51B Skin Problems

[Bullethead]

Well, my long, slow learning experience with skinning is drawing to a close.  My P51B --> A36 skin is nearing completion.  I've got most of it how I like it and am doing the finishing touches.  However, I've run into a couple of problems that others who work on this skin might want to know about.

#1.  Right Side Discontinuity
P51BSID.bmp shows full-length skins for each side of the fuselage.  However, that's an illusion.  The right side of the nose actually uses a mirror of the left side's texture, from spinner to about the windshield.  But from there on back, the right side has its own texture so you can have the squadron letters and serial numbers read correctly.  Problem is, the 2 pieces of texture don't line up correctly, the right side being a couple pixels higher than it's corresponding part on the left side.  This results in problems like that shown here:


My main concern here is doing the exhaust stains, which span the joint between the mirrored nose and the unique right side.  I think I can fix this with some judicious tweaking and perhaps compressing, but does anybody have any advice on how to do this the easiest way possible?

#2.  Gear and Bomb Pylons use Wing Skin
I don't think I can fix this problem .  It appears that the bomb pylons and landing gear struts use areas of the lower wing skin for their textures.  And the problem is, the areas they use are right where I've got a stripe and a dive brake.  As a result, I've got yellow gear struts and dive brakes on the pylons, as shown here:


Is there some way to keep this from happening, short of moving the stripe and dive brake?  I don't want to do either because they're located relative to the aileron/flap joint.

And note that the bomb pylon is mounted too far aft anyway.  It should actually be between the leading edge and the panel line at the front of the dive brake.

Thanks in advance for the help.

[Bullethead]

After further fiddling with this thing, I have determined that the pixel discontinuity on the right side isn't the only problem there.  I managed to work around that easily on the fuselage side with the exhaust stains, but that didn't help the As on the tail.

The problem there, unfortunately, is that the right side of the tail uses a different scaling factor than the left side.  So the letters on the right side are taller and further apart than on the left, even though they both use the same number of pixels.  And nothing I can do with it makes it look any better than it does now, so I'm leaving it as is.

Anyway, below is a picture of the completed project.  The right side of the tail now looks better than in the pic above, but it still ain't perfect.  Nothing I could do about the landing gear.

It's based on the A-36A flown by Major John Crowder of the 27th Fighter Bomber Group in Tunisia, Sicily, and Italy.  The plane was named "Dorothy Helen" but due to the mirroring of the nose texture, there wasn't any good way of doing that, so I left it off.

The plane's markings are as of July 1943.  Ealier, the plane had the older-style round stars with yellow rings and the As were on the fuselage, 1 on each side of the star.  As was usual at that time, it had the round stars on the top and bottom of both wings.  When the insignia changed to the winged star with the red surround, it retained all 6 stars and the As moved to the tail.  If you look closely, you can see a slightly different shade of OD paint covering where they used to be on the fuselage.  This is also why the wings on the stars on the wings overlap the older yellow stripe.  The yellow blob above the serial number on the left side is a poison gas indicator--it would change color if exposed to a gas.

If anybody's building another Mediterranean map, feel free to include this skin if you plan on having A36s in the scenario.  Hell, feel free to make it look better if you want, too.  This is, after all, a 1st attempt

[NHawk]

Originally posted by Bullethead
And the problem is, the areas they use are right where I've got a stripe and a dive brake.

To the best of my knowledge no P51 designated as a P51 had dive brakes. Now,The A-36A was an early version of the P-51 provided with dive brakes and underwing racks, to operate in a close-support role.

It looks like you used the P-47 under wing for the P-51.

And, actually the canopy on the P51-D in AH is from an earlier version, quite possibly the A-36. The P51-D has more of a bubble canopy.

The A-36A


The P51-D

[NHawk]

Read your post to quickly. Didn't see the first mention of the A-36.

[Bullethead]

Hey, no problem .  I didn't make it very clear I was doing an A36 and I titled this thread 51B because that's the real name of the skin with the problems.

The yellow wing stripe on my version goes through the landing light instead of the middle of the dive brake as in the A36 in your picture.  Unfortunately, the 51B mirrors the wing textures so I couldn't do the landing light, which is only on the left side.  However, I did change the exhaust stacks from the Merlin's stubs to the Allison's fishtails .