The Scale Effect of Color and Other Considerations

[oboe]

I found this article online the other day, and thought I'd share it.  It talks about our perceptions of color vs scale, and why it is necessary to "lighten" colors of painted models.  The smaller the scale, the lighter the color must be made to achieve a realistic look, according to the author.  This isn't the first time I've run across this idea - in fact some where on the web I once ran across a color table that showed standard colors and their lightened variants based on the scale of the model.   Even though we are not building models here, I find what the author says makes sense.   

Anyway, submitted for your consideration, "THE SCALE EFFECT OF COLOR AND OTHER CONSIDERATIONS", by Mark Gerges of the Prison City Modelers

http://leavenworthmodelersclub.org/member-articles/the-scale-effect-of-color-and-other-considerations/

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[Devil 505]

It's a great topic of discussion as there are a bunch of modelling techniques that can be adapted to skinning.

However, scale effect needs to be handled differently in AH than with plastic models. Greebo was the first to notice that with the lighting system in AH3, he needed to darken his camouflage colors more compared to the versions of those same colors in AH2. The key to achieving scale effect in AH3 is in desaturating the colors so that they are not bold. As we've seen with some of the recent debate over marking colors in various threads, even colors that should be relatively bold need to be significantly toned down in order to look realistic.

[oboe]

Yes, I think AH's lighting is significantly different than real world lighting.   I feel like in AH, there is relatively much more direct lighting and less ambient lighting than real world.

[Vraciu]

White flares in sun, dark colors turn purple in shadow.  It is challenging to get right. 

I've noticed my dark green looks fine in the cockpit but at certain times of day looks dark externally from some angles.

[oboe]

I think the light colors flaring is a result of the super intense direct lighting.  It effects whites, yellows, light greys.   The only solution we have to this is to darken the color, which may look incorrect in our diffuse map, but ok in game.

Voracious brings up another important differece.  While models are viewed exclusively from outside, our skins can be viewed from inside the cockpit or outside.  Makes it even more challenging.   I have been almost exclusively judging by how it looks externally, but in the next skin I’m trying to tweaking it to look better from inside the cockpit as well.

Voracious?   Really, spell-check?  Really?

[Vraciu]

Originally my priority was entirely internal.  I'll sometimes lean toward external so long as it still looks good from the inside.  But I often spend a lot of energy on things nobody will ever even see.  Seams, joints, panel line continuity, etc.  Some things I only notice when I'm using the viewer.   The average player will never notice.   But, it gives me something to do to kill time.