It's been an interesting year...

I suffered a certain amount of illness, was unemployed and found a new job. An amazing year really. And now I am back where I started, before I launched myself on the downward slide a little over two years ago.

And what has happened sim-wise? In my favourite pastime? i.e. painting planes?

Naff all (to use an "only fools and horses" quote). I am slowly getting not just disappointed with the aircraft modelling set, I am getting downright angry at the sheer laziness of model makers.

Those idle so and sos do not follow the ground rules that ACES set down as conventions in the FSX SDK. And because they don't follow the guidelines, the standards of FSX models is still barely better than TOTR models for FS9. If I was to analyse how many FSX models I had paid for, I would probably be horrified. For it would have been wasted money and I might as well have stayed with FS9.

Most of the "bad" FSX models are poor FS9 conversions. The rest are FS9 models exported with the FSX SDK and merely have poor quality bumpmaps and NO specular textures.

The use of specular texture mapping was the single most innovative improvement to FSX models and yet the modelling fraternity have ignored this. Only a few modellers actually use specular. IRIS for one of the fixed wing modellers and Nemeth in the rotary scene.

Of course I have worked my way through several aircraft betas where the models are non-specular, but in the end, I have never flown them after the beta closed. Not even the Aerosoft Catalina has made it into my heart - despite a jaw droppingly beautiful level of detail and love in the paintkit.

...and then you get the odd freeware model and there are gorgeous speculars included.

Guys, I am sorry, but if you can't build decent models which can be really loved by painters of my "bent" then I give up on you and your models, no matter how accurate. I am going back to those that do give you the freedom - like that beautiful little Bushhawk.

Still here, still got eye problems, still hanging in though.

My latest projects are still on the slow burner.

Sick, lame and lazy...

Well, I am back again...

Oh? You didn't notice I was gone? Oh well, never mind, you weren't to know. So what has happened in the interim? Moved house, changed jobs - to a job I have yet to start. Rebuilt the PC to a Vista 64 bit system... You know - the usual stuff in the life of a nomadic PC addict. Spring is finally looming after a fashion, the mornings are still fresh but this afternoon was gloriously sunny out on the balcony. Got a decent one this time with enough room for a lounger and table for the cocktails. All I need now, in my quest for the perfect domicile is one that faces the afternoon and evening sun - I just get the morning sun here, which is a bind for someone who has to go to work.

Anything new on the flightsim scene? Not really. I have been "down" a lot recently with that IKEA building, furniture arranging, living out of a suitcase... It's been almost three months now, since I packed up at my last home and started all this move thing, and now I am slowly reaching that stage, where I can say comfortable.

Still - I have set out my library and am working through the Pratchet section again.

I'll keep in touch.

Once more into the breach, dear friends...

Bloody Blogs, you start 'em and then, ages later, you realise you haven't said much in a while. But in the meantime, my forum post counts have shot up beyond count. I have passed five and a half thousand on SimFlight and almost eighteen hundred on Aerosoft plus thousands elsewhere - and no, they aren't all pithy "one worder" posts either. I usually write pithy thousand worders *ggg*



Here and above, you can see a couple of shots of my "Don't mess with Texas" paint for the Iris Raytheon T6. Basically an American redesign of the Pilatus PC9, but a bit more modern. A real fun plane to blast down the Grand Canyon in.









I have been beta testing like Billy O until recently, I have been "threatening" forum posters with all kinds of dire consequences (big nasty moderator that I am) and I have been painting too. One thing that pleases - and puzzles - me is that I get a lot of "fan mail" asking to do someone a paint. Either I am getting better, or folk just don't know better. I also find myself answering all kinds of questions about how to do "this, that or the other trick" on a skin.


The Aerosoft Twin Otter was a real fun plane to beta test and to paint. These two are proving very popular on the downl0ad fora. I wonder? Should I write a book and solve everyone's problem? Good scheme! Make some money...


So, let's catch up with the "now" in my life. Real world wise I have been busy too. I landed a new job with Eurocopter - Hoorayyy! I am back working on helicopters. Well, I am doing it primarily to keep "off the dole" and the fact that I am "tech clerking on helicopters" is a coincidence. There are better things I could be doing - like simming. But that evil Mammon just keeps pulling at my soul and the needs are there. So that also means another move to another home in another town. All that is keeping me rather busy real world wise these days, more's the pity.

Anyway, let's see about tagging a couple of screenshots of recent paints to this post. The Harvard above is another fine plane to have in the Hangar by the way. As for painting, this offering on the left is a real challenge - to the artistically minded. Who on earth would do a photo paint like this on a real world 747?

It was an excercise in seeing what can be done with the default 747... oh well. "It's Cool to be Hot"

Another day, another year

Happy New Year to anyone who stumbles across this blog. I don't expect it to be too many ;)

So, how did you spend your new year's eve party?

I went way off the beaten track and flew a "Tube" - shock, horror, dismay! Some youngster had pestered me enough with an interesting challenge to repaint an Embraer 170, so in the end I did. I am not overly happy with the result, but I wasn't too unhappy either, so in the end I caved in and let him have it "as-is".

But those of you as knows me (and my little grammatical and authorial idiosyncrasies) will know that I don't fly tubes. That is not real flying. It's bus driving... Horrible ghastly thing to do.

Anyway, I painted the beast, so I had to go fly it, didn't I? Gawd 'ow borin'!!!

Set cruise altitude, set height hold on the AP, set speed on the speed hold, push the throttle forward. Retract gear once up, set bearing on heading hold. Keep your radios n and follow ATC instructions. Set flaps, switch AP off, lower gear, land and follow taxi instructions. Shut down.

Enjoy the slide-show:

I've "gone aero"

Being a professional aerospace engineer, the idea of having an "Aero" TLD has been on my mind for a while now. So I finally treated myself and registered www.brisland.aero for myself.

Feel free to pay the site a visit - and feel even more free to drop me a line to critique the content.

Oh my God!

It has been months since I last posted! Not that I have had nothing to say, but more due to the fact that I have been busier than sin! Betas all over the place. Repaints - well, a few. Job hunting too and now I find myself eligible for a .aero TLD.

So watch out folks - Eagleskinner could be going .aero - but that domain will have to be more along my professional status - with some sim-work thrown in for good measure...

Anyways... this was just a post to let you know I am still alive and kicking.

Area Alpha - One Man's View

(This is not a "commercial review"; just some subjective feelings from a Beta Tester)

Originally I chose to volunteer to "fly beta" on this particular area, because the original Vancouver addon had a great little "read along" adventure about Chuck Merryweather. OK, his adventure poaches a bit of the neighbouring terrain, but I had flown that area quite a lot in FS9.

Was the FSX version going to live up to it?

Yes! Cubed! And then some!

But whoa there, don't take me at face value. Let's look a bit closer and deeper into FSX and it's new features first.

FSX can cope with a far greater tree density - Vancouver "outlands" just happen to be very "treed". Point one to FSX for a greater level of detail.

Next, the meshes. Again, FSX can handle a far greater LOD than FS9 did. You go flying low around the FSX version of the Vancouver hinterland, and you are going to be low - in some rather realistically unpleasantly steep-sided ravines in places. Point to FSX

You want crazy flying? In the "9" version I would set a strongish wind from the town and land a Beaver or later the DO27 on the helipad at the Grouse Mountain lodge. In the "X" version I have discovered the ski slope nearby. More fun even, than Courchevel in France. Point to Vancouver and X for "original landing sites"

Visuals. I am not a real world pilot, although I used to be one - gliders - and have collected a few chopper hands-on hours as perks of the job as well. FSX isn't there yet, but the visuals are so much improved, that old pilot habits are coming back. When I approach a new field (well, any field now) I find myself looking for the visual clues to landing. They aren't there yet, but the flight experience is going the right way. You find yourself looking a lot more respectfully at the scenery. Point to X again

Over the past few weeks of testing, I have clocked up over 100 hours day and 25 hours night on both a modern "fast CPU" PC and my "slower" one. Microsoft have "paid the ferryman" after the FSX launch disaster and fixed it with SP1. A lot of other wise folk have added tweaks to our knowledge base. You really do have to "work" with FSX to get your rig enjoyable - it was a lot easier in 9. Point to 9.

The Vancouver scenery is addictive! See above - so many hours collected and I still have not had enough of the scenery! The landscape is simply perfect for bush flight. There's "wild country" to land in - start up your Tundra-tyred Beaver and fly up a river - there's plenty of gravel banks to use as a landing site.

Someone (Erich) posted this video as a very surprised member on Simflight and asked "Whe re in the X world can we do this?"

In a couple of days, this guy is one guaranteed Vancouver customer! There's plenty of places to do that in the Vancouver scenery.

This is not the place to plug someone else's addon, but I am going to anyway. Hi Fi Sim have brought out Active Sky for FSX and X Graphics. Add the three programmes together, and you really get one hell of a bundle. The Vancouver hinterland is absolutely amazing when the weather closes in. Misted valleys, haze, city grot - it's all there. Simply amazing!

Praise over! What can I say against Vancouver Plus?

A fair bit actually. But nothing that can be directed against the Sandmann / Patch / FSAddon team. There are still some limitations within FSX that cause strange overlaps between the MS scenery and the FSAddon textures. Roads break off in places up in the woods. Sometimes scenery floats past in the sky (well, trees) - this is caused by having your settings really high. As you change views, the PC will forget to redraw some tree objects and you'll have floaters for a while, until the next scenery re-draw. Some object alignment is a wee bit off (there is still some object placement inaccuracy in the sim itself it appears) - but if you're a "normal" flyer, you aren't going to notice much.

One thing about this scenery addon... it's going to save you money for a while. How so? You aren't going to want to buy anything else for quite a while! (Even if you do go and get the Hi Fi sim stuff)

I'd like to comment more about this marvellous addon, but I don't have the time - I want to go fly some more!

This is a "must have" with all the bells and whistles!

Eta Beta Pi

...or "To Beta or not to Beta?"

I really have been remiss, haven't I? How long has it been since my last post? Months? Seems like it.

The trouble is, so many exciting things have been happening, so much is going on, FSX has finaly been tamed by SP1 and we are nearer to DX 10 Graphics. A couple of months ago, you could have chased me up the garden path and back again - Fly FSX in very high detail mode on my PC? Not on your Nellie!



Well first of all, the pundits have been coming up with all sorts of FSX tweaks - Fiber Frame Fractions, Max Autogen Trees or Buildings per Cell, Texture Bandwidth... FSX was improving already before SP1. Now SP1 is here and the difference is staggering! I can fly in X at 15 to 20 FPS no problems.

"Huh, I hear you say, "I get 50 in FS9 all sliders right..."



Well, FSX is a LOT heavier on our systems. 2500 Trees 1200 Buildings, most sliders way up towards the right... and 15 SMOOTH Frames / second. I can live with that. The scenery is so much improved now and the payware addins are really coming up trumps in ways we really didn't think about six months ago. And planes...

Don't get me started folks! The airplane market for FSX is amazing. Freeware, Payware... it's all there and more than there was this time last "iteration" - at least that is the feel I am getting. It's also been so busy in the scene, that I have even started pulling a few FS9 planes across, like my beloved Christen Eagle. Anyway, where have I been? Well, I can safely tell you about a couple of Betas closed - First of all, there was the Aerosoft Beaver and the Helgoland scenery.

The Beaver is really an update based on the FS9 paints. OK, there's far more paints for the Beaver X now, but it is still basically "poor" in the paint sense. Instead of fully implementing the FSX paint techniques to the full, Aerosoft have chosen to do a simple adaptation of the FS9 skins. No, don't get me wrong, the Beaver is a great value-for-money payware. It's just that I have been spoiled by some pretty damn good FSX painting recently.

The Helgoland Beta was an amazing experience. The trouble is, my most recent Beta invitation is Helgoland to the power of ten! If you thought Helgoland was good, you wait till you see the jaw dropper "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" Sorry! I can't tell you. More to the point, there's another Beta I am on - "yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy" and that is even more stunning! Folks, you are in for a HOT summer.

And then there's Vancouver X - go visit the FSAddon site and have a peek at THOSE previews - and take a drool mop for your keyboard!

Then there was another little project I had started to get involved in. This little darlin' is amazing! A pity that it is not going anywhere. I did some paints six months ago, bu the dev team has not yet managed to pull the chestnuts out of the fire yet. But just think! This plane will have a level of detail hitherto unknown in the FS world. We're talking up to 800 and more pixels per foot resolution in places and rivet heads that can be modelled - and not just painted or bump mapped.



OK, let me see about som images to pad out this post...


There you go - business as usual. Don't forget to go explore my Photobucket... loads more there. Have fun!

Stits and Farts

Yep, this blog is moving along in stits and farts...

Again it's been ages since I last posted - but at least I have an excuse folks. But who cares? I just hope you are enjoying this as we go along. Anyway, what's my latest escapade? Let me see now...

I quit my old job, moved house, am settling in to the new town and job, started some fitness training - the trainer is a distant relative of the Marquis de Sade - I've almost sorted all my baggage out after the move and my main PC
is online again. That sums it all up I think.

Anyway, I've been invited to join the Aerosoft Catalina Beta Test team - an honour and a pleasure! It'll be a while before anything useful comes from that, but she is looking great already. As for the fun side of sim flight, well I had a session over New Zealand doing a dog fight with two Spitfires. That was fun. Otherwise there's no real news to report.

Enjoy the scenery...

And this makes three

Third post in two days! What's all this? Well, this is a predominantly graphical post to show another series of pictures.

That recorder module is fun, but I am still not "cutting it", as they say. I can get aeroplanes in the same "lump of sky", but true formation is still eluding me. Personally I'd be the bad workman and blame my tools... I "need" a wraparound six axis full motion simulator so that I can really "feel" where I am in this simulated 3D world.

But I managed a reasonably close straight and level with nine BAe Hawks today. I set up one plane straight and level, locked in the autopilot for heading and altitude hold, let the plane settle with the throttle at the top detente (Saitek X52, you can feel an interim "3/4 throttle" position) and then saved the flight.

Using the recorder module I now let the plane fly on for six minutes. Right, I now have six minutes of steady straight and level flight to work with - should be a piece of wee wee to set up a sequence, no?

No!

Even starting the module on record with traffic and the two planes overlapping, you very soon end up drifting up or down or off the track.

More practice is needed - and next time I'll do it without FSUIPC and turbulence :) :)

And then there is a spate of entries

Well, a second one in just a few days that is :)

First of all: big surprise, my blog is read! I just noticed a comment and I also checked the stats counter...

But most important entry in the blog today is:

I HAVE FOUND THAT ELUSIVE YETI!!!

I can't remember exactly when I installed the Lukla scenery, but I have been up Kali Himal so many times I just can't remember. Today I thought I'd have another atempt and lo and behold, I departed Lukla in my EC 120, looped round to the south, headed east and then north. Flew past Kali Himal and did a right turn up a likely looking approach for the mountaineers and there he (?) was, right out in the open...

Where has it all gone? Time that is...

First blog this year - and the years nearly over already! It's been a funny old start to the year, has this one. Job worries, health worries, various mid lifers - you might know the sort of things. You know, the ones where the only answer is "Sh*t happens".

And it certainly has for me... Car crash too.

Although one of the "events" must have been a bird of paradise one...

Because despite an adverse start to the year, I am now getting a fresh start in a fresh new permanent job and even if this is a very positive move, it does mean a lot of extra work with all that house hunting and packing of boxes. Ah well. New job, new town, new friends...

Anyway, this is just a short post to let anyone who does read my musings know I am still alive.

Of Specs, Bumps and Other Practical Things

On the principle that a day without learning something new is a day wasted, I guess I am now entitled to "Prof. Emeritus", because I have been learning like Billy-O. FSX has done some interesting new things for us painters, and not all of them nice. A texture set for an aircraft now has up to four sheets. OK, the emissive map we don't need to touch (those are the "night textures"), but now we have specular lighting and bump mapping to play with.

"Ah well," the pundits might say, "you don't need to create a new bump map or specular when you repaint a model." and this is generally true - if the people who made the plane also made a sensible bump and spec set.

So what, in simple terms, is a "Spec" and a "Bump"

Let's start with "specular" and say a prayer of thanks to Wikipedia, because the answer is pretty easy:

Specular reflection is the perfect, mirror-like reflection of light (or sometimes other kinds of wave from a surface, in which light from a single incoming direction is reflected into a single outgoing direction. Such behaviour is described by the law of reflection, which states that the direction of outgoing reflected light and the direction of incoming light make the same angle with respect to the surface normal; this is commonly stated as θ_i = θ_r.

So... is that all clear now? No? I thought not. Nor for me. Oh the quote makes sense enough, but what does the specular image do in FSX? Why do Microsoft's default aircraft have such funny hued images as their "Specs"?

Let me see now, metal reflects differently to plastic or glass or a silvered mirror... OK... and a red surface reflects differently to a green surface... Riiigggghhhht... (google gooogle goooogle...) I found one interesting reference somewhere, where the author wrote something like "I have found the best specular for me is a 180 shift..."

...and it was that "180 shift" that finally got me going in the right direction. Whoever it was, he (or she) was talking about degrees, and 180 means opposite - as in the opposite side of the colour wheel, as in colour wheel in your paint program. For those fashion conscious among you - think "complimentary colours". Look in your graphics program and you'll probably see a section where you can edit the colours, and one of the options there will show a circle with options to pick out different kinds of complimentary or opposite colours.

Anyway - I don't want to make this too long. Just suffice to say that the specular component of a texture set defines how the model shines. A polished paint surface will reflect white light as white light, so your specular needs to be "180 shifted". A slightly matt (satin finish, for instance) surface will add its base colour to the reflected light. So here you'd need to tone your spec image differently.

So for shiny airplanes, all you need to do is to flatten your image and then shift the colours by 180 degrees.

That, in essence, is what it's all about - finding the right section of the colour circle and shifting your specular image to suit. There is more - brightness for one thing. A spec image also carries an alpha component, which is not like the alpha we know from FS9. No, in FS9 the dark part of the alpha means more reflectivity. It's the other way round in FSX for the specular. A darker alpha for the spec map will make the reflection less harsh and a lighter one... well, let's put it this way - if you have too harsh an alpha for your specular, you'll end up seeing all the polygons on your model.

Lord, so many words already and I still haven't gotten anywhere. My suggestion is to read the SDK and try to remember. Here's what I have written on a note pad on my desk:

Specular - a two part image (base plus alpha). Shift the base colour by 180 for reflected light. Make the alpha channel grey scale. Experiment with different values of light and dark until you find some you are happy with. My values - 180 clour shift, 35 - 50% lighter for the colour image, save copy as-is but grey scale and use as alpha

Bump map - "flatten" a copy of the texture sheet (remove things like text, logos, emblems and other parts of the skin that don't usually have depth). Go to your "effects" section and choose the "Emboss" effect. Not too high. Select target colour to "greyscale" - that way the height map separates out into thre channels - RGB. MS have declared that the red channel is used for the alpha, so click off the blue and green channels and make the red into an alpha channel (grey). Back to the RGB channels and flood fill RED with black colour. Then flood fill the BLUE with white. Switch on all channels again and you are left with a blue toned image, just like the microsoft bump maps.

It's that time of year again...

Well, actually, it's over at last, and the days are already getting longer. Won't be long now and we'll be looking at Easter Bunnies on the supermarket shelves.

I hope you all had a pleasant Christmas. Did you remember the Christmas Spirit? Or was it just the Christmas spirit?

Hasn't tempus fugitted this year? It seems like ages since I last had anything to blog about. Not to worry, the Dornier has taken up a lot of my free painting time and of the rest of my available hours, my day job has been responsible for hacking those away.

In the meantime, FSX has come and (in a few cases) gone from our PCs. Some folk are dismayed at its (lack of) performance, others are pragmatic enough to realise that it's been designed to have breathing space for the next few generations of PC growth. I have been playing with this tenth generation of FS and fortunately have a computer that can handle the load reasonably well, although I still have to adjust my settings before each flight.

I've also been invited to do some beta testing, so now I have a mission as well as a cause. And I have also been asked to do a commercial paintkit for someone in the new year, so my card is relatively full for a while.

What really has pleased me has been a plethora of new goodies for FSX - just in time for a Christmas CC bashing session. There's been the Tiger Moth (a little disappointing but not a total waste of money), Some new sceneries and - much better - some excellent freeware released. Although I've only had her on my PC for a few hours so far, Rick Piper's Chipmunk for FSX has already won her place in my heart for FSX. Even as installed (she's still a work-in-progress) the Chippie is a delight. The only mistake I made with my first flight was to set up weather in FSX and not spot an errant zero in the windspeeds settings...

...I had 10 (ten) knot winds gusting 150!!!!!! And bear in mind that I also use FSUIPC and have effects such as turbulence activated. Man, can you imagine the bumpy ride I was getting?

Anyway, here's a couple of images to show what I am up to these days. There's more on my photobucket link. Have a happy New Year's Eve and remember - it's not much longer till Burns' Night!


"Beavering towards Sitka" in somewhat minimal conditions - FSX


"Chippie over London" using the real weather as provided by ActiveSky for FSX


Flying Chuck Lischer's F260 over Oshkosh in FSX


Chippying over High Wycombe... ATC has just told me that Booker is IFR, but I'm still going in!


"Vingt et Un" pair doing a very close pass at Wanaka.

Been Away for some time....

Ah well, we all need a day job so that we can pay for our hobbies. It has been a wee bit busy at work of late, so I haven't had much time in the way of feeding the blog.

Another thing keeping me busy these days is the Dornier DO27. 'Tis a wonderful plane, with an excellent paintkit, but the more you delve, the more you find inconsistencies with the scaling and aligning of the various parts of the model. If you pay a visit to my Photobucket album, you can browse to the various albums to see what I am up to.

Thing is, when you get down to the detail, you find you need things like a detail grid so that you can locate and line up details on the textures. I do this with a simple scaled and multi-coloured grid - here you can see a couple of examples. Try it yourselves sometimes...

Recorder Module and Smoke

Bazzam posted a comment recently - er well, some while ago - and asked about smoke in the recorder module.

You can show smoke and record smoke in the recorder - there's an option in the setup of "recorder" to record smoke.

Let's do a DO?

One of my most recent acquisitions has been the Digital Aviation Dornier DO27 and i must say, this plane has one of the best paint kits around. OK, I can nit-pick about a few very minor inconsistencies, but all in all, this is one pretty plane - whether you fly her in "ugly" mode or in a prettified paint.

My first re-skin was - foolishly enough - a zebra-striped one; D-EDDY. I was approached by the guys over at Digital Aviation and given a nudge: "Perhaps I'd care to do this skin?" Ah well, I'm game for a laugh and I went and did it. Bl**dy Nora! What a lot of aligning work that needed! Anyway, the results let themselves be seen, so here you can see a few tasters.


After this one, I went for something a little easier: a Swiss registered Dornier in yellow. Hah! Little did I know! First of all I got digs about the tone of yellow... "Perhaps you could make the yellow a touche more reddish and not so lemony?" And then: "Hey, you haven't painted the cowling in the VC view!" Ah well, we live and learn.




Next up on the drawing board - and still work in progress - is a Portuguese Air Force "27". I saw this one on airliners.net and liked the look of the squadron crest. I couldn't read the motto underneath the shield, but a fellow forum member told me. "Lealdad e Perseveranca" - with a cedilla.

Thing is, the crest is not well shown anywhere on the net, so I got out my Corel Draw first and created a vector graphic crest and a Portuguese cross. Also while in paint, I made some jacking and tie-down point symbols. _It may seem like a lot of work for something that is almost invisible on the FS9 plane, but knowing the detail is there means a lot to me.

Anyway, you have a look and see what you think. I shan't be doing any more until Sunday - tomorrow is the Aerosoft Flight Simulator show in Paderborn, and as it's a three and a half hout drive, I guess I could be up early. I need some beauty sleep!

Let's talk dirty...

No, you fools! Dirt on aircraft paints!

So far most of my painting has been along the lines of "It's just come out of the spray shop, so it should look clean. But of course, planes wear... after a few landings on a grass strip you have things like mud splatters along the underside. Eventually panels chafe and you get that typical black gunge where metal has rubbed agains metal. If the aircraft stands outside in the rain for a while, the pollutants in the atmosphere wash over the aircraft skin and leave dirty grey streaks...

With that in mind, I have started "dirtying up" some of my planes. The first candidate is the Tiger Moth paint of the "Mount Cook Flightseeing" plane. I have a photo of the real world version, so I decided to "take a hint". Take a look and judge for yourselves.