SurClaro Flight Simulator Resources

RD, I took a long look at the Hot Rod aircraft for CALX, looked at how you set up the alpha channel, and how you compiled it. For me, bare metal textures have been sort of the Holy Grail of aircraft painting; I have done some really cool stuff but never been able to do the polished steel look. Until now.

http://home.earthlink.net/~calxpress/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/fa-emb1.jpg

http://home.earthlink.net/~calxpress/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/fa-emb2.jpg

http://home.earthlink.net/~calxpress/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/fa-emb3.jpg

Man, I don't know how to tell you how jazzed I am about this. You KNOW how jazzed I am about shiny planes, and after maybe an hour and a half, a couple of false starts....here it is. I have painted planes for FS since 1997, maybe hundreds of planes over those years, and for me, this is the single most important development in my learning painting. Again, RD, thanks a million dude.

Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2006 11:30 pm Post subject:

Unfrickkin' believable.

Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2006 12:20 am Post subject: bravo...

Bravo and welcome to the chrome club.

Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2006 3:59 am Post subject:

Yeah, thanks. Now I need to learn restraint. I wanna chrome an A380...MUAHHAHAHAHAH!!!!

Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2006 7:32 am Post subject:

Thanks man, I appreciate it. I taught myself, by looking at other textures and the "forbidden" alpha channels. Then I just started playing with them.

You did the same. My hat also tips to you, for wanting to learn how to do it. Most just want it, and not look into how it was done.

BRAVO, you nailed it. A pat on the back from me to you, for doing so.

And the pic looks awesome. GOOD JOB. (dam, now I'm outta work again !!!)

RD

Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2006 4:05 pm Post subject:

ROFL!!!! Sorry you're out of work, but that's exactly what I did was look at the alpha's and figured it out from there. I reverse complied the Hot Rod aircraft 3 or 4 times, look at the alpha, saved it, broke down the tint on it, etc. I screwed up the resaving a few times, good thing I backed it up so I could start over. But it's not hard now that I know how to do it, the only really time consuming thing on the Embraer was making the alpha channel plate because of all the little detail crap that had to be painted out of it. I'm still making small modifications to just the alpha but I'm about 99% there already. I'm going to start working on weathering and polished metal now, like having the paint in places thin enough that the metal begins to show through.

Posted: Sat Oct 28, 2006 5:39 am Post subject:

Good stuff Peter.

Play with it, experiment with it. And yeah, you do have to change the plates or tint when you want to paint over the chrome stuff. Once you get it, you got it. Everything else, is just a little pain in the butt details. But they are needed to get what you want.

Welcome to a new world of chrome.

RD

Posted: Sat Oct 28, 2006 3:50 pm Post subject:

Last night I sort of played with jet engine parts, doing "blue alpha" paints on them to represent heated titanium or other metals. If you've ever seen exhaust parts they have a sort of blue tint to them. So far so good, small details but on an aircraft with some nice engine detailing like the POSKY 767, it's a beautiful small detail. The next thing I want to tackle is gold foil coloring on fuselage stripes.

My current test bed is an SGA/FFX 737-500, with great panel lines. Right now it's just mild with chrome engine intakes and a chrome lower fuselage...and chrome reg markings. Smile

But this is the aircraft I'm doing my colored chrome experiments with. The texture plates are simple and creating or modifying the alpha's is not a major time expense.

http://home.earthlink.net/~calxpress/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/7375chrome.jpg

I've also found that by taking the alpha layer and adding "noise" to it through a photo editing program will get you a brightly polished stainless steel look, not the mirror finish of the chrome but something about 10% less reflective. This is perfect for wings and control surfaces. I'm still working with this effect but once I get a nice desired look I'll post it too. I don't know if anyone else has tried this, if they have I never saw a posting about it so I just toyed with it.

More stuff later.