LanceCriminal86

I appreciate it, I'll give it a whirl. Also just saw you had templates for the pilot suit and HGU-33 as well, I'm not sure if those were recent but I passed them over to the other skinners as well. Also, is there any reason the RIO pilot body doesn't have a separate LUA callout? Is that something that can be done? Pilots and RIOs often had different patches and their wings are different as well. It would be appreciate for us detail nerds.

@ensamvarg the UVWs around the tails as well, or just the wing root flipped textures? I'll keep my eyes out for more. One thing I did notice is that typically, the ext 2 and ext 4 are the left side of the aircraft and have the text "normal", while 1 & 3 are "mirrored". However, looking at the wing glove vane areas on the 3 and 4 textures, it seems like the lettering is the opposite. On 4, the wing glove area is backwards text, while on 3 it's regular.

I also found some weirdness in the UVWs along the back of the aircraft around the vertical stabilizers, it messes up the red stripes when you do high vis style liveries:

Testing my VF-201 skins and some different Reshade settings:

VF-201, just waiting around for the -A to happen at some point.

While extending the red stripe up to the top of the aircraft as seen in older late High-Vis schemes like that of VF-201 and VF-202 (prepping for F-14A), I noticed some oddities when the definitely straight line in my texture was NOT straight on the back of the aircraft: I recall some issues with a flipped vertex being reported a loooong time ago, but couldn't remember if this had been reported. While the A model we're getting is supposed to be later than the late 80s timeframe VF-201 wore this scheme apparently into the 90s at least on their CAG bird and even alongside the lo-vis with other line aircraft. It's one of those things many would overlook but once you see it exists, it's hard to ignore, especially after spending a lot of time trying to replicate this squadron.

Damn, that was a no kidding hot-shit pass!

Welcome to skinning the Tomcat. All I can say is I have not found an easy and consistent way, no.

When he announced a family emergency I believe in the same statement he said that update would have to wait, as that was primarily his role to do it.

Those were A models, I think some folks are holding off on some of those schemes until we see how different the A model is to paint. I saw claim that B skins will work on the A with minor differences so we will see.

I paint Tomcats however I feel, historical and non-, and I am working on templates for other skinners to use. I don't give a flying crap HOW they use those templates, because they were also kind enough to help me with mine. I have worked in mods and modding teams (Roma Surrectum 2/3 for RTW) for many years and have almost never seen the attitude you display about the use of *your* template. We knew that people would go and flavor the mod to taste, add non-historical units in on their own, etc. So I'll just make my own I suppose, just like I did with the E-2D. And I'll let folks use it and paint My Little Pony schemes or whatever the heck they want with it. If you just put a solid template out there, people will use it. Some would be fictional, yes, but plenty will be historical. But since that's the attitude you choose, good riddance.

I don't understand the dude's stance when the Navy LITERALLY did exactly what I was planning to do with their CoNA schemes:

Why? I have never seen anyone release a skin template with the condition "Don't use this for fictitious schemes" Is this an "official" stance of the Military Aircraft Mod, that no skins shall be made that aren't of a real aircraft? So the guy deleted his comment now, I take it this was someone's personal template?

I completely understand. But my thought was that if your Tomcat is inverted or rolled 90 degrees, that TARPS pod isn't going to be able to *see* the target. Does the mission builder allow for any parameters like aircraft roll or pitch attitude for triggers?

Ah, but I take it no layered's PSDs or anything? Even something simple with the details and panel lines separated out would be a huge help. I ask because I've been having fun backdating various aircraft to the post-WW2 dark sea blue schemes used through Korea. I had the E-2 before my HDD crashed, A-4, F-18C, and Tomcat. I was thinking the Orion and C-2 would look great in those schemes!

I didn't see it previously, but do you guys have some basic templates for these aircraft by chance?

Perhaps in addition to actual photos/screenshots a "zone" can be painted around the aircraft representing the TARPS sensor and visibility, which can then trigger success flags in missions. Something a little more complicated than flying over a zone is making sure the cameras were able to "see" the target sufficiently.

@Lt.Seahawk Are those your own roughmets/template or did you borrow someone's? I'm looking for an improved roughmet to work from for a HAVE GLASS painted Tomcat.

At one point there was a P-51 weapon mod that allowed it to carry a loadout close to a Skyraider with lots of bombs and rockets, not sure it still works but until the Jug shows up that could fill a gap. There also was a Skyraider mod in progress but sadly it never even made it as an AI asset.

Could that be added? Allegedly the KC-10s with basket were preferred by Tomcat pilots for refueling during OEF/OIF, maybe due to the higher speed and less turbulence tanking from a basket off the boom instead of wingtips.

I was nearly done with a fictional F-14 Blue Angels pack, but I had an HDD crash and lost all of it. I may try it again if nobody still has done it, but the problem I ran into was matching the Blue's tail numbers. Have not been able to find a font that matches is, and am not so great at hand-making anything just yet.

@IronMike you forgot the ™ Soon™

Pay attention to what format you export in. I noticed that depending on what I selected in the Intel DDS export window in Photoshop the texture would come out super dark. It depends whether you select SRGB vs whatever the other option was. Also the tail texture does seem to apply differently, I had to do extra work on it to have it match the rest of the aircraft whenever I used non-standard colors like dark sea blue or ww2 Blue-Gray. You may need to add extra color layers or play with the brightness/darkness/contrast manually to have it match the body of the aircraft more closely.

I feel like a good number of the things folks are whining about not having been released yet, actually have had logical statements from HB on WHY, stuff like the Phoenix missile model as it was working fine offline, but wasn't working correctly in multiplayer. Seems to me being a 3rd Party developer is just as challenging as landing on a carrier in real life, you have a moving target, a small strip to land on, all while your fuel is burning away, and that's on a clear day when you get to do CASE I. ED has their own branches they are making changes in, and when it comes time to merge in, new problems arise that weren't there before because the target has moved. Perhaps whenever you guys get around to doing a dev rollup a line or two on the technical challenges for each major line item could be thrown in?

I was going to try and buy a busted X-55 throttle and slowly mod it into F-14 throttles, ended up with an X-56 instead. I'm still considering ways to one bit at a time upgrade the X-56 into a franken throttle, to include completely new replica F-14 grips, replace the buttons, and eventually new sensors and have the whole thing running on a whole new USB controller. I've wondered if Heatblur would be able to export some of the cockpit part meshes to commonly available 3d formats, that could be manipulated, split open, and 3d printed to allow for "drop-in" conversions of existing throttles like the Warthog or X-56.