• There seems to be an uptick in Political comments in recent months. Those of us who are long time members of the site know that Political and Religious content has been banned for years. Nothing has changed. Please leave all political and religious comments out of the forums.

    If you recently joined the forums you were not presented with this restriction in the terms of service. This was due to a conversion error when we went from vBulletin to Xenforo. We have updated our terms of service to reflect these corrections.

    Please note any post refering to a politician will be considered political even if it is intended to be humor. Our experience is these topics have a way of dividing the forums and causing deep resentment among members. It is a poison to the community. We appreciate compliance with the rules.

    The Staff of SOH

  • Server side Maintenance is done. We still have an update to the forum software to run but that one will have to wait for a better time.

Bare Metal for FS2004

O

OBIO

Retired SOH Admin
I am working on a bare metal skin for the Paul Havney/Paul Barry Texpest Mk II. I have tweaked the MDL file using MDLC to give the plane full-on reflective texturing. I have been trying to get the bare metal just right...but it either comes out too silvery or too gray, either too reflective or not reflective enough.

For those who have more experience working with bare metal skins, and especially weathered bare metal skins, what RGB values do you suggest for the actual paint texture and which RGB values do you suggest for the alpha channel?

OBIO
 
For dcc’s P-38, I used an alpha RGB of 195, 180, 180. This is a sort of pinkish color. I got this value from Tom (Gnoopey) Kholer. It’s the value he used on his P-47s. It lookeds pretty good on both the P-47 and the P-38. The bare metal color varies around the RBG of 150,150,150 (ish).
 
I think there's more to it than the RGB numbers, as I tried PRB's 'pink' alpha and ended up a with shiny white model. So far I've good luck with 136 for RGB, and 160, 0, 128 for Hue, sat, lum respectively. For the base paint I used 187 for RGB and 160,0,176 for H,S,L tho the base could be darker (shadow reflectivity/color is dern near perfect, but sunlight shows a definite white bias). Check the spinner- from 'Dangerous Donna' model, I havent looked at the numbers yet, but thats what chrome should look like (IMHO)

 
With regards to the "pink" alpha - the alpha channel is grayscale, so you can paint it whatever hue you want and it will end up the same in the final texture.

MS on their Polished aluminum P-51 has the base color as 203,204,203 and the alpha as 117 (55%) (117,117,117 in RGB).

I've seen others with 198,195,198 with an alpha of 136

A nice chrome is 75,75,75 with an alpha of 44

But that's just me, and it probably depends on what you are using as an environment map as well.

Brian
 
Hey OBIO, how did your bare metal work out. I am thinking about doing a cargo MD-11 in bare metal but having a hard time figuring out where to start. I am going to try some of the numbers posted here.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top