Thunderbird!

[falcon409]

A few early WIP shots:

[falcon409]

Not sure how this is going to look. . .the top of the wings and the fuselage are pretty straight forward, but the underside is not. The fuselage doesn't have a texture for the underside, the left and right halves just wrap top and bottom, so the thunderbird graphic on the underside is going to take some creative texturing and even then it won't be what I'd like to see. I will have to add some color in the areas where the head are tail would be and then let it wrap around and see if it fills in at all. . .not so sure it will.

The underside of the wing gave me a good start for most of the thunderbird, but I've indicated on the paint kit where I'll have to add something and see how the wrap effect fills in the other sections of the graphic.

[Tylerb59]

Great work on these liveries, Falcon.

The line work and rivets are a bit heavy on the diffuse texture. If you could throw those over onto a bump map and tune it down to almost nothing on the diffuse, it will dramatically improve the effect, especially on your bare metal livery.

[modelr]

Great work, Falcon. Could the Blue Angels' TO-2 be far behind??:applause:

[Railrunner130]

Lookin' good Ed!

[falcon409]

. . . . .The line work and rivets are a bit heavy on the diffuse texture. If you could throw those over onto a bump map and tune it down to almost nothing on the diffuse, it will dramatically improve the effect, especially on your bare metal livery.
I barely understood the dds texturing, let alone a bump map, is it simply a case of labeling it "bump.dds" or is there more to it. Don't have a clue. As for the bare metal, I'm not doing a bare metal. . .there is no reflectivity in Tim's model so my attempts at bare metal were futile.

Update: Well, I've looked into the bump mapping procedures a bit more and I won't be doing that on this airplane. I'll try toning down the lines and rivets, etc., though. If you'd like to have a go at it, I'll be more than happy to send you the 45 layer paint kit.