Gabby Gabreski

[Nomde]

Hi Gents,
Here's my latest almost ready for posting. Please give me your thoughts on any mods plz.

This skin is for the P47-D25

Francis "Gabby" Gabreski of the 56th FG was the USAAF leading ace in the European theater of operations with 28 kills. In July of '44, Gabby had just returned from his last operation and there's was a flight getting ready to go out. The operation was going into an area where he thought there would be a chance for another kill, so he decided to ready up. During this last flight, Gabby was strafing a German field and got too low while extending, and the prop of his plane clipped the farmland and he had to ditch. He was captured and spent the remainder of the war as a POW.

This plane is a rendition of Gabby's plane in June of '44. The invasion strips are still visible from d-day operation.









This one was just a fun one as I thought the sun background looked cool

[United]

Very very nice, but JPEGs dont do it justice.  I know it looks even better in game.

Keep up the good work!

[nopoop]

Bruahahahaha !!!

GREAT WORK !!

WE HAVE A FUGGIN SQUAD !!!

See my post

[nopoop]

Only thing I noticed besides your control surface shadowing which is great and I NEED to learn, is back off the opacity of the kill flags. They stand out, and they shoudn't.

You givin jug lessons ??

Huh ?????

[Sp4de]

Garden NOMDE!!!!!!!! lolololol wtg:rofl

[Nomde]

Yep, Gabby's got alot of those little flags on that plane doesn't he. Then he goes and chooses to put the german national flag on instead of the standard black crosses. After I had reduced one of those flags to proper size (bout 12 pixel width), it looked so bad I had to fiddle with it for a couple hours just to make it look right.

I'm a insomniac anyways and it gave me something to do, hehe

Lessons....
Hmmmm... 2 sheep an a case of sam adams and ya got a deal

Just give me a shout when we in the main arena nopoop, we can hook up in DA and i'll show ya what little I know


Ok, here's a closer view of the skin with the kills opacity set to 50%.

[Octavius]

Great skin Nomde!!

Hate to spoil the party, but do those kill flags, being swastikas, violate the terms of approval?

[Nomde]

Nopoop,
To create the shading try playing with this....

1. First, mask out an elongated rectangle along the edge you want to make a shadow over, make sure it's at the right angle you want. the witdh of the mask will determine how far out the feathering (gradiant) will go.
2. In the palette option, the forground will be black, and the background should be set to no color.
3. Goto the brush setup and use one with a larger size then the mask.
4. Goto the forground color setup and instead of using a solid color, set it to gradiant.

Now here's where it might be different for you, depending on what program used for painting. I use PSP 8.1 and they have a number of gradiant option. I can set the style of gradiant, forground to background feathering, or visa versa, and I can set the angle of the gradiant too.

5. I'll set the angle of the gradiant to the proper angle of the surface i'm working with, and make sure the masked portion is where I want the gradiant shadow.
6. I have the gradiant set to forground to background color.
7. Using the brush I setup earlier, I'll make a pass over the masked area and try to do it in one pass. successive passes just doesn't look right to me, so it usually takes me a couple tries.

Hope this helps bro

[Nomde]

Originally posted by Octavius
do those kill flags, being swastikas, violate the terms of approval?

Good Question Oct, i'll Have to check in with HT and get a calling on this. I thought that ruling was in effect for the larger prints on the tail of the german planes. To be honest, i didn't even have a second thought on this, thx for bringing it to my attention.

The flag as is it, is hardly discernable. I had to work with the flag for awhile before it even looked right from a reasonable distance. I can change the flags to the more standard black crosses lined in white, makes it easier too.

I guess it'll come down to historical accuracy vs German Law.

[Furball]

Nice skin, but this isn't true : -

Originally posted by Nomde

Francis "Gabby" Gabreski of the 56th FG was the allies leading ace in the European theater of operations with 28 kills.  

[Nomde]

Please enlighten me kind sir

[Furball]

leading allied ace in ETO? with 28? well, if you are not including soviet aces, Johhnie Johnson had 38 victories (all single engined fighters)

http://www.wings-fine-arts.com/johnniejohnson.htm

[Guppy35]

Since I'm not a skin maker, I hate to be critical, but a couple of things stand out.

First, and I don't know if it's possible, but the windscreen and canopy frame was silver on his bird.  See the included color scan.  Also note in the image that there is a white rectangle outlined in red, that I imagine had Gabby's name along with his crew chief and armoror in it.


And I'm not convinced that the fuselage stripes looked that way.  If you look at the black and white image included, the white clearly goes 'under' the star and bar and it sure seems to be black between the white.


I've seen the fuselage stripes done that way on models etc, but I wonder if, like with William Shomo's P51 "The Flying Undertaker", that the marks left from masking the stripes has been misinterpeted as an outline.

Needless to say, if all the great 56th FG skins get in the game, and enough folks get together in the air with them, it will make for one heckuva screenshot

Dan/Slack

[nopoop]

My scanners on the blink but on page 69 of Osprey's Thunderbolt aces of the eighth air force there's a picture of his plane with a crowd around it. The stripes are as Nomde painted. No filled in black, just thin stripes ala' this plate.





Jeez now I gotta mess with my scanner...Oh I wanted to do THAT today...

[Nomde]

Furball,
Thanks for the correction, I should have noted he was the highest scoring USAAF pilot. Correction edited in previous post. Salute. Here's some good info on Gabby, I like the second link best as it gives a more complete history.

Gabby Gabreski
Gabby's History

Guppy,
Thanks for the input bro, this is how we get the most historical accurate planes as possible.... input/critique.

1. Now for me to enlighten you on some aspects of the P47 cockpit painting....
On the subject of the cockpit, I worked for hours trying to get that puppy silver without affecting the left wing root. I finally had to reverse engineer the mapping of the cockpit on the page - input more hours....
Apparently, when the powers that be mapped the 3d model to the 2d surface, which gets painted, they mapped the lower left wing root to the same area as the cockpit center. So, the cockpit needs to be the same color on this model.
To make matters worse, it was double mapped depending on the angle of view you have. When you have an external view of the cockpit with the pilot visible, the paint error is greater then when you move position where the pilot disappears. It's hard to explain this if you're not familiar to the P47 painting, i'll take some time to redo this and post a couple shots....

2. The white rectangle outlined in red has been added, thanks. I was looking at that and was wondering weather to model it or not, you convinced me to change my ways

3. I'm not sure what you mean on this 3rd critique. The white stripe does go below the stars and bars exactly as shown and all pictures I have seen of Gabby's plane show the black strips removed from the fuse. The paint there was an olive drab.

In painting this rendering of Gabby's plane, I used as many references as possible, all of which show the left side of Gabby's plane. I used model references to show the topside and rightside angles and I tried to get it as close as possible. As far as the cockpit, I can redo the wingroot color to seagrey camo and paint the cockpit the same color, this may be the best compromise.

Thanks again for the input gents