New Paint Schemes!

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Howard Day

Random art guy.
Starting off with the WIldcat*! These are two options for the Light Stealth Gray color scheme that the Landreich sports.
This are just a test of the new colors, feel free to offer suggestions at this point.

paint1.jpg

paint2.jpg

paint3.jpg


*these are not specifically for the Wildcat - that's just the testbed for the changes.
Comments?
Oh, and right now I'm leaning towards #3's look - but that might change.

Howie
 
Brad, i like the changes you've got going here, but i do have a couple of gripes.

Firstly, looks like the main hull (and to a lesser extent, the gun mods) has lost its bump data (normals look fine though ;)). Either that, or its been knocked down to the point where it cant be seen. This really throws some of the diffuse detail.

Secondly.... the gun mods connected to the fuselage dont really seem to fit in properly. The wing mounts are fine, theres a nice colour match there, but the ones under the nose dont really fit in properly.

Just some thoughts.... ;)
 
I prefer #1, because #3's camo seems blotchy and accidental, like it's covered in shadows of something else. What about a camo pattern breaks up the ship's profile against the stars? Smaller blotches?
 
Howard Day said:
*these are not specifically for the Wildcat - that's just the testbed for the changes.
Comments?
Oh, and right now I'm leaning towards #3's look - but that might change.

Yeah, I like the texture of the third picture more than the first.
 
Mick - these are flat lit images - there's no directional light on these textures (except for the baked in ambient occlusion, of course) so the normal detail wouldn't be evident. No worries, man - once the paint job is finalized I'll do more final lit renders... Also, the guns are completely modular at this point - and they're going to be one of the most swapped items on these ships anyway. Well, besides missiles. But they don't come back.
Working on more right now.
 
More coming. Still trying to nail down that Light Stealth Gray. Trying more gradients and solid transitions here.

paint4.jpg

paint5.jpg

paint6.jpg

paint7.jpg

paint8.jpg

paint9.jpg
 
Now the Dark Stealth Gray - Same as above, but darker on the inside.
paint10.jpg


Comments and preferences are welcome, everyone!
 
Paint9 and 5 look great, as does the dark grey. But would the darker colours look good in-game? Just concern that realistic textures that look good on thier own may look fugly when your flying around them (WC4 capships anyone?)

Also just for a tough of character you could have slightly darker/lighter patches of paint to look as if the pilot or ground crew have hastily patched the armour and used the closest paint they could get hold of, perhaps even chips showing small amount of bare metal. Scorch marks and such would blend in well with the lighter grey colours schemes too.
 
The dark stealth grey is perfect as it is. The camo for the light grey is also great.

#3, #5, and #6 seem to get the right colourings for a light grey out of the second lineup.
 
Okay. I've already done some tests with the darker paint in a simulated engine environment. Amazingly, they are kinda hard to see - at least from a distance. Then I rotated the view slightly and BAM! That cockpit glint gives off a hell of a bright light. So I wouldn't be surprised if you're targeting these things out of the corner of your eye, once they're in-game.
Oh, and the reason the textures on the capships in WC4 sucked so massively: they used a high tile ratio (the texture map was repeated a great number of times across the hull) and the textures were high-contrast. Now, this wouldn't have been a problem on a modern video card - Bilinear/Trilinear filtering would have averaged them out decently. Unfortunately, WC4 was released in a time when 3D accelerated Video cards were not common - and thus the bilinear filtering feature wasn't supported. So what happened is that as your distance from the ship grew - they turned into pixel farms. All that detail was just crawing over that model - the engine couldn't figure out which texel to display at which pixel. That's why the textures themselves looked pretty good - but when you put them on a model and flew around them.....well, let's just say that I'm glad we've got bilinear filtering.

So here's the latest incarnation of the Dark Stealth camo colors - I added little chips of paint here and there - mainly on panel lines and at mesh corners. Unless anyone has any other suggestions/changes, I recokon this'll be the in game texture set.
paint11.jpg

paint12.jpg

paint13.jpg

Still looking for comments and suggestions.
 
I'm still pre-caffeine, so I can't really comment much on the color schemes, but for the paint chips, adding them along the leading edges, especially for atmospheric craft, might not be a terrible idea. Go easy on the leading edge ones, though, since for most of a WC fighter's flight profile they're shielded enough to protect against little nicks and scrapes due to moving through an atmosphere (whether fighting on a planet or simply moving around on base/carrier).
 
First of all, great work on all the models, they look excellent!

I like the the one with the dark patches on all the edges of the craft. I don't like the dark grey much because the lasers stand out too much.
 
Cool! love the dark coler schemes. The know the novels mentions ships being painted white with the landrich cross or some non-reflective black. I think the dark grey is great, not to bright to wash out detail and not to dark mute it out. Though i do agree with Khan, it makes the lasers look kinda out of place.

I like the idea of being able to sneak up on someone or lay in wait and have the last thing they see be a glint, then a full gun salvo!

Daniel
 
Alpha: Thanks, and no.
Death: yeah - I've already considered doing that....but it seemed that no matter how light I went on the leading edge scrapes, they looked like too much. I'll post a picture so you can see what I mean.
Khan: The lasers will eventually match the brightness of the ship.
Dyle: You won't be able to fly any of these Landriech fighters. They're AI only. Sorry.
 
I've always been a fan of camo that makes sense - and the dark grey does make sense in space. I'm uncertain if you're giving the radar a lower detection range against milspec/passive stealth systems - if you are, then it'd be awesome to have dark paintjobs running around and difficulty spotting them. If that's not an issue, I'm all for either a natural-metal look (like the red-tan of Kilrathi plasteel?) or something bright and easily identifiable, to make units and freelancers look more individualized, with a stock "worn military surplus" skin or two in the colors of the sector fleet and probably the few adjacent as well for those not rich enough to afford a custom paint job.
 
very nice work.

they do seem a bit too factory fresh. Perhaps a few bits of makeshift paneling etc?

I do like the worn logos as well.

Keep up the good work!
 
Chernikov: Well, the problem with customized personal colors are that it's kind memory-consuming to make all these maps. Simple nose decals are a great deal easier to do. As for the radar returns - these kind of coloration styles are more for crowded engagements = where radar isn't much of a help anyway.
Conrad: Am I the only one who sees the massive amount of rust on these textures? And the brightly-colored replacement panels all over this thing? It's all there folks. May it needs to be *more* there.....

And now....
Viva la Corsair!!!
Corsairnew4.jpg

Corsairnew5.jpg

Corsairnew6.jpg

Corsairnew7.jpg

I likey.
Enjoy.
 
I do like the stealth color but I prefer multi-tone color myself, like the very first one. I guess I think it adds a little more governmental patriotism that we’ve see the WC games so far.

I don’t see the rust spots you’re talking about but I do see what I believe you intended as the wear marks. They seem way too small to add any character to a moving ship you might be fighting in space against. What I picture more for this are the long oil strikes or the carbon exhaust marks on the WW2 plains.

I do see the light panels but honestly I never thought of them as patch jobs. They looked to clean and uniform.

Keep up the good work!
 
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