VACATION

I had to take a vacation from the C4D Spitfire project.  I was burned out.  Today I did the camouflage for the rudder and the left side wing fillet.  Soon the only big remaining task will be the cavities for the wheel wells.  THEN I CAN START ANOTHER AIRCRAFT.  :-)  +Åke Jonsson +Dale Jackson +harley harp 

BREAKFAST ON THE RANGE

Here is a light breakfast out on the range.  First, you have to have a 100 year old Griswold cast iron skillet that has been recently cleaned.  I can personally attest to the fact that this one was THOROUGHLY washed very recently.  Spring of 2010 as I recall.

Next thin-slice some double mahogany smoked slab bacon.  1/4 inch thick will do nicely.  For a dinner with grits 1/2 inch would be better.

Put the bacon in the skillet with a sliced up peach.  Two peaches might be better.

It is important that the chef is properly "calibrated" and up to the task.  The following picture shows one method of calibration.

Proceed to cook up the bacon adjusting the heat applied to caramelize the peaches by piling them on the bacon or visa versa.  The peaches will "sweat" into the "hog fat" to make a delightful mix.

Presentation is part of the meal.  Here we have chosen the finest Wedgewood paper plates from Costco.  The mahogany pan drippings are scraped onto the top.  Any left-over liquid in the pan can be used for hair pomade and will be relished by any camper nibbling on your ear after hours.

+Åke Jonsson +Dale Jackson +harley harp +Mark Boehm +Heidi Anne Morris 

SUBTLE FASTENERS and PANELS

Remember that I had black dots for the fasteners and black lines for the panel edges?  Here is the image.

This morning I did a little research and learned some things.  I knew I could change the nature of each row of dots but that would mean changing details on about a dozen layers in PhotoShop one at a time.  I took all of those “text” layers made up of “period”, “space”, period and put them into a group.  I then changed the “blending mode” for that group with the underlying color layers to “soft light” and varied the opacity (magnitude of the effect) to make the Dzus fasteners more subtle rather than just solid black dots.  Soft light doesn’t change the color but varies its intensity at the dot positions.  The effect is to make the fasteners look like they had been overpainted (which they are) and then worn a bit.  I put the panel edges and things in another “group” and can vary how “intense” that effect is independently.  The fasteners and panels can be adjusted independently and all at once.  There are about six “regions” involved in the so-called UV map which makes the 3d surface into a squished 2d version and the fasteners have to be positioned on the panels by making movements in PhotoShop and checking the rendering in Cinema 4D by saving the PhotoShop image and then reloading it into C4D and rendering.  But it does all work.

What remains to be done is to change the scale factor on the Dzus fasteners right at the spinner in the aircraft long direction so that the fasteners are not stretched by the curvature.  No big deal.  I now think I have one of many possible workflow scenarios figured out to simulate fasteners and panels.  There is a lot more that can be done with PhotoShop as well as by making so-called “bump maps” for the textures in Cinema 4D.  This can go on and on forever but the results so far have been very encouraging.  An image of a subtle treatment of the Dzus fasteners and panel edges is shown below.

 +Dale Jackson +Åke Jonsson +harley harp 

LONG STRUGGLE

It has been a long struggle and there are still DAYS of work left to go on the Spitfire project.  It certainly has been a learning exercise.  Yesterday I lost all of my work on the fuselage camouflage simply because the documentation for Cinema 4D does not explain the STRATEGY of data set storage and manipulation but, instead, gives you a cook book and leaves you to web sources for some meager knowledge.  Well, I have mostly recovered and certainly know what not to do the next time.  It is looking good ... from far, but far from good. I need a rest.  Although I haven't used it I know what the "to do" list feature in the software is for.  +Dale Jackson +Åke Jonsson +harley harp 

FUSELAGE CAMOUFLAGE

I can't hit the right simile to use about getting the camouflage (mostly) onto the fuselage.  Is it like "birthing a horse" or maybe a breech birth with a porcupine.  When Cinema 4D, Illustrator and PhotoShop are all involved simultaneously and it is CNTL in one program and ALT in another to do the same operation plus four or five file types I think I can appreciate how a master juggler feels.  Yes, there is a goober here and there and, yes, the wing filet has not been painted and, yes, there are many details yet to attack ... but I am now thinking that maybe the target date for completion (these things are never really complete) might get pulled back from Halloween to Labor Day again.  And, oh, the video driver card and its software gets in the act and a soft start of the computer DOES NOT solve that.  It takes turning off the house circuit breakers and turning them back on.  :-)  :-)  There is apparently zero video card "standards" that work properly all the time.  And Illustrator doesn't like the driver version ... I NEED to spend two hours fighting that.  And just to make things totally impossible C4D uses the mouse wheel to magnify and Adobe hasn't figured out yet that approach has now become an industry standard.  When the day comes that there is ANY cooperation between software companies I will be a firm believer in miracles.  What fun.  But it sure makes the hours fly.  Next: the fuselage side markings.

DIHEDRAL

I just couldn't stand the flat wing any longer.  Although I still have no idea how to "munch" a hole into the bottom of the wing to install a wheel well and making the wing asymmetric may create more work later on, I just had to "bend" the wing to create dihedral.  Even that was more complexity than I thought it would be but it got done.  I think the beast looks much more airworthy with proper dihedral.  I continue to be amazed that the Brits could manage to make these things fly straight with a Lucas refrigerator (just kidding) under only one wing.  (Why do the British drink their beer warm?  Because Lucas makes their refrigerators.)

I confess.  I DID save the unbent wing along with the bent version in case I run into trouble later on.

I was pleasantly surprised to find how easy it was to create a five-spoke wheel hub with Cinema 4D.  Yes, I know, for those with a little peer or formal schooling this is all hypernerbalicious simple (take-off on Supercalifragilistic).  But for this unschooled 3d savage it is delightfully easy without help.

And even from the underside looking up the dihedral makes things look more natural.  PLUS ... I am sure the thing might even fly instead of instantly entering a flat spin.  Don't you just love the stylized Hoover vacuum sweeper hung under the left wing for an oil cooler?  (I am allowed to poke fun at the Brits.  After all, at one time I actually had 44 cylinders worth of British cars all running at the same time ... which may be a candidate for a world's record.)

+Dale Jackson +Åke Jonsson +harley harp 

UNDERSIDE DETAIL

I have hung the Lucas refrigerator radiator under the right wing, the oil cooler under the left and the air intake in the center.  What comes next?  Just too many things to do to contemplate.  Maybe work on the wheel rim, huh?  Yes, the wing is still flat and the flaps should be down.  More and more details.  Wheel wells are a really big issue.

CINEMA 4D SPITFIRE FOR SUNDAY

ALRIGHT.  I figured out why C4D screamed about missing files and fixed that.  It now renders without complaint.  I revisited the geometries on the landing gear and created wheel covers and made them the same goose-egg-blue as the underside.  I will have to map different colors for the inside and outside and figure out how to make multiple extrudes to create the inside detail.  Later.  For the rest of the day I MAY work on the radiator or wheel hubs or just veg-out.  I have some Budweiser so maybe a veg-out afternoon is in order.  The "BIG DEAL" is going to be munching a hole in the bottom of the wing for a wheel well.  That one eludes me so far.

+Dale Jackson +harley harp +Åke Jonsson 

BODY PAINT AND UNDERSIDE

WHAT A STRUGGLE.  I must say ... I have never seen anything that is more grotesquely over-complicated than body paint in Cinema 4D.  I blasted through the obfuscation with unbelievable stress.  Still isn't right.  Somehow the program thinks the color for the right aileron is not available and is hidden down in "User" "Documents" which denies me access.  Haven't blasted through that yet with Microsoft and C4D both in series with progress.  There will be a way but beats me how for now.  I am ready to start on the tail feathers and fuselage.  I put landing gear place keepers in the file taken out of one of my practice sessions.  I picked the "goose egg blue" right out of the Audubon book (just kidding).  No dihedral added yet.  This kite would be totally unstable the way things are.  I thought I was kidding about getting the project more-or-less done by Labor Day.  I have revised my estimate now to Halloween.  Fitting.  +Dale Jackson +Åke Jonsson +harley harp 

TEXTURE MAPPING

Oh, me!!  I am pretty badly disconnected from the texture mapping.  HOWEVER, I stumbled around and figured out how to create a non-symmetric object out of the symmetric object it once was.  I then stumbled around A WHOLE LOT MORE to get the frontal projection of a JPEG PhotoShop image to line up with the UV map in Cinema 4D.  I put a second roundel on the left wing.

The result is the Spitfire now has a left and right camouflage pattern like it "should-oughter".  The ailerons are separate entities and know nothing about the wing material/texture so I suspect I will just "body-paint" them by hand ... if I can get a good hard brush edge.  I used "frontal" projection which I believe will work for the wing and tail feathers but probably not for the fuselage.  Then again maybe I can "pre-distort" the texture map in PhotoShop so that it will do a reasonable wrap onto a frontal projection of the fuselage.  But maybe I should struggle with "unwrapping" the fuselage if for no other reason than to induce another migraine.  There are several ways and I am sure I will wind up exploring all of them.

In any case ... here is the state of the camouflage treatment at this brief instant in time.

+Dale Jackson +harley harp +Åke Jonsson 

 

ROUNDELS

Here is a try at generating roundels for the wings.  The colors might not be that accurate but it has been an experience.  Next comes the left/right wings, ailerons, fillet and the fuselage.  I am encouraged. +Dale Jackson +Åke Jonsson +harley harp 

TIME FOR CAMOUFLAGE

I used the new version of ILLUSTRATOR to trace out camouflage patterns from 3-view drawings of a Spitfire on the web.  I searched around and found a sunlit image from the RAF museum and sampled the colors with the ILLUSTRATOR eye-dropper.  The spline-draw tool (curve) in ILLUSTRATOR is much better than the pen tool but also about as obtuse and non-intuitive (but then that is probably just me).  I took the JPEG version of the ILLUSTRATOR camouflage pattern and put it onto a texture in Cinema 4D and dropped that onto the symmetric wing object knowing that it would be (improperly) mirrored onto the opposite wing.  I have not coped with the fillet or ailerons that have to be handled separately or the side views of the fuselage.  It will all come as I slowly learn this multi-program monster.  For now I am ticked as much as I ever get tickled.  I know I am doing this in a not very efficient manner but I am learning.  This is but a start.

Thanks again go to Anders Lejczak http://www.colacola.se for donating non-commercial use of bits of his files.  I hope I can repay the favor someday and I will re-created anything borrowed from scratch.

+Dale Jackson +Åke Jonsson +harley harp 

COMING IN ON ONE AILERON AND CROSSED CONTROLS

+Dale Jackson +harley harp 
Things do go slowly.  I have added a wing fillet.  It started life as a cylinder and got trimmed down to a concave 90 degree segment and then the orthogonal dimensions adjusted and the axis of 10 "cuts" moved to put each slice against the fuselage and wing on the two ends.  It will take some adjusting yet ... particularly under the fuselage at the end.  However, it doesn't look too bad and it certainly makes the aircraft look much more "natural".  I cut out a wing segment and made it into an aileron.  The mating "hole" in the wing trailing edge is yet to be done.  I have figured out how to do that without ending up with messy n-gons all over creation.  The "big deal" yet is to cut a cavity in the bottom of the wing for a wheel well.  I did it once and promptly forgot how.  I saved the file so I can use it to recall.

I have been working in "symmetry" for the most part.  Problem is: how do I do left and right details?  I suspect the procedure is to discard the "symmetry" half and then reproduce the remaining half mirrored and simply place them against each other so there are left and right halves that can be unique.  Now, you would think there would be a way to take a "symmetry" piece and preserve all of the points but make it a single element so that a different "paint" can be applied to the left and right.  I will bet there is but it is hidden very deep and things like that are NEVER covered by Lynda or others ... too simple in one respect and far to advanced in another.  Most of the tutorials are aimed at the most elemental operations.  Further, the "search" engines in "help" key on single words.  No context searching.  It is not exactly "google-ish".

I have put in and taken back out dihedral.  (It is quite interesting that the google/blogger spell checker does not recognize dihedral.  This happens to me a lot with my vocabulary.)  I want to keep the wing axis flat for working on the wheel well for now.  The control surfaces are turned for effect.  There is only one aileron and it is at cross purposes with the rudder ... the way to induce a spin.  Things are a bit bumpy and lumpy here and there but I verge on the ecstatic that I have persevered to this point.  The program is indeed quite "friendly".  All of this would be quite easy with just a little peer help ... like in a graphics arts organization.  But for a "lone wolf" it has had its painful moments.  (Actually more of a "Lonesome Polecat" re: Al Capp, "Lil' Abner" for you that remember the 50's like they were yesterday.)

AHA.  A bit of research reveals that the mesh convert command "current state to object" does indeed take a symmetry object and convert it into a single object (keeping the symmetry object).  That solves my left/right "painting" problem and allows me to make left and right variations to an otherwise symmetric "thing".