Barker's Camel

[Greebo]

After joining up at the outbreak of war Canadian William Barker served as both an infantryman and air observer before joining the Sopwith Camel-equipped 28 Squadron in October 1917. While not an outstanding pilot Barker was very aggressive and an excellent shot and scored three kills in a month over France before the squadron was transferred to Italy. Here he continued to score heavily, bringing his total to 46 by September 1918. Throughout this period and despite transfers to 66 then 139 squadrons Barker flew Camel B6313 for all his kills, making it the most successful individual fighter aircraft in RAF history. After a brief spell in charge of a flying school in Britain Barker was allowed 10 days at the front in France to refresh his combat experience. On 27th October after shooting down a two seater on a solo flight in a Sopwith Snipe he was bounced by 15 Fokker D.VIIs. In the ensuing fight he was wounded four times but managed to bring down three of his opponents before crash landing his aircraft in friendly territory. After a lengthy recovery from his wounds he was awarded a Victoria Cross for this action. To this day Barker remains the most decorated Canadian soldier, apart from his VC he was awarded two DSOs, three MCs, the French Croix de Guerre and two Italian Sliver Medals for Valour.

I've painted B6313 as it would have appeared at the beginning of its career in France, in Italy it was later adorned with a letter "N" and then black and white stripes and a heart logo on the tail. The skin uses all the latest AHIII effects and consists of no less than twenty 1024 res bmps. One of the things I was looking to do was get a realistic fabric effect using the normal map, particularly on the upper wings.

[Arlo]

Very nice. Very nice, indeed.

[oboe]

It's beautiful, Greebo!

What do you mean "no less than 20 1024 res bumps?"   I can only think of a handful - the basic diffuse map, the environment, Specular, N-map, and the power map.   What else is available?   Or are you talking about something else?

[Skuzzy]

It takes 5 bitmaps to make each texture.  I believe there are 4 textures for the WW1 planes.

[Greebo]

There is one 1024 bmp for the wings and one for the fuselage and tail. Then there are the specular, environment, power and normal bmps for each of those, which makes ten. Then there are copies of each of those with the damaged areas added which makes twenty. In reality it is not as much work as it sounds though. I made six files, two each of the diffuse, specular and normal maps, the other fourteen were just copies of those with some modifications.

I'd guess the eventual file size downloaded by players will be about the same as an AHIII 2048 res bomber skin.

[lyric1]

 

[Devil 505]

You've outdone yourself this time Greebo. 

[Drano]

Eventually you're gonna get the hang of this! 😎

Sent from my XT1585 using Tapatalk

[puller]

Very nice...I will be using this one as my new Camel skin 

[Arlo]

Terrains might draw more players to 'The Great War' arena. (Along side such fantastic skins.)