Hi,I started several paints for the new QualityWings 757, but I need some help on bare metal. I do not know whether hand painting it or photoreal would be the better bet. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hi,I started several paints for the new QualityWings 757, but I need some help on bare metal. I do not know whether hand painting it or photoreal would be the better bet. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I have found, and this is only my personal opinion that photoreal bare metal textures are great for screen shots , as the reflection of the runway or surrounding buildings looks really impressive , but stick that same aircraft over water then the bare metal reflection looks kind of odd .Hand painting is the way to go , but finding the right balance of shine and shadow is something that only a few have mastered .(I'm looking at you Mcphat Studios :( )Good LuckMark

Thank you mark for your support! Now, to answer Alec's question about the baremetal textures. Our policy at McPhat studios is to handpaint everything, nothing is taken from a photo or picture, so having that in mind one of the most difficult things to work with is the baremetal on these aircrafts.Now, you first need to know the materials, in this case are a lot of metal parts. Once you started looking at pictures you'll find in a huge problem. Baremetal behaves like a mirror, it reflects everything around it, so depending on where the aircraft is it will reflect and look different. Make a search on Airliners.net and look closely how different they look.Once you've decided how you want your texture to look like, you'll need to know which are your resources to make it work. Is the work going to be for FSX?, or perhaps FS9?. Well in this case it doesn't matters cause, as far as I know, QS757 doesn't haves Bumps and Specs so the look will rely on the diffuse texture only. If so, then the only thing you'll need to work with too is the alpha channel, to give the aircraft, or at least the baremetal part a more glossy look.Look, every time we had to work at a baremetal texture we all spent hours and hours trying to make it look as we wanted, so, you might find your self stuck several times, use everything at your hands to get what you want and of course post some screenshots! I'll love to see how you run trough this nightmare you're driving trough ;)Cheers!

And don't forget the global environment maps... You'll get a paint looking good in one situation and absolutely wrong elsewhere. My approach to bare metal is to hand paint each time. Photo textures can look good, but if you are using sources such as airliners.net, you are likely to be in breach of so many copyright rules that it is not worth the effort.Besides, I personally think phototextures look terrible unless they are done by an expert with his own camera and with access to the real plane being modelled. So I hand paint - it's often a nuisance, but the results are more satisfying. For me.The worst thing to do though is to do what some painters do and that is to use "noise" on the bumpmaps to distort that horrible FSX reflection of the environment. Bare metal is a pain... The real plane is really mirror-like and this FSX model is a re-vamped FS9 one, so the original model has a lot to do with bare metal too.And then there's the consideration of metal flake paint...Metal finish can also be affected by the specular textures of a model as well - leave the old ones in and odd things happen...And of course - metal skinned planes are not smooth. Some panels will ripple (Although who'd skin a plane in 24 carat gold sheet?)...And then again, some bare-metal planes tend to rot if not cared for...Getting metal even anywhere near my even amateurish idea of "right" means playing with all three texture sets - the UV, the bump and the specular - but in the end it is fun and can be rewarding. The only thing that spoils a good payware though, is when the makers don't activate bumpmaps and/or speculars. Without either or both, your FSX model deserves nothing more than to be comissioned to the reject locker. The whole thing about my comments is that you'll need to take a different approach almost every single time you want to make a new metal-skin paint on a new aircraft. Nausea can be such fun at times