O Danny Boy (RAAF P-40E)

[Devil 505]

Kittyhawk Mk. I (RAF spec P-40E) flown by Flight Sergeant Lloyd "Danny" Boardman of No. 3 Squadron RAAF in the summer of 1942.  In this plane,  Boardman would score his first victory somewhere between Tobruk and El Alamein on June 24th. He would score another before finishing his tour in North Africa in February 1943, having flown 144 sorties. His nickname, Danny, was coined because of his popular renditions of the Irish folk song, "Danny Boy".

This aircraft features the standard tropical paint scheme of Dark Earth and Middle Stone over Azure Blue. Heavy oil staining can be seen aft of the engine cowling. The nose art depicts the popular comic strip character "Snifter" just after relieving himself on the palm tree emblem of the German Afrika Korps.

[FTJR]

Very nice, i like the soot on the leading edge..

[lyric1]

 

[Greebo]

Great job on the skin Devil.

Given that screenshots are almost always taken with the engine running I'd suggest ditching the propeller blade holes on the spinner though. Maybe alter them to directionally blurred holes to give an illusion of movement, these would likely just look like shadows thrown by the blades when the engine's not running.

[Vraciu]

Great job.

I wondered about those holes.   The P-40 is the only plane that seems to do that.

[Devil 505]

Great job.

I wondered about those holes.   The P-40 is the only plane that seems to do that.

The P-40 model has a single rectangle that is used to make the spinner. It wraps around the shape with a single join line that runs from the point to the base. The panel lines for the prop blade holes were on the default skin, I just filled in the holes with black to make the holes complete.

The Bf 110 have the same style of spinner texture, but with a few quirks. The left and right ends don't join on a straight line, there is a step half way to the front. How Greebo was able to make a proper spiral pattern for one I'll never guess. I trashed a whole 110G project last year because the spiral looked so bad.

[Greebo]

Below is the spiral spinner from one of my Bf 110G skins. This also has the prop holes since when I did the skin the 110 model had a second spinner texture that was only used when the spinner was turning. On this texture I deleted the holes and blurred the spiral to give the illusion of motion. Unfortunately this second "in-motion" texture later caused a bug in the game that made spinners vanish so for all those planes that had them the second spinner texture was disabled. When I do another 110 skin I'll likely get rid of the spinner holes.

The way I mapped the spiral was to create a test layer and draw a series of coloured lines vertically across the spinner texture. These appeared as circumferential lines wrapped around the spinner in the skin viewer. Then by trial and error I adjusted the spacing of these lines until they all looked evenly spaced in the viewer. On the bmp they are wider spaced the closer they get to the tip due to the way the texture is projected onto the dome from the side. I then used these test lines as a guide to draw the borders of the white spiral lines. Each white line is roughly the width of one gap between the test lines and each diagonal crosses three test lines from top to bottom. This also needed a fair bit of tweaking to get all the lines to meet correctly at the ends of the texture. If this is a hassle though feel free just to paste this image into your skin as a guide.

[oboe]

Great-looking skin, Devil.  Sorry I just lost it in the MA though, climbing up after an La-7. 

[Devil 505]

Thanks Greebo, I'll give it a shot.

[Devil 505]

Great-looking skin, Devil.  Sorry I just lost it in the MA though, climbing up after an La-7. 

You should have taken a Soviet scheme. The red stars would have given him a false sense of security. 

[Nefarious]

Really great work as always Devil.