Looking for Aircraft Profile Tutorials

[ChrisS]

All,

 

I'm delving into aircraft profiles and am looking for any tutorials out there on the web to get some tips on best practices. Anyone know of a resource or two on creating aircraft profiles using advanced graphics software?

 

TIA~

[Hacker]

l have a freind who says there is a program for converting colour refrences e.g methue colors to FS numbers. I wish to find a copy or where to look. Like you l also want to get into aircraft profiles

 

hacker

[P-40]

https://www.largescaleplanes.com/articles/article.php?aid=507

[Coolie]

Thats a great link...I am going to give that a try myself i think.

[Vernon]

Chris,

Before you go this route, I've taught myself a bit more than I knew back then. Here is a short form lesson using the F-86.

 

Step one:

Import a base drawing into Photoshop make sure the image is large (I normal use 3-600dpi and have the image at around 3000+ pixels wide)

 

Create a new background layer of an overall medium grey colour.

 

Reduce the transparency of the base drawing to about 25-40% whatever you're comfortable with.

 

Create a new layer and using the line tool draw the entire outline, I normally name this "Outline" funnily enough. Then create another new layer and using your references, draw in all of the panel and detail lines and call this "Panel Lines".

 

As a final bit in step one, create copies of both "Outline" and "Panel Line" and mergethese copies to form another called "Line Drawing". This acts as an excellent mask for both overall colours and panels.

 

The picture below shows this stage complete with a white background to add emphasis.

[Vernon]

Step two:

 

Create a New layer, "Base Colour" under the line drawings. For the Sabre I chose a very light blue grey and sprayed this all over except the gun panel. Image shown below.

[Vernon]

The third stage is to make the base colour look like metal and is done in two phases. The first is to create yeat another new layer call it whatever you want, and then spray dark blue on the top of the fuselage and dark green on the bottom with a white stripe down the middle.

Wherever there is a vertical surface, cut out the blue and green as this is trying to give the impression of the colours of sky and grass reflecting in the metal. As a final step reduce the transparency of the layer until it look like below:

[Vernon]

The next step in Phase Three is to alter the individual panels by spraying them black or white and reducing the transparency from 25% down to 2%. This takes up many different layers but they can be merged into one layer called NMF Panel Shades and will look like this.

[Vernon]

In step four you need to make the aircraft look three dimensional so again using many layers and transparency variations (70%-10%) add in the shadows and highlights in black and white until you get something like this.

[Vernon]

The way to check that things aren't too overpowering or not strong enough is to switch off the Base Colour and Line Drawing layers so there are no panel lines showing and the image your left with looks like a ghost.

[Vernon]

Next step is to add in the common details and colours again using mutliple layers but then merge these into a new layer called COmmon details so the image looks like this.

[Vernon]

After that to add the canopy and other glassware. I'm now doing this by taking a photo of the sky, and then using the distort filter to spherize the image and then crop it to the arframe. highlights and erasings make it come to life.

[Vernon]

You're now at the point where you can add the going out clothes in camouflage...

[Vernon]

Or in NMF...

[Vernon]

Or get all pointlessly arty...