Color; Aluminum

[joes1944]

I was looking over your swatches and couldn't find any that represent the color of aluminum. What I'm trying to achieve is the base metal of aluminum that lies underneath the paint so that when the paint chips off you see the base metal. I've seen p-51 skins with Bare metal, shiney and dull. Any suggestions as to where I can obtain a swatch?

[BLOWHARD]

There is no color aluminum, it varies depending on the type of aluminum, how clean or dirty it is, whether or not it's polished etc. It also depends on what's reflected on the metal. Put some polished aluminum in a red room and it will have a red cast to it. It's more of a matter of choice in this case.
Perhaps people could post their RGB colors for bare metal?
There is also a post here that it worth looking at-
http://www.simmerspaintshop.com/foru...t-chiping.html

[Serval]

Well, aluminium is not really a color. it's a partially reflective material. What aluminium looks like depends on light and how dull it is.
But paintswatches do have aluminium paint. Like RAL 9006 and 9007.
But that is hard to translate into a computer color. Though RAL 9006 and 9007 are in the list on this site.

I don't use a swatch for aluminium, since it depends on how it works out in the game. For my baremetal skins I use greyish colors that tend to blue and I try to let the game give the refelctive effect.

Now for paintchipping I just use a gey color that looks right. and that also depends on the colors surrounding it, since colors influence eachother. Try some light to medium greys and you'll see that work.

If you have a template which has a baremetal layer you can simply use that. In my opinion the dull ones work best. The ones where much shades and highlights are painted on may contain too much black/dark and white/bright areas

Especially for metal effects: don't go for what a swatch tells you, go fo how it looks in the game. If you think it looks right, then it is right.

[joes1944]

FW-190A. I intend to add a new layer entirely of grey(aluminum) placing/duplicating it AFTER the paint layers (grey or green) that I want to be chipped.Then erasing the paint in areas such as the wing tips for instance so that the underlying aluminum layer shows through. If a solid grey color for the aluminum doesn't look right I intend to paint in stripes of various lighter and darker greys to show variances of reflection along the lines of the bend of the metal. In other words along the front of the wing. Then blurring the effect along those lines so as to minimize the striped look.

[AGNT_Matt]

this is a tricky subject, i agree entirely with Serval here. i only really applied paint chipping to FS9/X as you can apply an Alpha Channel to give the aluminium underneath a shine.