P-51D Mustang

[BlueMoon]

Well, I've been planning to make a profile of this aircraft for a bit, and I figure it's a good time to start.

But I have a question before I do. What's a good technique for creating a bare metal look? I saw what Gamary did and the result was quite nice. Are there other methods or is that how I should go about it?

Also (and this probably seems silly), how do you guys go about shading your aircraft - on my Wildcat the shading looks all choppy and inconsistent. Do you guys just use very big brushes get general look, or gradients or something?

Thanks, BlueMoon

[mclaring]

Bluemoon,

you'll see from some of the masterpieces on this site that there are various ways of doing shadings/ gradients. the main thing is to determine the shape first - some aircraft actually have curves in unusual places. Being a PS guy, I usually incorporate a fuselage gradient within the first skin - then I darken the other/ outer areas using a combination of large and smaller soft brushes. If the shading looks too dark - reduce the opacity. Warning - my experience is that the shading always comes out darker in the printed product. as to the bare metal thing - i'll let someone else answer that - there are some good examples out there. HTH,

Michael

[GrubbyFingers]

Hi Bluemoon,

I agree with Michael, I find the size of the area dictates the size of the shading brush. I always shade with black so I don't upset the colour balance of the base colour, unless there is a specific reason to. Bare metal is a case in point where you might use different colours. I haven't done a bare metal render yet. I also set the opacity of the shading brush to just 1% or 2%. Then build up the shading gradually till I am happy with it. Don't forget that you can always drop the opacity of your shading layer if you go too far. That's usually a lot easier than trying to fix it with the brush. Don't forget, too, you can use the brush, set to Clear and reduce the opacity to slowly remove pixels as well.
Grubby.