Ducklings fly-by

[FentiFlier1]

​I have done a couple of repaints for Paul Domingue's upcoming J2F3/4 Duck model.
They represent J2F-4 serial 1656 used by U.S. Marines Headquarters Detachment 7M in San Diego, J2F-4 serial 1651 used by the U.S. Navy, and J2F-3 serial 1572 also used by the navy. Also to come is a J2F-4 from USS Saratoga.

On this last aircraft, the blue tail is my interpretation. It could also have been green, red, black, etc. If anyone has information on this, don't hesitate to share it. I am prepared to correct any glaring mistake.

I have chosen to give the aluminium "silver-grey" paintwork only a subtle weathering as these machines seem to have been kept pretty clean.

They are still WIP, and I will release them after Paul releases the next Duck package, and once certain issues have been worked out.:)

Owen.

[FentiFlier1]

A few more pics

[Bomber_12th]

Exquisite! I really do love the early pre-war paint schemes applied to the Duck, compared with those that came later. They look excellent, and I'm looking forward to them being available.

You're quite right that these aircraft were kept in very fine, perhaps 'pristine', condition during their service time in those early years. The finish of the silver paint - the way you've captured it - looks great!

[Paul Domingue]

Owen has been sending me previews of his work and I have been very anxious to get copies of these early squadron colors for myself. His work is outstanding.
I'm almost ready to release an update on the duck and this time it will be without restriction and available to all. I have a few more things to write code for in the VC and I'll post.

[Roger]

Owen has been sending me previews of his work and I have been very anxious to get copies of these early squadron colors for myself. His work is outstanding.
I'm almost ready to release an update on the duck and this time it will be without restriction and available to all. I have a few more things to write code for in the VC and I'll post.

Repaints look great! Regarding the release version that's great news Paul:ernae:

[roger-wilco-66]

Right on! Looking forward.

Mark

[FentiFlier1]

Thanks for the kind words chaps, makes it all worthwhile!

I was going to start a new thread to explain my little problem but I might as well do that here.


The textures you see here are saved as DDS 888-32bit files, by converting the original PSD files with the dxtbmp program.
They are seriously overweight at 21 megs apiece...
Problem is that I tried saving them as DDS DXT-5 but the result was excessively degraded.
Does anyone have an idea how to avoid this, or of what I am doing wrong?

[Paul Domingue]

You shouldn't have any degradation when exporting to DXT5 and with a 2048 x 2048 texture sheet it should come out to 4 megs in DXT5 format. I use the Nvidia plugin to export out of Photoshop. You might try exporting to BMP then use DXTBmp to convert to DXT5. Your using GIMP, is that correct? I don't know that much about it since textures are not my forte. Maybe one of these texture artists will have a better idea.