Still Spilling Paint

[Willy]

It's rainy today, can't get out to do much and I've been scratching a Howard 500 itch lately. I've been working on replacing the default Learjet AI traffic with Howard 500s and decided I needed more paint schemes to go with the dozen or so I already have been using. You can't have too many H500s sitting/flying around in the background.

I'm not sure which or who's model I'm using other than it's FSX native and uses the original texture mapping. I kind of got 'em all mixed up. I did the basic fuselage paint for this some years ago in FS9 and forgot about it. It's still a work in progress and I'm pretty sure that the bare metal on the front of the engine cowling is gonna go and some of the details will get moved around some. Otherwise, it's pretty much there, just needing a wee bit of tweaking...

[Willy]

Getting there. Darn cowling bezels are apparently a lot more reflective than I thought they were. The textures are red until I look at them in the sim. Looks like I'm going to need really lighten up on the alpha there. Other wise I think I'm darned close on it.

[TuFun]

That's one of my favorite Milton aircraft! There's about 34 repaints for the Howard 500. The cowl and flap (mirrored) area are no fun to paint. The exhaust ports were not align up right with the wing-root making the strips hard to do correctly. Would be cool if this model got updated to FSX/P3D with the 2013 revised model. The tail mapping and proper sized crew were done on that one.

This one I couldn't finished due to issues with the mapping.

[Willy]

N500HP, before it was N500HP!

Someone did that paint for it early on in FS9 and I was going to take a shot at it myself as the old one was kind of rough in spots. I've been using the old FS9 paints for AI purposes (the H500 works quite well as AI as do everything else of Milton's I've tried) and that's one I've got flying about.

I've been detaiing the original paint kit into one that's more to my liking. Just mucking about, I did a fictional take on TWA's only Lodestar updated to '50s white top paint scheme on the Howard a week or so ago. I never did sort out the mapping of the inside areas of the vertical fins and just left them in white with no stripes as I couldn't get the one texture to line up right on both sides of it.

I've had more problems with bottom of the flaps as bare metal than anything else. Painted, those seem okay. The bezel texture for the front of cowl as I mentioned before is not wanting play nice, but I'm confidant, I'll get it figured out sooner or later.

[TuFun]

Yep, now N500HP. Most difficult to paint that area under the wings on the nacelles. Had red bleeding thru the top nacelles on that N4362F. Maybe it's the model version I was using. It's an old model done a lone time ago.



The real aircraft, notice the exhaust stacks are below the wing-root.

https://www.airhistory.net/photo/18543

[Willy]

I've figured out my bezel texture problem is in the FSX native model. If I use a FS9 model the red shows. The FSX native shows bare metal from I assume the shared textures folder which is where I stash the bare metal exterior textures.

The FS9 model though throws my alphas all out of whack so I'd have to start from scratch if I went to that model.

Got some thinkin' to do on it, but I'm probably got a lot of redoing alpha layers ahead of me.