Some skins are really hard

[UK_Widowmaker 571]

Fellow Skinners!... Do you find (as I do) that some aircraft in OFF are really quite hard to skin properly?

 

Alb's and DVIII's are fine, and pretty self explanatory... but others (such as the DR1) are really quite hard to get right?

 

My latest effort (SE5a) was too hard for me to get stripes on the elevators to line up... I ended up ditching that idea.

[Olham 164]

D VIII's?! You saw D VIII's soewere???!!! WomenFly2!!!!!!

 

An idea: put a white or yellow grid over the surfaces of a skin of a more difficult plane.

Then, use the skin ingame, and make screenies. Then you should see, were it distorts.

[RAF_Louvert 101]

Yes Widowmaker, as I mentioned in another recent post about the Strutter I painted, it can be very tedious to sort out the adjustments for the wrap distortion. I used the same basic idea that Olham outlined here with a grid overlay and screen captures, but even with that you will get down to moving certain bits and pieces a pixel at a time to achieve the final "perfect" alignment. One of the issues is that the distortion changes exponentially as you move away from or towards a certain point, so even the grid system won't get you dead on, but it does help. That's why you need to work in many layers that allow you infinite adjustments of all the pieces you need to work with in order to get the final results you are going for. My Strutter project ended up with 23 separate layers, but it was worth it, and was a very educational experience. I am sure my next OFF skinning project will go more quickly, or at least I hope it does.

 

Cheers!

 

Lou

Edited April 13, 2009 by RAF_Louvert

[RAF_Louvert 101]

For a clearer illustration I thought it might be helpful if I posted an image of the Strutter skin file I built so you can see the odd adjustments that had to be made.

 

 

 

 

Please note:

 

a. The asymmetrical stagger of the diamonds at the elevator joint.

b. The odd shape of the wing diamonds.

c. The closer spacing of the right wing stripe to the roundel and the wider aspect of both when compared to the left side.

d. The shift off-center of the fuselage top diamond.

e. The narrower width of the elephant and name on the right side of the plane.

f. The fact that the right side elephant is not reversed yet the name is.

 

As you can see it gets to be a challenge to end up with everything looking the way you want it to when the skin actually wraps around the 3-D model.

 

Cheers!

 

Lou

Edited April 13, 2009 by RAF_Louvert

[UK_Widowmaker 571]

This should be made a sticky!!...thanks guys

[sandbagger 1]

Hi all,

Its no different for the OBD skinners - We have to go through the same for some types of aircraft. Some of my previous skins have nearly 70 layers.

 

I have little knowledge of creating models but know that its a compromise between time and modeling detail/size. I guess perfect models could have been created, but it would have taken far more time than creating BHaH would have allowed. Also a too complex model might increase its 'formatted size' such that it would affect frame rates in-game.

 

However, the models are always being 'tweaked' as we find anomalies.

 

This should be made a sticky!!...thanks guys