Variations on a theme

I just took a look at the last shot of the 412 in the post below. Not quite happy with the out of focus effect. Needs something. What do you say?

What say you? Or perhaps:

Long time no see...

The wrist has been fixed, but not as well as I'd hope. In fact there are some aspects that are much worse - especially for a right handed person.

Anyway, I am back on the other end of the paintbrushes and doing some sim repaints. One particularly interesting livery is the air rescue livery used on some of the Intensive Care heli-transports in Germany. These are different insofar as they are primarily used for the transport of patients in need of intensive care in flight. These aren't the normal crash rescue helis - there is a slight mission difference.

Still, as I say, the livery looks good and was a bit of a challenge. See what you think...

Something to read...

Many years ago - more than a gog's lifetime in fact - I wrote a story on behalf of my dog...

You can read it here

In it, Sam tells a fictionalised version of a true story.

You can read that story here

Enjoy!

The Saturday Cynic...

While I am waiting for my wrist to be repaired so that I can get on with my hobbies...

Here are my satirical Non-PC thoughts for today:

Gulf of Mexico fishermen can now can their catch without an in-between step. Shrimps or Tuna or sardines in oil - from net to tin in one go... and maybe even provide a laxative dolphin-sushi for the Japanese market.

I used to be proud that BP was British... but now BP means blackened pelicans...

And guess what - some eejit has seriously suggested that the US NUKE THE LEAK! So not only will you get instant sardines in oil, you can even open a can and have a nightlight that will glow in the dark for the next 350 million years....

Listening to the financial news... Oh dear... BP announces that there will be no dividends on their shares this year. Oh dear - better check your portfolios!

The quickest way to plug the leak would have been to wad last year'sprofits into the hole. There were enough dollar bills to stuff into the hole and make a paper mache plug. Or an even more non PC suggestion would be to send the management down as plugs... Oh no - hot air wouldn't work.

Instead of hair, perhaps they could use shredded dollar bills to absorb the mess?

Cynic's thought: what do we do with all those poor dead seabirds? Wick them and light a chain of mourning candles all around the oil multi's head offices?

The swamps used to be hotbeds of illegal bootleg stills during the prohibition... will we soon see bootleg oil refineries?

Heyyyyy - beach holidays with free sun tan oil...

Maybe now we'll see fewer mutts down on the beach, cr@pping in the sand... YAY!!! Let's hear it for dog-free beaches.

Aha! It's SLD - and no, that's not a Mercedes sports diesel...

I went for an MRI scan recently and now I have the doc's report... What a read! All medical-speak with hundreds of long words like "Scapholunate Disassociation" I Googled that and other terms. Isn't Google wonderful? Anyway, the upshot is that my wrist isn't "just" sprained and I don't have so much a tendon inflammation problem. There is a definite need for surgery.

So now I join the waiting list and wait and wait and wait...

Oh well.

A New Blog

I am currently still plagued with several inflamed tendons in my wright wrist, so my FS stuff is sadly way into the background. My hand has been splinted for simply ages and using a mouse is a pain.

But I have dug out my graphics tablet (an old Wacom A5 tablet) and pen, so why not pay George a visit? Who's George? Go see:


Accidentally George

Can't see the wood for the trees

Thoughts to all those scenery makers out there...

This idea came to me while thinking about adding orchards of olive trees to Greek sceneries.

One thing very typically Greek is the Olive - there are orchards everywhere and most look pretty much the same. But putting orchards into the sim adds polys!

OK, instead of individual trees, let's look at the nature of tree objects: A tree is three transparent polys with a front, side, top view.

A 200 by 100 metre orchard with trees every five metres means 800 trees (40 x 20) or 2400 polys. Just one orchard! There are thousands in Greece... (and technically you can say the same for forests)

So instead of making individual tree objects, why not make long transparent strips with a tree every five metres and then simply place strips in a grid patternwith 5 metre spacing? The above orchard would then only be 61 polys. (40 lengthways and 20 widthways plus the horizontal one.

Level ground? OK, so of course not all orchards and forests are on level ground... so maybe a sloped orchard is in tiers... 40 long two wide? You can simply use varying length strips of trees and map from one texture accordingly. I could even conceive a way of programming autogen forests for some areas. With the right programming, you could even add randominter spaced single trees and tree rows that would break up the regularity of an "orchard".

Especially when you consider commercial cultivated pine forests...

Take a standard FSX square of 1.4 kilometers. The default autogen max load is 4500 trees - that's 13500 polys. Put a flatland cultivated "forest" on it and you would need only 561 (280 each longitudinal and lateral plus one horizontal).

Yes - it could look odd. But only if you don't create the grid intelligently. You could even used honeycomb pattern transparent "walls" with tree images at random interfaces. You may increase polys slightly more, but you would be creating less "objects". I'll see if I can work out any pictures that help illustrate this...

Oh... by the way, in my suggested 561 poly solution abouve, you would get a tree at each intersection, so that means 280 x 280 or in other words... 

78400!

It is March and I thought the snow had gone...

That was Monday this week...

The weather has been fine for a couple of days, the snow had melted almost completely - except for the remnants of the heaps where people had shovelled the white stuff into a corner...

...and then yesterday morning I had the surprise of the year. Eight inches of the white stuff as far as the eye could see.

Global warming?

More Musings about Lameness

Sometimes it's the little things that get you down - like having to lay off your favourite pastime because bits of the old body don't want to play...

Ah, now that could be read in different ways, ooops. I am actually referring to my ability to use a PC at the moment. My wrist is still sore after my slip on the ice recently. The snow is thawing out now, but the injuries aren't. My typing is sloooow to say the least and as for using a mouse - well, all I can say is "wimp wimp". 'turts to stretch the tendons over my wright rist (oh yes, and my speelong isn't much better now either)

I could guess that I have aggravated things with my base over apex fandango recently. I might not have broken things, but CTS may be rearing it's ugly head - and that could mean surgery.

Oh well, either that or get me a left handed mouse.

The snow has been here ten weeks to date.

...and it's still keeping my car in the garage. Not that I couldn't get it out, but there are fifty metres of ice, a flat S bend and two narrow passages between buildings to negotiate before I even reach the road.

I think I'll leave it be - besides, a family of mice seems to have claimed the battery bay as a nest... walnut shells and chewed battery matting...

I think I need a cat.

As for the painting world, you'll have to wait, I don't feel up to painting at the moment. Bags of other diversions to keep me occupied.

Doing the ice-scape "Paso Doble Para Uno"

This probably belongs in January, because that's when I did the pack-ice fandango on the way to work. It's quite silly really - it's been snowing and freezing since before Christmas and I manage to get all the way through five weeks of slippery paths only to go base over apex a mere ten metres from the front door to my place of work.

A week later and still no improvement in the sprains, so I had to go to the specialist for work-related injury. By the way, having an accident on the way to work is classed as being work-related, so employers are more sensitive to these accidents. Anyway, off I goes to the casualty clinic and on the way there, the ice-worm trips me again - just to add insult to injury. Oh well, I guess I'm just lucky like that.

So anyway, February will be light on postings because there's not much to say and I even have problems typing anyway - with one wrist splinted, I am back to hunt and peck typing; as for using the mouse, that is more difficult than usual.

See you around soon...

Done!

That took some doing... now what?

 

 This one's finished and has been uploaded to my website - go there and help yourselves.

Sometimes it Goes Right First Time

But I am now on week three... (but getting there)

Yes, yes, I know... "Stunning", "Wow", "Your best yet"...

Well, I've got news for you - my next one's always my best and my last one's a nightmare. So. Let's check my readership - who wants me te write a book about painting FS models?

Taking You a Stage Further...

oops - sorry there, got carried away as I just remembered a drill lesson oh so many years ago...

When you've got nasty paint schemes that wrap over half a doz different pieces spread over three UV sheets, you really have to get into the nitty gritty with those colour grids. In the case of the EC120 I have been playing with the way the pattern wraps over the tailboom. I have a multi-layered vector graphic drawing  (11 layers with several dozen separate vector objects and jpg background images...)

All I have to do with these now is copy the black bits over, spray the points red, copy the white bits over... blah blah... all time consuming stuff. After all that it's make up a set of dds images and try them out. I'd like to think I can get it reasonably right  in one go, but there'll be adjustments for sure...

You can look at this picture small here or doubleclick it for the full-sized one - which is only a quarter sized to save bandwidth. The vector drawing I am working with is 8000 by 2000 ish...

Anyone notice how the underside texture panel of the tail boom is lopsided? The makers mapped this model somewhat unevenly. Oh well - that's all part of being a painter.

Back to my Musings...

Enough of this frivolity I say! I came here to moan about painting sim-planes...

Anyways, I'd like to share some pictures, but I have used copyrighted photos as comparisons, so I can't publish. Still, when you are painting, it does help to have photos that you can open in a window over the FS one. That aside, I am going to let you in on my current paint project and share a few screenies with you.

In that first shot, you can see that I have overlaid a coloured grid pattern over the textures so that you can see where the textures should wrap. Here's another on the right. Notice how the lozenge shaped paint over the top of th eboom seems odd? Well, now that I have added a grid, I can correct that.

Why a grid? Why don't I use the wireframes? Well, you can use the wireframes as a guide, but often you find that the polys that the modeller has mapped are a tad too large in places, or the lines that he unwrapped from the 3D model are just too thick. But hey, don't blame the makers for this. It's just an inherent part of painting - if you want detail, you have to be fiddly...

Well, that's enough musing for now. It's time for a cuppa...

Totally Off Course (of course)

I haven't really ever been on track with this blog, have I?

Well today I have one or two cross-links to music videos - I really can recommend these for the sheer cleverness of what this guy does.

Oh - and I may plug a laugh or two as well... (So that's what  "Plug 'n Play" is all about...)








The last vid above is intended to be played with this one opened in a separate window. Simply right-click the link and select "open in new window". Do that and hit pause, then come back hereand wait for MGM in the video above to give the countdown.

[edit] and just in case you are wondering what that should look like, then here's a screenshot of what it could look like...

Wayyyy too cool!

Want to know more about this guy? Go to youtube and search "Mystery Guitar Man"

Bernoulli Sucks

I guess that caught your eye then...

It should also give you a hint as to my faith. I am a Newtonian. Action and reaction. Try leaning over a piece of paper and sucking it up into the air. Now lean under it and blow upwards...

David Anderson can describe it more succinctly - look him up in Google. Add "Fermi Labs" to your search - and "how planes fly".

...and yet clever heads still insist on teaching young engineers the Bernoullian theory of flight.


It's like some sort of masonic movement out there. Engineers and counter-engineers. I think I have been reading too many Dan Browne books and watching too many films of his lately. I am seeing good teaching ignored and dumb teaching promoted as gospel. Oh, don't get me wrong - Bernoulli's numbers work in a tube - that's why venturis work - and thus carburettors and internal combustion engines; but wings?

Research David Anderson and prepare for enlightenment.

(Anyone worried about my mind yet? It's all these dark conspiracies, doncha know. They're out to keep us dumb.)

Now Why Would Anyone Make Textures 4096 Pixels Square?

I have often been asked this by people who complain that FSX eats frames. Everyone insists that creating 4096 px textures for FSX paints adds wayyy to many bits and bytes and slows FSX down. Well folks, I have a three and a half year old PC. It's based on the AMD FX62 chip. It is grass roots minimum for FSX. I generally fly with at least 25 to 30 fps in even the heaviest and slowest planes (as far as file-size and FPS goes) My 4096ers are not noticeably slower than standard 1024s.

All I say is take the advice offered by people like Mathijs at Aerosoft.

Anyway, I like 4096 because of the detail you can get... look, you can read the small print:

This is the kind of detail I had been looking for, ever since I started painting aircraft textures. Would you believe that it's only a little over five years ago, that I started painting planes? The first paint I shared online was a Christen Eagle (of course...) and it was a fictional paint with the registration G-EAGL. Anyone remember this one?

I have fond memories of this livery - it still resides in the hangar and is waiting for me to do an FSX version of it. Mind you - this was not the very first livery I painted. I think that was my "Fire Eagle" aka "hot stuff". Without any experience I barely knew what to do, so I made an all black skin and added some default paintbrush flames. Again, this was on a Christen Eagle. Some time in the late summer of 2005 if I remember rightly.

AS I look back with the experience of hindsight I'd say that is a pretty "basic" paint. But it worked for me.

Anyway - that was in the days of 1024 pixel textures and dxt3 formats. So now we can just about use four times the size textures and thus sixteen times the amount of data per image map.

One major aspect of creating such ultra high detail images these days is the fact that the painter versions of these textures can easily reach half a gigabyte in size. I paint with Corel Draw Suite version X3 now, and when I have added all the little details, a single photopaint texture weighs in at around 70 MB for the detail texture I show at the top of this post. Then there are the specular sheets - here I usually "get away with" making only 2048 pixel square textures. But even so, there's over one gigabyte of data on my hard drive for the basic skin and for all the current EC120 textures in my Hangar I have clocked up over four and a half gigabytes storage space.

So why do we do this to ourselves?

It's simple - I like screw and rivet heads to look like the right size of screw and rivet heads. A pixel is a pixel. It's the smallest "blob" our monitors can display and if you measure the size of a Beaver texture sheet in FS9 and then make a line of rivets, you will see that a pixel takes more space than a single rivet head, so it looks awfully clutzy.

Nowadays we painters are able to achieve around 250 pixels per metre for even the larger jet liners and I have even managed to get some sheets up to around one pixel per millimetre - but of course - that is only when I can work directly with the developer (and they are a right conservative bunch at times, you mark my words...).

Anyway, here's a few more clickable high-detail images of my recent paints of the Nemeth EC120. It may not be the greatest FSX addon, but it sure as heck can be photogenic!

...and of course, as a painter, I do have to leave a mark of sorts so's you all know who dunnit!

Catch you all around again soon.

I seem to be losing it...

...my affinity for the Christen Eagle that is...

Shock! Horror! Dismay!

Well, it's not quite as bad as that really, it's just that I have re-installed FSX and all the addons recently, after converting to Windows 7 (big improvement there, MS, well done!) and now I am finding fun with helicopters again.

As much as I could slate them, the Nemeth Brothers made really pretty EC120, EC135 and MD500 helicopters. Their standards have dropped a bit with the FSX version of the EC120, but these helis are good to fly and good to paint despite quite a few niggling little bugs. I hope we'll see patches for the EC120 - she's just too photogenic not to have in the hangar.

...and that is just some of the fun I have been having with this chopper!

The best one at the moment though, has got to be the CERA Bell 412. It is great to fly - realistic procedures have been programmed into it and she is also really nice to paint. So without further ado, here are some more piccies:

There are more to see on my website in the downloads section.

I have had my knuckles rapped

Good morning all and a Happy New Year.

Hasn't it been a long time - again!

It seems my last post has caused umbrage amongst the modelling fraternity. I make no apologies for putting a few noses out of joint. After all - standards ARE dropping.

You want proof? I shan't name names, but when you buy a model and see that text on the instrument panel is mirrored, then you absolutely know that is sloppiness.

When you put your right foot in and the little "Turn and Slip" bubble resolutely tells you you are flying balanced, then you know that is sloppiness.

When you turn on the nav lights and red is on the right, then you know that is sloppiness.

When you sit inside a VC that looks like it was made for FS98, then you know that is just laziness. Especially whe the exterior has been modelled so well.

When you browse through an aircraft's folder structure and wonder why the plane takes up hundreds of MB storage space - and even a numty like me could apply a texture.cfg to reduce such a waste of space, then you know the developer has missed a trick.

When you try to take off in a plane that, in real life, can clear the runway in a few feet and it takes you half a mile to get airborne, then that is more down to the difficulties of creating air files.

There are so many more examples I could show - but that would overload the system...

Now I have been accused of talking without knowing how difficult it is to make models.

So... with over two dozen beta tests behind me and co-development on a couple of commercial models, I can possibly say I have more experience at making models than some modellers. Hubris? Am I arrogant? Quite possibly. However, I have spent hours, days, weeks and months working with some of the best developers in flight simulation and I am basing my statements here on my blog on what I know from these developers. As for making the 3D models myself. Well, I know what can be done - I just don't (yet) have the necessary skills to make a model.

But I do know what can be done.

On a lighter note...

I have managed to get myself thrown out of a chat forum... Well, it looks that way, as I can't log on any more.

[edit]
Maybe or maybe not - I still can't logon to that forum, but there were some odd looking cookies there. After I cleared the cookies, I could see more of the forum, but still cannot access the site - so who the heck is "rubiconproject.com"
[/edit]

I was being my usual provocative self and trying to look at things from a different viewpoint. There was an action by the site owners that might have been viewed as discrimination by some. Well at least by one - me.

Perhaps I should have held back and used the private message option? Sorry guys.

You see - I AM becoming that boring old fart I always snigger at.

If you have read "The nice and accurate prophecies of Agnes Nitt (witch)" then you can see me turning into an archetypal "P. P. Taylor"

And finally

Whilst I won't name and shame the less able developers, I will gladly name the ones I have worked with or discussed modelling issues with.

Thorsten Reichert - developer of the Bushhawk at Aerosoft
David Brice - Iris Simulations
Michael - Flight Replicas
Alex and Andrey - Sibwings
Rob Young - Realair Simulations
William Ortiz - Lionheart
Joachim Schweigler - Aerosoft Glider
Sascha Normann - Aerosoft VFR Germany Sceneries
Kevin Lechmanski - Long Island Classics
Francois Dumas - FSaddon
Holder Sandmann - Vancouver and Victoria
Christian Stock - Various New Zealand sceneries

...and quite a few more. These guys are the top in their specialities and they do know what they are doing. I have even been quite a PITA to these people - more to the point: I have been a right nit-picking 'arris of a beta tester in quite a few of their works and I have also made quite a few wishes about their projects that couldn't be included in the models - yet.

You have listened to me though gents. despite my often self-righteous moments.

I am just the painter - you are the masters of the flightsim world.