I saw this A/C on airliners.net and decided to try and paint it. It's in no way perfect, and is certainly harder that I thought it would be. I was trying to hone my repainting skills and I have run into a frustration or two. Hopefully someone may be able to shed some light on a question that I have, are the blurry textures that I marked the result of how the texture was mapped to the model? Any light shed on that would help a ton! This is still a work in progress so... Enjoy!
My issue...
The fuselage to wing transition seems to look like someone ate a box of crayons and threw up on the aircraft.
I know this isn't an exact science, but is there a way to improve the resolution?
the blurred texture is due to the paint being stretched over the curved surface, the HTAI F16 has the same problem, and you will just have to adjust your paint to make improvements a bit at a time. IE your paint will look nothing like correct but it will stretch and look good on the model,if your not bald now i will give it 2 weeks
F4Nutter-
Thanks for the insight! I've been racking my brain over this, trying every little trick I think I know. I decided in my best interest to put this one away for a little while to save my sanity. I kinda figured that no matter how I painted it... it's just not going to be picture perfect! Damn that OCD!!!
And if you look at it from a distance... it looks pretty cool.
Fedfirefighter-
Send me a PM with your E-Mail if you want it. It's not 100% but, I can touch it up and let it go. I was just trying to get an honest opinion on it before I even remotely decided to put it out there. I have an odd feeling that MAIW might already have this in the works for the future (or something along the lines) anyway seeing there was a new hornet release with new models recently that seems to be really popular... and Canada hasn't been represented yet. So you can wait for the masters or you can have this one. The choice is yours.
The issues that you have pointed out will plague AI modellers and painters till the day they die. Especially so on Military Aircraft with lots of parts. See the reason is we try and squeeze all the parts onto 1 bmp to save space when using multiple aircraft models. This is the standard that was set in the original days and is the way things will be done forever as it is the best way.
I'm afraid it is one of those things you and users who use the aircraft will just have to live with. People who complain about such things once they have downloaded the products from talented guys such as yourself are simply not worth worrying about.
Thank you for your response Nick. It's great to hear from the creator of the bug himself. After I repainted this and set it free in my own little piece of "simulated" airspace... I realized that the little things just are the way they are and it looks great on approach and... on the ramp it looks even better! The most important thing is that I am happy with the way it turned out, and those who now have it seem to love it too (I hope). And to have a nod from the creator of it is nice too!
Being new to the repainting aspect I wasn't sure the reasons why I had the result I did. I hope to be able to contribute more when real life doesn't consume every waking minute. Believe me when I say that reguardless of the way some members may have taken my original post and the PM's that I recieved, I was not and am in no way complaining about anything to do with the model. I really love this model and look forward to any future release of other models. I'm sorry to hear that you are leaving the FS world. But, your models will continue to bring hours and hours of enjoyment to not only me, but to all of the MAIW world I'm sure. Thank you for your kind comment and your contributions to this often overlooked part of Flight Simulator.
This is the problem with painting AI. In general the modeller is limited to one bmp to save computer resources and memory. Even worse for Military AI as he must include seperate left and right wings as the markings are not always the same.
The only way I can think to improve the front problem would be not to make it go quite as far up to the top of the fuselage so you have less length of jagged edges, if that makes sense.
If you want a challenge try putting the Stars and Bars on the rear fuselage of Henry's F-16. It took me hours and in the end I think the are two lots of vectors, the top half and the bottom half, so I could distort them seperately and then I used a 1 pixel paint brush to smooth some edges out.
You could try that, copy the part behind the canopy and convert it to a raster and then try using a 1 pixel paint brush and different shades to try and soften the jagged edges. Do not lose the original vectors because you may need to try several times or if you lose all your hair you can always revert back to them.
Graham King
Why can’t they keep the colours in the bloody paint pots and just leave them grey
Hopefully someone may be able to shed some light on a question that I have, are the blurry textures that I marked the result of how the texture was mapped to the model? Any light shed on that would help a ton! This is still a work in progress so... Enjoy!
