EagleSkinner

Hawaii, Zero, kamikaze gamers who deliberately crash into others?I can see it now - hundreds of MP users looking forward to a Hawaiian holiday trip in early December...What (in the names of seven hells) are MS thinking of? That certainly doesn't look like political correctness to me.OK, that's the cynicism over with for now. I have seen a user's videos that he posted of the Zero. I even flew in "Flight" for about two minutes again the other day (just to do an aerocache) I saw the "For sale" notice took a look. No pit. Goodbye! Flying time since end of beta? Insignificant and likely to stay that way.

The short story - mask out the sharp heli from a screenshot, make a new object from the masked out bit, blur the background to taste. You may end up with a couple of differently masked sharp bits and you will have to clone brush the "original" to eliminate the blurred bits of the heli that appear behind the sharp bits...

She's finished and if you want a copy, you can find it on my website under Repaints / Helicopters or in the Avsim Library when the librarians have done their bit.

Obviously not a glider pilot, Bill. ;)But to the topic on hand - I really enjoyed the interview and you are to be commended on your questions,Tom. The answers may not appeal to the hard core simmer, but then again - nothing has been lost and we have gained a new "flying programme".So back to business...

The "other" CareFlight livery is now very near completion...

You could probably fit a good percentage of my repaints on a 380... :D is looking good.

Is this the "Piglet" Porter?

very nicely done!

On the bright side - The Alabeo Sukhoi is rather fun to fly! So I have to "force myself"...

Now before anyone accuses me of unfair treatment of the developer, I will add that a 3D modeler has far more developed tools at his disposal than us mortal texture painters. We can only paint a two dimensional texture sheet. The modeller can paint or drape a photoreal texture over his 3D model BEFORE he extracts the UVmaps to 2D texture sheets. I cannot afford 3DS software.So we third-party painters have to use the mapping the modeler gives us. Like these:

It gets worse......much worse:

I saw a very nice looking model on the market, but knowing the author to be somewhat lackadaisical with his mapping I wrote first and asked "are the engine grilles individually mapped on either side of the nose or are they mirror mapped". The kind gent replied "Individually mapped"... So I bought the model with the intentin of doing some EagleSkinning on it.I unwrapped the box and took the model flying - very nice so far. Then I looked at the paint kit and did some colouring in...(All Images below are clickable to open large versions if you want to see the real detail...)Left side: Right side: Texture sheet: Oh yes - he individually mapped the louvres - but only 18, so he has mirrored the 18 on the opposite side.So if you wanted to do a simple "red bull" type noe art: If you are a model developer reading this then take a painter's plea to heart "Ask US about the mapping before you make a dog's dinner of your model."I have had to critique every model from this developer in the past for one inaccuracy or the other and I hoped that because he has gone solo this time that he had changed and "gotten better at it".

This livery is being uploaded to the Avsim File library right now, but if you are impatient, then visit my website and look at the bottom of the repaints/helicopters page...http://eagleskinner.com/helicopterdownloads.htm

I did the Cera 412 in the red/white/blue stripey livery if you want a copy. Visit my site, go to repaints / helis and help yourselfOh, by the way - this one is finished. I finally reached a stage where I must say "Enough, already!" - at least it is good enough for "stand off". I did the specular so that the blue looks metallic and the orange "normal" and I have added a not so dark alpha so it doesn't look too chrome-like. All I need to do is to wrap up a "read me" and post it to my site.

There's a particularly interesting word in the English language: painstaking. Now while doing this particular number I not sure whether it derives from taking pains or staking pain. I think maybe the later, becuse there is something vampire-like about the paintkit - it sucks the very lifeblood out of you.Just look at all those texture map joints and all those last minute pixel alignments...

It's been a long time, since I could repaint to any detail (after I wrecked my wrist). I managed a few simple skins for Misty Moorings and a set of skins for the default Extra, but this work-in-progress has been bugging me for well over a month so far - all those fiddly lines! But there's not much left to do before I can add the specs and save a high definition 4096 pixel set.Enjoy:

As far as © holders refusing a livery - I have had three so far: Breitling for a fictional and Pirelli refused me permission to repaint the yellow Pirelli Do27 and another aircraft I am not at liberty or willing to discuss. Breitling because of the fictional and Pirelli because they do not make or market the tyre that was depicted on the aircraft.I also had one "How dare you!?" when I had the aircraft owner's permission to reproduce a livery. The very odd thing here was that although he owned the plane, he didn't own the livery - and the previous owner of that plane still did - he proved it with a copy of the copyright statement too... I did get permission after I explained though, and I now have a reasonable relationship with the guy.Which does bring up a very important point - "relationships"! By asking and getting permission to recreate liveries you actually end up making new friends and some turn into fun, long-term friendships or at least acquaintanceships. I even have the owner of one airline on my personal contacts list - and his dog! That part of researching liveries is actually one of the most rewarding.OK, sometimes you can't find the owner, or you do not get an answer. I agree I have a few liveries that are technically illegal - James Cameron never got back to me about the Avatar twin rotor liveries I did :Thinking: and nore did one or two others. But the pleasing thing is that occasionally even some of these now shows have discovered Eagleskinner liveries of their planes and sent me thank you letters too.So don't give up on painting...

My sentiments entirely Wombat. If I were to charge my real world hourly rate (the job pays very well...) then there's no way I would sell a paint ever. Especially as I seem to choose the hardest liveries to reproduce (like the Careflite livery on the Nemeth A109 that will clock up a couple of weeks and then some before I am happy to let it go - even as a "stand-off lookalike".For some liveries I'd be charging four places left of the decimal... ;) and in a higher value currency and not cowrie shells.I paint planes because it's relaxing. I get the © holder's permission first in most cases too. So anyone who charges for a paint would also have to bear in mind, that if he is making money from someone else's copyrighted livery, then the water gets very deep, very quickly. If there's anyone doing repaints for money legally, then I would dare say that only McPhat is doing it right. I would even go out on a limb and say that most painters who use photoshop are probably even on the wrong side of the line... I won't ask for an honest show of hands from painters who actually legally own their paint software or who actually have ALL the © permissions for all the trademarks and such on their paints. Even I can't manage to find all the © owners on the paints I do. Take a look at Patty Wagstaff's latest Extra livery - there's about 20 different TMs on her plane, and all the sponsor logos are protected.We painters tread on very thin ice when we provide liveries for flight simulation - do you not ever wonder why Microsoft only have a very few real world liveries in their repertoire? A few race P51's and the Kenmore Beavers. American military schemes (mostly public domain by definition - except for the digital cam pattern which is copyrighted.) There are very strong reasons why MS do not paint RW planes and ANYONE doing it for money is risking much.

Just a slight hint Danon...You might look at the book "How Planes Fly" by David Anderson and Scott Eberhardt (Fermi labs). They now teach theory of flight to Newtonian rules. As an aircraft engineer I was always disatisfied with Bernoulli - the math just never gelled. Under Newton, everything fits perfectly now.As I like to say: "Bernoulli sucks, Newton reacts!"

SSDs have the problem of cost vs capacity - I have installed a "compromise" - take a look at OCZ Revo drive hybrid. That's a mobo mounted 1TB hard-disk for capacity with a 100GB SSD buffer.It "memorises" the most used files after a while and stores these in SSD. An impressive compromise

Nor do I. I just spent 130 Oz Dollars on four airfields in the PacNW region... and if Flight offered what I wanted, I'd no doubt spend as much there too...

I have my own (stuck-in-the-mud) views on specular and subscribe to the Microsoft SDK way. There's a good explanation about specular reflection on Wikipeda and another good one hereIn my life I learned that the specular reflection cast by and object depends on the colour of the light falling on the object. The trouble is, I see so many other free and pay mode ls where the dev has made a sepia tone specular texture for his aircraft. The MS way (and, in my understanding - the correct way) is to take the diffuse texture, rotate the colour 180° (i.e. make a negative) and reduce saturation / increase lightness. So when you play around with the HSB - rotation angle, saturation and brightness model you can also create interesting effects such as the preudo-chromalusion effect.The diffuse reflection is dependant on the surface of the coloured material, i.e. the coat of paint - in real lif this is rarely perfectly smooth, even on a glossy surface. The more you varnish and polish a surface, the more reflection you get. A mountaint reflected in a crystal clear lake looks more intense than if the lake is iced over... The rougher a surface is, well then the the reflections turn matt. Diffuse. So the diffuse map and alpha define the reflectivity of a surface while the speculars give the depth of polish and gloss and the way the colours look under different light. (sunrise, noon, sunset)Computer graphics don't reflect light the same as real world and we painters don't have the computing power of Industrial Light an Magic, so we have to "cheat" the specular effect. Like I say - I know and use several methods for my speculars - but never sepia-tone or grey-scales because for my paints they simply do nothing. Technically each single livery needs its own colour specular texture to reflect the colours of that particular livery.So why do other painters make their own monotone spec? Is it just to save the effort of making a new spec for each model? Or is there a sound reason? What can I learn here please? Is there a reason for it?

There is a newer Texan on the market... Sim Unlimited or something like that. I don't have it re-installed yet, but I do believe... hang on, I have the old computer's C: drive... Yes - this version does support spec and bump, although the makers still use the bitmap format. That doesn't stop you using dds, of course.

The trouble with spins on PC aircraft, They almost all recover automatically as soon as you let go of the stick, I think I can count the "real auto-rotaters" on the fingers of one hand. Although when you do get a good one going in the Flight Stearman, it feels so good, you want to take it all the way down ;) Next best was spinning the Mustang down from 38000 feet - I got 30 full spins before I chickened.I am glad we don't feel reall forces in Flight. I remember a flat inverted spin I once suffered in a Slingsby Swallow from 6500. Sycamore leaf, head banged hard against the canopy and all the dirt from the footwell up on the "roof"... That is the last I ever want to do in Flight ;)

The most fun I had was with the Airfield Photographer - if only MS would give us that photo album as a reward - now THAT would be really cool!