Silver finish as opposed to BMF

[Krusty]

Question: What are the various thoughts regarding "silver" finish, rather than BMF?

The recent mossie upgrade and the silver dope skin for it got me thinking. Also it's found on P-51 wings (which were painted silver rather than bare metal). With BMF you have a certain look, but would silver necessarily look the same way? I assume the color striations/variations would be minimal, as it wouldn't be as reflective?

How does one pull this effect off?

[maddafinga]

Question: What are the various thoughts regarding "silver" finish, rather than BMF?

The recent mossie upgrade and the silver dope skin for it got me thinking. Also it's found on P-51 wings (which were painted silver rather than bare metal). With BMF you have a certain look, but would silver necessarily look the same way? I assume the color striations/variations would be minimal, as it wouldn't be as reflective?

How does one pull this effect off?

I don't know about doing it in a skin, but I've seen planes at airshows and at the Lone Star Flight Museum side by side that were bare metal and silver paint, and there is a difference.  Even from a fair distance you can tell.  Not sure exactly how, but they just seem different.  Not that I was much help here I'm afraid, just throwing in my .02 based on seeing it in real life.

[oboe]

I agree, I think there is a difference and we should try to show it

My thoughts:

The silver-painted service would be more uniform in color, whereas the bare metal would have a component of reflected sky (maybe a sight blue tint).
Also the the aluminum sourced for panels may be naturally different shades, and so panel sections would have different shades in BMF, but they would be uniform if painted silver.

[Krusty]

Good point!

The lack of reflectivity may also be why they look different to maddafinga. Might indicate all the shadows, highlights, and nuances of BMF would be missing or very subtle, I would guess.

[Knite]

Definitely there's a difference in reflectivity, but we can't do that difference in AH.

What I did for my P-51 skin was that I actually created it in BMF, and then painted a brighter shade of grey over the metal, and did NOT shade the paint... i.e. typically for my bare metal I brighten/darken the grey color to make it look like more light reflects off the metal, then I took a lighter shade of grey (slightly spotted to look like a metallic paint) and did not do the same reflection effect.


I kind of like how it turned out. (Compare tail, around the call numbers, wings/flaps/wing roots and nose around engine vs. under pilot, trim tabs, and wing ends)

[Baumer]

I have a few color photo's that I thought might be helpful (I'm new at this so skinning stuff but I think they help show the difference you'd want to achieve)

First here are a few B-25's fresh at the factory that show the bare (unpolished) aluminum and painted fabric control surfaces. I have these images in much higher resolution if you need them.







I worked on this B-25 restoration for 4 years and we had to paint the aluminum since it had been badly pitted and stained during its use as a sprayer. It was decided to color match the silver originally used on the fabric surfaces. This is the same color NAA used on the wings of the P-51. [NOTE: there was gloss added to the paint that should not be present] 



I'm sure if you look for more images of "Maid in the Shade" it would help you compare how the silver paint should look compared to the bare aluminum.

Hope that helps Krusty,

<S> Baumer



 

[Greebo]

When I did my silver doped Mosquito I used a slightly darker shade of grey for the base colour than I would use for BMF. The metal type effects I used was tinting the upper surfaces blue, the lower surfaces green and adding some white highlighted areas. However I kept these effects a lot more subtle than on a BMF plane. I also did the trick of making two sets of panel line highlights, one above and one below the markings. Silver paint does reflect its surroundings more than any other colour would, just not as much as BMF. Without these effects it just looked like glossy grey paint.

[oboe]

These are all excellent comments, and the pics of the B-25s really help.   I think this suggests too, a different parameter setting for specularity in the material.txt file between a silver-painted versus BMF finish.   

[Krusty]

You would definitely need to tweak the materials.txt file to suit your end-product.

[Saxman]

I wish HTC would update skins to include separate Spec maps. The problem with the material.txt is that IIRC, it applies the specularity to the ENTIRE skin, not just certain parts of it. I'd love to be able to set varying specularity to different parts of a skin (IE, high spec for BMF and polished aluminum, with a more matte finish for painted areas).

[Greebo]

IIRC when specularity maps for skins was brought up a few years ago HTC said it would take too many resources to implement. Each skin would need a large additional file and you are talking about a lot of skins. I agree it would be nice to have though.

[Saxman]

A Spec Map would just be an additional Grayscale or RGBA image. If they were to go with a simple Grayscale for spec only (no color, just shininess) you're not looking at anything bigger than the diffuse map already used. And if HTC is concerned about the performance hit or the download times, they can make it an option to turn on/off. If you turn off Spec Mapping, you don't download the file, simple as that. HTC can default it to "Off" to prevent unwanted downloads of the extra files. To simplify things, they could even restrict Spec Mapping to only the 1024x1024 skins. If you use a lower resolution there's no Spec Map to download at all.