United said:I was wondering if there are any tips on adding weathering damage to plane skins. I've been doing it lately by color change and placing each different pixel in the spot.
You need a better editor
. With something like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, you just rough it out and then blur it (sometimes using different types of blurring sequentially) to get a more realistic effect.
As to your specific questions, I wouldn't worry about damage too much. Heavy damage either leads to the destruction of the plane (either shot down or hangar-queened for parts) or puts the plane in a repair depot for weeks, after which it emerges rebuilt without scars in the structure (although the new paint might not match up with the old). So the only damage you'd see on planes still in the line would be a patch here and there over the odd bullet or fragment hole, and these in unimportant places. If they were in important places, the plane would fit into one of the above categories.
Repairs on sheet metal parts of the plane were usually done by cutting a piece of sheet metal slightly bigger than the hole off a hangar queen. This was then riveted over the hole, usually with dome-head fasteners. This type of repair is quite visible because the patch itself stands proud above the surrounding skin, and the fasteners usually stand proud above the patch. So this would result in very noticeable panel lines and rivets. As to painting the patch, this was a function of time and resources. The top end would be primer and then paint to match the surrounding area, which would be a little brighter than the original paint due to no fading and not as much grime on it yet. Or it might just be primed or not painted at all.
Repairs on fabric parts were usually done just by gluing a fabric patch over the hole. These were usually just a an inch or 2 square and if painted over, would be invisible on a skin except as a tiny area of fresh paint. OTOH, sometimes such patches were proudly displayed as honorable battle scars, so were painted red, or with the national roundels, or whatever.
But anyway, in AH2 damage sustained in a sortie will be displayed on the plane in real time as decals of bulletholes. So there's another reason not to worry much about damage effects.
As to weathering, that's a great subject for artistic license. Every skinner has his own opinion
. There are actually 3 questions involved here: What type of weathering? Where to put it? And how to do it?. Types include stains from exhaust, fluid leaks, and gunsmoke, as well as paint chipping and servicing scars. Where needs to take into account the mechanism that causes the weathering, so you put it in logical and realistic places. The how is pretty simple once you get past these hurdles, if you have a good editor.
IMHO (and my experience working on airplanes new and old), paint chipping happens for 3 reasons. The major cause is from people walking and working there. So wing walkways and the areas where mechanics and armorers sit or stand all the time (forward wing roots near the engine and around wing gunbays)get heavy chipping. The next biggest cause is what I call servicing scars. This happens on parts that people don't stand on, but touch a lot with tools and/or remove from the plane a lot (and sometimes drop in the process). This includes the removeable panels around the engine, gun/ammo bays, and hand-holes to control linkages, as well as fuel filler caps and such. These panels get scratches from slipping screwdrivers, have ammo belts dragged over them, get set on the ground so get scuffed around the edges, etc. The least important source of paint chipping is stuff hitting the leading edges, which only becomes really significant in sandy areas and even then often doesn't go as overboard as many modelers do it
. Likewise, I have never seen a real plane with noticeable paint chips around the control surfaces.
So, the big area is where people do a lot of work. In such areas, the people are trained to stand on underlying structure, so these areas are scraped almost bare. But they can't help stepping on the unsupported skin a lot, so these areas get a random assortment of scrapes and also get dished in. The actual chipping needs to look somewhat marbled. The way I do it is to have a whitish background layer and expose it by waving a 1-pixel-wide eraser on the paint layer to expose the background. I want jagged edges of my chipped area, but the jags need to be as small as possible, and there need to be fingers and frills of both paint and bare metal intermeshing. Then I blur the paint layer and I get the marbled look. For the service scars, just make some small erased areas here and there, especially around the edges and dzus fasteners. And if you know from looking at pics of the plane where unique types of chipping took place, to them. Like in a spit, the pilot got in on the left side and his seatbelt hung over the right side where the buckles scraped arcs in the paint.
Exhaust stains are something that many people, IMHO, get totally wrong. They put all this heavy black on there. But except for some German planes that burned diesel, a lot of black is a sign of a very sick engine that's buring a lot of oil and/or running rough. Such an engine would be yanked off a combat plane and replaced before it did much heavy black staining. Folks should look at more photos, which hardly ever show that heavy black staining.
Healthy engines, OTOH, produce mostly hot air. This blows back against the skin for most of the length of the fuselage and its main effect is discoloring the paint from high heat, usually bleaching it out lighter than originally. Healthy engines also produce a little soot, which accumulates all along the fuselage and dirties up the lighter, bleached paint. It can also accumulate in panel lines and rivet heads, especially if these have been exposed by extensive paint chipping (or never was painted, like the side panels of an La7), so these features would be very visible there. Every once in a while, a healthy engine has a little oil get out the exhaust area, which usually cooks onto the skin in a small, wind-fanned area of black gunk close to an exhaust, but that's the usual extent of heavy black.
The arrangement of the exhaust pipes has a big influence on the exhaust staining. The bleaching effect is most obvious in planes with inline engines or radials with the exhaust collected into a single exhaust. In these cases, you get a thin line that's very bleached in line with the exhaust, due to the heat concentration along there, with sooting to each side of it (as in my Malta spit skin). OTOH, with radials that have a bunch of separate exhausts across the height of the fuselage (ie, FWas, La7), there's not so much heat build-up. So you don't get much bleaching at all, but a wide area of sooting.
Once you know what type of exhaust staining you want, then you have to make it. The way I do it is to put it in a layer on top of everything else, which includes all stains (exhaust, gunsmoke, fluids). This layer is nearly transparent. Then, if I want a multi-exhaust radial, I just use a flat black color (like RGBs in the 60s). If I want an inline or single-exhaust radial, I also use an off-white (RGBs in the 240s) in the middle in line with the exhausts. I use a spraycan tool and rough in the staining in the area I want. It should be shaped to match the airflow in the area. In 1-engine fighters, this usually matches the airfoil section of the wing root, curving first up from the exhausts and then down to somewhere between the wing and the tail (look at photos of the plane you're doing to see for sure). Then blur the Hell outta this paint, using something that streaks it in the direction of the airflow.
Another touch to exhaust staining on the fuselage is to then add
very thin vertical streaks that are pretty dark. This is from when the plane sits out in the rain. The rain washes the soot off and it runs down like the mascara of a crying woman, accumulating on the upper edge of the wingroot fillet. When the water dries, it leaves the vertical streaks. This is something that will have to wait for the high-res skins of AH2, though.
Fluid and gunsmoke stains are done like exhaust stains, but streak straight back in the direction of the airflow. Aviation gasoline usually acts as a solvent for the underlying paint, plus often has a dye in it, so the stain should be a mix of a brighter base color, plus some exposed primer, plus the color of the dye. This sort of stain should usually be only on the lower surfaces, where any leak of fuel will eventually go. Gunsmoke is a touchy subject because you hardly ever see it in photos. I've actually seen it on an F86 in the USAF museum in Dayton, however, so I figure it existed in WW2.
I figure I overdid this on my Malta spit. The F86 I saw had streaks only about 8" long and I did mine for about 4 feet. But you can argue that the spit saw a lot more action
. Who really knows?
