Consolidated PBY-6A Catalina Post-War USN uploaded

[Mick]

Hallo Mick,
the screenshot I posted are in fact Pierre Lheureux's Calypso repaint.
So if Shessi will do for us the civil versions will you publish your version of Cousteau's Calypso?
Because if we got the civil version with no turret but with blisters I will adjust my repaint of Fire Eater,
the Cat from the film Always to fit the -6A.
If you have an Calypso ready I do not need to push "my" one in the arena
For the moment I have a lot of problems to finish my 2D panels, military and civil for the Cat (not interesting for you as you delate them,lol)
Yours
Papi

Sure, I will post the Calypso skin. It's not really "my" version; it's just Lheureux's skin with the file names edited to work with the -6A model. Aside from editing file names, all I did was color the new cowling and nacelle textures to match the rest of the plane. I'd thought to put it with the model if Shessi's OK with that, along with the red bird. But now I see that we'll need two versions of the model to accommodate both skins, one with and one without the waist blisters. If Shessi is up for making the two versions. I really have no idea of the work that would entail, so I am reluctant to make a request.

You've painted Fire Eater from "Always!" I love that movie, but I haven't watched it in years. I'd completely forgotten about Fire Eater. I look forward to seeing your paint job!

I only delete your wide-screen panels. I have your standard screen panels for Nigel's Avros and I really like them. If you made standard screen versions of all you panels I would use most of them, maybe all of them.

 

[michaelvader]

PBY civilians

Hallo Mich I still had posted a screenie from Fire eater a time ago,
this night I will readjust it at first for the standard -6A version to see what must have been done
So we both did the same for the Calypso. It was a bit tricky I find as the textures are not simply the same.
So for the wing outbord swimmers it took me a moment that for the bottom texture I had to invert the texture
As I have found a site about this special ac I will look this night if some thing can be done for the interior. If yes I will send you the modified interior textures , if you are interested.
I come home from work this evening at 23:00 and yet have to beginn my night turnus tomorrow at 22:00 - so I will have a bit time to "play" with the textures.
Yours
Papi

 

[michaelvader]

our newest Cat in our familly in Brittany

not realy the thread for this,
but a special Cat for Mick
her name is Onyx
And she certainly would not agree if I try to repaint her
miau miau

 

[Mick]

not realy the thread for this,
but a special Cat for Mick
her name is Onyx
And she certainly would not agree if I try to repaint her
miau miau

Hi Papi,

I don't remember having to alter the float textures, but they look correct on the model so I must have done that.

Onyx is beautiful! Brown tabbies are beautiful, and they always seem to have such sweet personalities.

My late, great Scooter was a brown tabby. He was a wonderful pet and I will always miss him. Now I only have one cat, Rowdy, an orange tabby.

I wish you and Onyx many years of good health and happiness.

 

[michaelvader]

Cousteau's PBY Calypso

Mick,
the bad thing is that I do not see my familly so often, but in four years I will be retired and will be with them and will have plenty more time for flightsim
Now to the PBY, the floats had to be altered as for the calypso they are quiet specefic for the colors and on the original -5A textures there is only one texture for the floats, but on Shessies evolution there are a a bottom and an upside texture for the floats.
Mick what tool do you use for the repaints?
I do use FSRepaint
And with this version of the cat on my fsrepaint I can no longer see the inside of the ac.
Do you know why it could be?

Miau miau
Yours
Papi

 

[Mick]

Mick,
the bad thing is that I do not see my familly so often, but in four years I will be retired and will be with them and will have plenty more time for flightsim
Now to the PBY, the floats had to be altered as for the calypso they are quiet specefic for the colors and on the original -5A textures there is only one texture for the floats, but on Shessies evolution there are a a bottom and an upside texture for the floats.
Mick what tool do you use for the repaints?
Papi

I thought I'd have more hobby time after I retired. Wrong! I have less. Much less! It's hard to explain, but other folks have told me they had the same experience. Some years ago I was working on a project with a modeler who retired from his job and soon after that retired from the FS hobby completely, saying that he no longer had any time for it. Strange but true.

Well, the floats on my skin look right on the model, so I suppose I must have made the necessary texture alterations, and though I don't recall doing it. That was a week or so ago and at my age, memory can be very short!

For painting textures I use MS Paint, set to work like the old Win XP version, for simple things, and Paint Shop Pro 7 for more complex work. Both, of course, through DTXbmp. I don't know anything about FSRepaint, so I don't understand your question. I never understood the purpose of a repaint program when it's just a matter of painting images on texture files. Maybe I'm missing something...

 

[michaelvader]

PBY-6A blank textures

Good evening Friends,
I just came home and tried to transport the textures from my PBY-5A to the -6A
and gloups big problems at the fin.
In reality I was not astonished as the structure is quiet different.
So my question:
might it be possible to this bird with "blank" textures?
Just all the textures for the skin in neutral white or gray, but with the structure lines.
That would ease my the job a lot and makes a repaint quiet faster but Please NOT a paintkit
I never was able to use them.
Shessi I supose that painting the ship was the last step when you did build her, so perhaps you have such textures?
I join two pics about Cousteau's Cat interior. They are the only ones I found for the moment.

Yours
Papi

 

[michaelvader]

Cousteau's PBY interior

here another pic
I hope that I will find more
Yours
Papi

 

[michaelvader]

repaint program

Hi Mick,

for me the advantage to use such a program that when I have changed a texture I can see immediatly on the modell if it "goes" or if it has to be redone or corrected.
In the program itself I use a good old Paintshop pro 6 old but still working LOL
My hope for more time for flightsim comes also from the fact that my wife always suports me with this hobby.
A lot of times I wanted to put all away when again the pc crashed or things didn't go well.
She always convinced and helped me to start again and to continue.
If I still have my nose in flightsim it is due to her.
Yes I must frenchie girl is a realy fine one !
Yours
Papi

 

[Mick]

.. big problems at the fin...

I recall problems with the mapping of the fin and rudder on the original AlphaSims -5 models. The need to stretch the textures to cover the new, taller fin seem to have made it worse. If you look at the screen shots of my skins on the plane in the sim, then look at the tail texture files, you'll see how different they look!

I have no idea how easy or complicated it would be for Mark to do anything about the issue, so I just went ahead and made the adjustments on the textures. It took some trial and error!

So with FSRepaint, you can see the textures on the model without loading the model in the sim? That could be useful. It takes me about 20 seconds to load the model into the sim to check a texture, and sometimes when I'm busy those 20 seconds can feel like 20 minutes!

You're fortunate to have a wife who supports you in the hobby. I just have a cat whose hobby is annoying me, and FS gives him lots of opportunity to practice that hobby! Sometimes I think I should give him partial credit for my skins.

 

[michaelvader]

big problem at the sim

Hi Mick,
this problem I experianced it just when trying to make the repaint of Fire Eater.
Sadly I read your post after I spend about two hours on it.
Yes it is a big advantage to see the aircraft before loading it to the sim.
Even I have parked most of my airplanes in an hangar on a extern hard disk my sim takes about
three minutes to have the plane to fly.
My sceneries are too much and sadly I can not make a second installation with less sceneries,
no more space on the disk
I join a screenie of the -6A as fire eater to show where I bugged at the fin
and now hop hop to go in bed this evening I must be at the job at 22:00 hours that means I have to wake up at 19:30
latest.
Hard to work on flightsim as a second job LOL
Yours
Papi

 

[Mick]

Hi Mick,
this problem I experianced it just when trying to make the repaint of Fire Eater.
Sadly I read your post after I spend about two hours on it.
Yes it is a big advantage to see the aircraft before loading it to the sim.
Even I have parked most of my airplanes in an hangar on a extern hard disk my sim takes about
three minutes to have the plane to fly.
My sceneries are too much and sadly I can not make a second installation with less sceneries,
no more space on the disk
I join a screenie of the -6A as fire eater to show where I bugged at the fin
and now hop hop to go in bed this evening I must be at the job at 22:00 hours that means I have to wake up at 19:30
latest.
Hard to work on flightsim as a second job LOL
Yours
Papi

That's a great looking paint job!

I see that all the tail markings are on the fin. You've seen how hard it is to get markings to look right on the fin. Wait until you try a skin where the markings overlap both the fin and rudder! That is a major challenge!

I know it slows FS loading if there are a lot of planes in the Aircraft folder. I keep all my planes except the AI planes and the plane I'm flying or working on in a hangar outside of FS. Some folks say that many scenery areas slow the loading of FS, but I doubt that. I have more than 120 scenery areas in both Golden Wings and "FS1954," and almost that many in "FS Jet Age." I also have an almost undeveloped FS2004 with only about 20 scenery areas. They all take between 20 and 30 seconds to load after the first load of the day, (The first load can take a minute or two.) So I don't think the number of scenery areas makes much difference. Surely not as much as the number of planes.

I thought my 120+ scenery areas were a lot, and I have many combined together, otherwise there would be well over 200. But I saw a post in one of these forums from someone who said they had something like a thousand scenery areas! That really amazed me!

Twenty second to load seems pretty quick if I'm going to fly, or check something out, but when I'm painting a plane it seems like a very long time. I get very impatient! That's where Rowdy the cat helps me. When he's on the desk to keep me company and give me kitty kisses I don't get so impatient.

But when I'm actually working on a texture file he's not so helpful, though he tries to be. He likes to help. He wants to be involved. He demands to be involved in everything I do. Deeply involved. In every little thing. Sometimes he sits in front of the monitor screen and bats at my pointer to make sure it doesn't escape. Sometimes he lays down across my mouse hand to make sure the mouse doesn't get away. His signature move is the full body keyboard flop. I'm not sure how he thinks that helps me, but I think he hopes it will bring him the gold medal in that event in the Kitty Olympics. Does Onyx help you paint?

 

[michaelvader]

PBY-6A repaint

Hallo Mick,
Onyx could not help me, nore Fiffi, nore Yaya, my lovely cats are with my wife in brittany,
the photo showing Onyx was a photo my wife sended me.
I live here in munich just for the work and alone.
You can be sure that I miss my little familly a lot
But in 15 days are hollydays and I will be back to my lovely familly
Yepeeeee
Let's come back to our commun cat.
Normally the number 53 should be on the rudder and the fin. I cheated a bit to put it only on the fin
But on the top of the fin normally the orange paint should go all over the fin and the rudder as a big horizontal strip
I tried all I know - bug so for the moment it is as you see.
If we have those "little difficulties" with the paints I wonder what work Shessi must do to modify this bird to all the variants he did and I hope still will do even he is on a new project.
Concerning the 2D panels, it would be difficould with my monitor to make a traditional 1024X768 as on my monitor it would be on wrong view.
I hope I can finish them the next week
Every time I make a test flight I find details to be corrected or which can be done better
Also there had some mods to do on the aircraft it self.
Also I tried this time to make the VC as suitable as possible.
I will be glad when this work will be done.
Yours
Papi

 

[Mick]

Hallo Mick,
...Normally the number 53 should be on the rudder and the fin. I cheated a bit to put it only on the fin...
But on the top of the fin normally the orange paint should go all over the fin and the rudder as a big horizontal strip
..Concerning the 2D panels, it would be difficould with my monitor to make a traditional 1024X768 as on my monitor it would be on wrong view

Hi Papi,

I thought the type of panel you can make was probably dictated by your monitor.

It is possible to get the number and the fin cap color to go on both fin and rudder, but it would involve a lot of tedious trial and error. The fin is the hard part, because the fin part of the texture is distorted, so you have to distort your graphic in the opposite way to compensate. The rudder isn't distorted as much as the fin; it's mostly just to a different scale, and stretched somewhat taller in relation to the width.

You can fix the fin cap color without too much trouble if you're patient enough for a lot of trial and error. Add the color to the fin, then brinvg it up or down until the bottom edge matches the rudder. The left and right sides probably won't be the same so you'll have to do them separately.

The numbers will be more difficult because of the distortion on the fin. The 5 on the left side and the 3 on the right will take some experimentation. I found that it was much easier to get the fin done as well as I could, then do the rudder. On the rudder it will be mostly a matter of adjusting the size and location, then stretching the height. If you look at my Navy skins they should give you some guidance. It's not easy but it's possible.

 

[Shessi]

Folks,
Just started a separate PBY Water bomber and civvy PBY post, to save people reading through the whole thing!

Cheers

Shessi

 

[Mick]

Folks,
Just started a separate PBY Water bomber and civvy PBY post, to save people reading through the whole thing!

Cheers

Shessi

Good idea!