It's so tough doing bare metal. I cheat, I won't do a bare metal skin on a skin that doesn't have reflective qualities. Even then the view out the cockpit doesn't reflect. But the skin gives you the opportunity to screenshot it at it's best.
Out of the cockpit, it's still blah. I went so far as to resize an IL-2 skin that looked really good and pasted it over a wing. Out the cockpit it looked like dog poop. It's a subtle thing, IL-2's colors were way too strong.
Main thing is to stay away from blue. I saw a small sample of a DROP DEAD gorgous 51 skin with blue in it to really bring out the "metal" and Pyro gave it thumbs down because of the blue.
So shades of grey and a "hint" of blue is as far as you can go.
"If" they ever get to the point where reflective properties are visable out of the cockpit and you have the ability to put reflective properties where YOU want them it's gonna rock.
Aluminum is tough, no way around it.
Good tutorial site United
