My First Try

[2ace]

I've decided to try skinning, so i started out by trying to skin joe foss's F4F while he was CO of VMF-121 on Guadalcanal.




I need some help with weathering, All advice is appreciated.

[StokesAk]

Look good for a first try,

im no expert on skins but if you smoothed out the edge between the blue and gray on the main fusaleage it would look better.

[2ace]

Thanks Stokes, after looking at it again i agree that it looks a little too sharp i think i'll add a little blur to fix that.

[Krusty]

For many reasons, that may be one of the harder skins to start out on. It's a first-generation skin, and it has mirror issues and other bugs in how the skin is mapped onto the 3D mesh.

On the other hand, sometimes these skins can be very useful to get you into the right "mindset" -- that is, teach you how to manipulate the pixels more to get what you want.

A few tips:

- Move mouse cursor off the screen when taking screenshots

- The number on the cowling: move it back to avoid the warping on the leading edge. Tweak it. You might have to sacrifice historical accuracy to work on some of these old skins. The real plane may have the number at the very front of the cowling, but on the skin it may be better to move it backwards a tad. There was a time when the 109E had to be mirrored left and right, so I had to make the number on the side "8" instead of "11".

- The star on your port side is irregular and requires tweaking. The leading edge is pushed backwards (into the roundel) and it doesn't look right

- When you work with colors, and where they end or where they meet, you want to alias the demarcation. You can decide how much "blur" it will have, but as-is you have saw-tooth patterns on your nose where the light blue meets the dark blue uppers. Depending on how you do this, you might try using a different tool, or creating a new selection with "alias" eneabled, or just going-over the saw-tooth edge with a brush and/or eraser tool to fix it.

- On older skins like this, they often default to 256x256. Make sure you up-scale it to 1024x1024 before doing any work!!! You will have to redo all the details from scratch, as these old skins never came in hi-res. No template to work off of. All skins must be 1024x1024 for HTC to accept them as submissions, and even if you never plan to submit it, it would still be good to practice in the "full scale"!


Keep at it! I see some areas that need improvement, but it always feels good to get that first skin out of the way.

[2ace]

Thanks Krusty. I chose this skin because it didn't have many details so i thought it might be easier,and I already sized it up to 1024x1024. I'm not sure if i will submit it yet.

I found this while looking for kill tallies and things like that. Do you think it is historically accurate.

[Krusty]

As a new skinner, I will suggest you find multiple sources, get a collaborative feel for how the plane should look. There may even be historic WW2 photos that tell you excatly how the kill tallies looked. Make sure you have more than 1 source. More than 2. As many as you can, to the point you're confident about how it should look.

That lets you concentrate on how your skills make it look, rather than how it "should" look. If you really can't find any sources, asking on this forum may help. There are many very helpful people, that would love to scan a page from a book in their library. I just wouldn't bank entirely on that, as folks may be busy, may not have anything, or cannot find anything like you ask. A friendly forum, but not always capable of answering every question. (I say that only to prevent folks from getting upset if a question is unanswered)

 

[Motherland]

ctrl c ctrl v from Sol's thread

First off I like to do rivets in white. Seems like a personal thing among skinners, majority are black but many use white as well. Just something to consider.
For both the panel lines and rivets (while the rivets are still black-- I do them in black and then invert), duplicate the layer and use a gaussian blur. I set that layer to around 20-25 depending. This gives a look of dirt buildup around the panel lines, the panel rounding into the panel line, gives a bit of an uneven 'this is sheet metal' look where the rivets are, and most importantly cuts a bit of the edge off of the panel lines, which IMO (at least on my skins) look very pronounced and almost out of place without this.

Another thing I like to do with panel lines is use several (3-5 usually I think) panel layers with different opacities. These are doors, access hatches, control surface joints, plain old 'new panel starts here' etc... gets rid of the monotony a bit.

Also... the devil is in the details. Painting is easy, weathering is where the difficulty lies.

[2ace]

Motherland, if you have the time would you mind giving me a few tips on weathering? I am not really sure where to start, what places to weather and what to do to get the proper look.