Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Custom Skins => Topic started by: SD67 on November 23, 2005, 05:42:28 AM
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Started work on an il2 skin
I'm looking for pics of the il2 in the white winter colours but I've had little luck on the web, so I've contacted the VVS in Russia to see if they can give me any info.
Anyway I've done some work in preparation, I've improved a little on the default skin i think, there may yet be some more tweaks to it before I'm ready to colour it. I've got a long way to go, this is just the first of three (or maybe more) sections that I have to do think and I'm doing Ok so far for my first skin attempt.
let me know what you all think.
(http://members.dodo.com.au/~peteandsarah/IL2M32post.jpg)
Cheers.
Pete.
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Well il2 is coming along, I've still had no luck in finding pictures I can reliably use for HTC for the colouring.
How hard do you think it is to get pics of the il2 in what I gather was it's most common white colour?
I'm still waiting for a reply from the VVS. One of my squaddies has some colour pics of the il2 he is going to send me, hopefully I'll be able to find what I need there.
Pressing on...
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(http://www.dangreve.com/il2.jpg)
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Sure, white was the most common, but wasn't it often a white-washed white, that wore off? I'm fairly sure a wide variety of shades would be considered "accurate" -- so just eyeball it. :)
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SD67 said:
think I'm doing Ok so far for my first skin attempt.
Damn good work for anybody, let along a 1st attempt. Very good attention to detail. My only criticism would be that you need to change the color of some of the panel lines. This is because on real planes, they don't all look the same. It's like this..
First off, the big question is whether you're going to put the panel lines above or below the paint layer. I personally put them below, then make the paint layer about 85% opacity so the lines show through, and this also thins the color a bit which, IMHO, makes it look a bit more realistic on the finished product. Just like on a plastic kit. So I use darker colors for my lines than those who put the lines on top of the paint. But either way you do it, you still need to change some of the colors.
Anyway, the gray you're using is pretty good for joints between fixed, flush skin panels. At such joints, there's about a 1/8" gap between the edges of adjacent panels, but this gap is almost always filled with putty to reduce drag and keep out water. When the plane gets painted, the result is just a ripple in the surface, making these joints almost invisible from the distances you'd see the plane in the game. OTOH, the Russians often omitted the putty in the interests of speedy production, in which case these lines would be much more obvious.
For the edges of raised panels, such as doublers, fillets, and some inspection plates, use a darker gray to make these lines much more obvious. Putting a 3D effect on these lines is, IMHO, overkill, because it either makes the line look incised into the surface or makes the panel appear too thick.
For lines representing moveable panels, such as cowlings, gun bays, fuel fillers, etc., you pretty much need to use black. This is because there's usually a real gap around these edges, or continuous use has bent them slightly so they don't fit perfectly anymore. Then, if you put these lines under the paint, you need to erase the paint over them. If that makes the line look too obvious or wide, go back over it with a very light coat of paint, like 25% opacity at 50% coverage, so you end up with a dotted line of various shades, but still very dark. On the finished product, this gives you a thin, dark line.
As I said, I put my lines below the paint, so I typically use 0,0,0 for the moveable lines, 80,80,80 for the raised edges, and 120,120,120 for the fixed panels. I also use 150,150,150 for my flush rivets and 80,80,80 for domeheads and dzus fasteners. Even if you put your stuff on top, you can use darker colors and just turn down their opacity until they look right on top of your paint. You can dim dark lines as much as you want, but you can't make light lines darker without redoing them.
Otherwise, I just have some advice. I can't tell how many layers you're showing in your pic there, but if you've got all that on just 1 layer, I STRONGLY recommend you separate it out so that the stuff for each part of the plane is on its own layer. Not just that, but put the rivets for each part on a different layer than the panel lines for that part. Do the same when you apply the paint. You'll end up with 40-50 layers by the time you're finished with the skin, but it's definitely worth all that so you can tweak each aspect of each part of the plane individually. This is especially useful if you put the lines under the paint, because they show up differently through different paint colors. It also makes it easier to clean up your overspray on the paint layers, so you don't have to redo lower surfaces when you get upper surface paint on them.
I look forward to seeing the finished product. Keep up the good work.
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Thank you all for the kind words and advice.:D
Especially thank you to Waffle for the pics.
Indeed, I do belive that it was often the case that they sprayed white over the existing colouring and it did flake off in places often in large chunks, so I may incorporate this in the skin I do, making a camoflague basecoat and then placing the white coat over that, flaking and weathering it to display just that effect.
I'll keep researching and hopefully I'll find some examples I can submit for that.
I am using layers to do each detail item, I use layers in my CAD work for that very reason, so I can pull a specific part off the aircraft I'm working on to tweak it. Basically, I am following Fester's tutorial, but I am using PSPX instead of photoshop.
This is incidentally the first time I've worked with PSPX as well, so it's been a learning experience in more ways than one.:cool:
I do intend to use blurring and shading to break up the apprearance of the solid colour in the lines.
It will likely take me some time to get it finished, but thank you all for the support, I'll be posting progress notes soon.
:aok
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Blurring in theory sounds good but doesn't work too well in practice. It takes the selection being blurred, makes it 30% opaque, copies it, shifts up up and right, so there's 30% there, and copies it again and shifts it down and left so there's 30% there. Something like that. So if you take a larger selection and you do this, the edges become softer but the "core" of the selection is still 100%. If your selection is only 1 pixel's width it doesn't work so well.
Just fair warning.
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Roger that, I'll keep it in mind.
The end product will probably incorporate a combination of effects.
Thanks muchly for the advice.:aok
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I did one thing on one of my 190s I submitted. It looked okay in the end. You duplicate the original layer so you always have it. Blur a copy of it once or twice. Put a copy of the original on top of that, and reduce the opacity so that it adds to the presence of the panel lines but is tempered by the blurred layer. I would add the shadow carefully. I'd not blur the shadow too badly because then either the panel lines or the shadow obscure each other some way or another. There's lots you can do, but be prepared to make a composite (i.e. not just 1 layer)
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SD67 said:
I do intend to use blurring and shading to break up the apprearance of the solid colour in the lines.
It took me reading the other folks' posts for this to sink in..
IMHO, blurring lines just ain't realistic. They're the hard edges of sheets of metal, either cut on a straight line or on regular curve. No waviness or blurriness at all. And for the vast majority of cases on any particular plane, panel lines shouldn't cast a shadow, either.
On a lot of the stock skins, and an quite a few folks here have made, you'll see most of the panel lines having like a 3D effect, basically composed of a very dark and a very light line side-by-side. When this is done on all the lines, it makes them all look like 1" wide, 3" deep, V-shaped trenches gouged into the plane's skin. I guess folks think panel lines need to be "inscribed" and otherwise highly visible, because that's how they are on most plastic kits they've built. However, this is not at all how panel lines look in real life. Sometimes you'll also see this 2-line type of effect around selected panels instead of all of them, which makes the surrounded panel appear raised like 2" above the rest of the surface. While the panel in question might well have been raised above the others, this amount of highlighting is total overkill.
Airplane skin is very thin sheet metal. In most places, it's only 1/8 - 3/16" thick at most. That means the deepest any skin panel line is in real life is about 3/16", due to the underlying structural member that the edges of the meeting panels are riveted to. Similarly, any raised panel is only going to be 1/8" - 3/16" above its surroundings. Where adjacent panels meet, there's usually a gap between their edges of about the same size: 1/8" - 3/16". As mentioned in a post above, with fixed panels this gap is almost always filled with putty, but even where it isn't, it's still a very tiny gap. And that's the MAX width of most panel lines on real planes.
Now think about how this relates to pixels. The typical single-engined WW2 plane was about 30', or 360" long. On our skins, that's usually the full 1024-pixel width. This gives us 2.84 pixels/inch. IOW, each pixel is between 1/3" and 1/2" wide, depending on which plane you're skinning.
This means that 1 pixel is already 3-4 times too wide for most panel lines on a plane, or for the height any panel would be raised above the rest. When you go making each panel line 2 or more pixels wide, including various shading effects, you really make the lines WAY too big and noticeable.
The same applies to rivets, for that matter. In real life, most rivets on skin panels have heads only 1/4" in diameter or so. This means 1 pixels is still about twice a big as a rivet in real life. Furthermore, on the vast bulk of WW2 planes, nearly all the rivets were countersunk with flush heads, to reduce drag. This made them nearly invisible, even on bare metal planes. It certainly precluded them from casting any sort of shadow. So again, using more than 1 pixel per rivet is extremely excessive, except in those few places on planes where they used really big fasteners, such as main spar joints.
There are some special cases that are exceptions to these general rules. For instance, early- to mid-war Russian planes often did without the putty in the points, although this was frowned upon and efforts were made to force factories to use it. Also, late-war German planes seem to have had dimpled skin instead of countersunk holes, which made even their flush rivets much more visible than you'd expect. But by and large, most panel lines and nearly every rivet should be very small, 1 pixel at most, and usually pretty light, to try to make them look the correct size. If you want to show a raised panel edge, or a domehead rivet, use a darker color, but usually it's inappropriate to use more than 1 pixel.
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The blurring isn't for radiating a blurred fade outward, it's for point-to-point panel lines that take an angle, and as such are "stepped" along the way. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't.
In real life almost all panel lines were so tightly butted against each other you wouldn't see them. You'd only see access panels and removable parts.
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There's also a touch of art that goes into skins, and sometimes a touch of "comic book" art goes a long way in a computer game..
Over-exaggerating some features is sometimes benificial to give the the object a certain overall impression or look...especially in games. Making it match the virtual "world" that it's in.
Granted there is a fine-line between "looks good" and "looks gaudy" as sometimes the over-exagerating can get "overdone" ...lol :)
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Krusty said:
The blurring isn't for radiating a blurred fade outward, it's for point-to-point panel lines that take an angle, and as such are "stepped" along the way. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't.
No need for fancy blurring and layering with offsets there. Just turn your line-drawing tool to anti-alias mode and it does all that by itself in 1 pass when you connect the 2 points. Looks like that's what SD7 had already done on his lines in the pic.
In real life almost all panel lines were so tightly butted against each other you wouldn't see them.
Actually, they always have a small gap like I said. This is to allow for thermal expansion and for the whole structure to flex under aerodynamic loads. Both of these processes would in time sheer off the rivets or wallow out their holes if the panel edges were in actual contact. But such a gap causes drag, plus can be a way for water to get inside the plane, so that's why they fill the gap with putty (actually called sealant).
The sealant is usually black and when it sets, it's flexible, kinda like the silicone caulk you use around the house. The flexibility lets it move with the structure and still stay stuck in there. It eventually, over the course of years, dries up and falls out of the gap, but you only really notice this on display planes that have been outside for like 10 years with no maintenance.
The sealant fills up the gap between the panels, although it dries with a very slightly dished-in miniscus along the length of the gap. If the plane isn't painted, the panel line is fairly visible as a very thin black line across the silver surface. Due to the excessive size of our pixels, however, you need to use a medium gray shade to make the line look thinner than it really is. On a painted plane, however, there's only a very slight color difference to the panel line, due to it being basically just a low, narrow ripple in the paint.
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Waffle BAS said:
There's also a touch of art that goes into skins, and sometimes a touch of "comic book" art goes a long way in a computer game. ... Granted there is a fine-line between "looks good" and "looks gaudy" as sometimes the over-exagerating can get "overdone"
Yeah, that's why, despite saying what I just did, I make my panel lines and rivets more visible than IMHO they really should be. But I try hard to minimize them.
I think a big part of it is expectations. Many folks who play this game have built models all their lives without having the chance to crawl all over, let alone build, real planes, so think that real planes had the exaggerated features found in plastic kits. So they either make their skins to match, or expect that in the skins they get from others.
At the bottom line, however, it's all pretty moot. All this discussion is about features that nobody in the game will ever notice during combat. The only time anybody will see rivets and panel lines is looking out their own side window, and most times they'll be looking at distant nmes instead of the wing you spent so much time on anyway :D. So it's really just a matter of personal style that has no real effect on the appearance of the skin as seen by most players at most times.
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Good points all.
I do aircraft design and analysis and am actually building an experimental at the moment, so I can fully understand where you guys are going with the construction methods.
I'll probalby make some modifications to the panel lines as you have suggested. I've already added a 3D effect as per the method described by Citabria in his Fester tutorial, however I can see where this may tend to be unsufficient in places to fully detail things like the access panels, I'll make them a little less opaque and see how that works.
Thanks again for the feedback!