were painted a glossy white and grey, not the ugly flat grey they are painted now.
 
When I spent a short period of time around the RAF, they used exactly the same, very matte, rough, paint that we used to repaint tanks and Land Rovers, whenever they had to change the colour of an aircraft in a hurry. The darned stuff peeled off after even a short period of time tearing around at >M1 on Tornados by all accounts, but it was exactly the same paint.

Aircraft came out of the paint shop all shiny, then go into a warzone and get painted matte. Because they were less worried about fuel efficiency than the possibly could have been, the fact that the surface wasn't smooth wasn't a worry at all. With that much thrust to play with, if you shove open then throttles, it will accelerate quickly.

That didn't apply to WW2 aircraft, which didn't have anywhere near as much power to play with - but the military expediency of "what paint is available to change the colours" strongly applies. IMO the "shininess" of paint isn't massively critical when compared to other things about a model that I'll notice a lot more.
 
For an FSX built aircraft the repainter can repaint to his hearts content since glossy and specular settings are held within the textures!

Matte becomes shiny anyways in bright sunlight! Note shiny not glossy.

Its all personal preference anyway.
 
I just wished a fraction of the time spent on exterior paints/details was spent in the cockpit.
I know you guys LOVE repainting but I rarely even look at the outside.
A weathered,lived in cockpit that many a pilot have spent 1/2 their lives in adds alot more to the immersion imo than a paint.
 
JIMJAM said:
I just wished a fraction of the time spent on exterior paints/details was spent in the cockpit.
I know you guys LOVE repainting but I rarely even look at the outside.
A weathered,lived in cockpit that many a pilot have spent 1/2 their lives in adds alot more to the immersion imo than a paint.
Click to expand...
ewwwwww, blasphemy, lol, lol. I am the same on this one JIMJAM. I know the bump mapping and specular stuff is all the rage and being able to see dimples in the exterior and every single rivet is cool, but I don't really purchase an addon for that reason. . .for me it all has to do with the VC, and especially if it looks lived in, lol. I don't fly from outside the airplane and aside from quick looks to get a screenshot or two, I don't spend any time outside the cockpit until after I've landed and then I take a quick look at my approach and landing to critique that part of the flight.

Just as a side note, when I purchase or download an aircraft and it has twenty liveries and 200 loadouts. . .I delete all the liveries save one or two and from the loadouts I keep a clean version and one with Aim9's and everything else gets trashed.
 
For what it's worth, I hardly look at aircraft in much detail at all (unless I have to publish them), because I'm a scenery guy..... the color of the grass and rocks is much more important to add to the realism as the little speck in the world that an aircraft is :bump::bump::bump:

Okay, so flame away........ :icon29:
 
This thread has been around, subject wise, since airplane models were first made. Colors and finish are just those things that can't ever be argued and resolved.
Just like arguing religion or politics, or who has the best sports team....:isadizzy:
 
:jump: *Raises his hand from the back of the room* :jump:

My turn, my turn!

For me it is all about immersement and suspense of disbelief. Like Falcon and Francois, I fly from inside the cockpit. My most memorable times flying my sim have been the moments where I forgot I was flying a sim and felt like I was once again in a real cockpit in the air, all alone with God.

It is moments like these that keep me coming back and pouring money into my hobby. I have flown clean and dirty birds, I have flown depot fresh, no dead bugs, aircraft and beat up, dented, ones with chipped paint.

I have been in cockpits with panels missing (not important ones) or new ones installed, seen modifications to the panels that made them look different from the pictures in the Dash-1.

It is not about the details for me but, the total experience. I can honestly say this total experience is getting better and better, thanks to the hard work and talents of so many of you.

:medals: + :icon29:
 
Piglet said:
This thread has been around, subject wise, since airplane models were first made. Colors and finish are just those things that can't ever be argued and resolved.
Just like arguing religion or politics, or who has the best sports team....:isadizzy:
Click to expand...

Yep, and long before that, the plastic modelers were (are) arguing over the same issue. Glossy or flat? With plastic models, an added issue is size difference between the model and the real thing. The large size of the real planes, even when painted with flat paint, make them appear shiny. Some even advocate painting OD green aircraft models with at least a semi-glossy paint to make them shiny(er).

:d ;)
 
Piglet said:
This thread has been around, subject wise, since airplane models were first made. Colors and finish are just those things that can't ever be argued and resolved.
Just like arguing religion or politics, or who has the best sports team....:isadizzy:
Click to expand...

There is a definitive answer. That's what I'm saying, at least for aircraft painted gunship gray, like bombers and tranports. It's both. They appear bluish and shiny as well as pale and flat depending on the age and mixture.

This isn't a debate thread. I'm telling everyone that I've been around these aircraft every day for 9 nine years and this is how it is. Personal preference be what it may, but the real aircraft come in both variances.
 
It's about what pleases my/your eye not anyone elses. It's about the artist and how he or she wants to represent their creation. FS aircraft to me are a work of art. The real ones which I'll never fly are sitting on a flight line somwhere in the real world.:engel016:
 
I can't think of a better way to start a debate (a.k.a. "food fight") in a thread than to declare that it isn't a debate thread because "I'm here to tell ya the way it is!" :d And Mud is right. Real airplanes these are not. So, the debate will continue as long as artists are "painting" them.
 
Debate is always good......it's just that no one knows how to do it anymore! Opposing opinions are too often taken as personal attacks. I always look at diffrent opinons as a learning experience!:engel016:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top