New London Model Teaser....

[+swambast]

Will share more details later...but coming soon finally a proper overhaul and respect for a London legend...

[EricJ]

Looking good!

[KJakker]

Great, I can fly a Hunter under it.

[+Gepard]

Its a nice addon for the new Battle of Britain "Operation Seelöwe" terrain (WIP).

[+daddyairplanes]

oooooooooh pretty

[+swambast]

Ok, some more details.

Completely inspired by Gepard’s Operation Seelöwe work, a comment alluded to needing an upgraded London Bridge.  Rightfully so, the one we have is archaic and definitely needs an overhaul.  

 

First – full disclosure and acknowledgement that the original base model mesh is not my work.  It is based on a publicly available free source model with no author attributed.

Next, that being said – like many free models, you get what you pay for.  This model was an absolute bastard to work with and had countless issues.  I mean endless open edges / unwelded verts,  massive 8K+ poly pieces, double-faced/overlapping polys, incorrect texture mapping and God knows what else.  So I created new scratch mesh pieces, brand new textures, new UVW mappings, fixed shadow issues and basically re-worked the whole thing over.  Why?  Well, I invested a lot of time researching and gathering reference photos/textures – but kept coming back to this option especially because it had some really great main texture pieces.  

This model will most likely never meet the level of quality I was hoping for, and I’m sure there will be some issues here and there.  Unlike most of my stuff, this one is definitely tipping on the higher poly side but I plan to make some lower level .LODs and tune up performance eventually.  In hindsight, wish I would have taken my friend Del’s advice when he said, sometimes the time to fix issues is better spent starting over – wise words indeed in this case.  Having just started from scratch would have resulted in cleaner mesh topography and probably given me more satisfaction in the end.  But it's good to at least be at a place where it's feeling "decent enough" and dare I say even rivaling some other flight sim payware additions like this one...

     

 

OK, enough of all the boring details, right?  On to the screenshots for you to enjoy!  This will be available as an exclusive feature in Gepard’s Operation Seelöwe project – so stay tuned as his work progresses!  As for future ideas – I eventually would really like to add in vehicle and pedestrian traffic on the bridge (but would need help researching era-specific vehicles) so more to come.

In-Game Shots

 

Edited May 9, 2020 by swambast

[+sophocles]

Outstanding!!!!!!

[+daddyairplanes]

dude walking the bridge is a nice touch!

[+Sundowner]

Excellent work as usual m8,

Just 2 small comments if I may......... as far as I can gather the steel work was a very grubby chocolate brown colour during the WW2 time frame and the building itself was very dirty due to all the smoke and smog of the city, this was the same for most London landmarks/buildings in general of the time.

[+swambast]

@Sundowner

Thanks m8, I was having a hell of time deciphering what it actually looked like during that time because most of the reference photos were in black and white, appreciate your feedback!  Do you have any reference photos you could share, or alternatively I can just make a swag at it.  Thanks again for the feedback.

[+Sundowner]

Colour photos are mainly a modern re-colouring job so not usually too reliable for the actual shades used, personally I'd just grub it up a fair bit & maybe make the high tide marks a little higher and darker......again during that time frame the Thames through London was little more than a huge open sewer/dumping ground for the various industry.

Another useful site for AA locations etc.....

http://www.anti-aircraft.co.uk/

[Wrench]

that is frakking AWESOME, Steve!!

[+KnightWolf45]

looks perfect to me