Combat Pilot - DD #18 - New A6M2 Textures, Hiryū Progress and Refraction?

Today we want to talk a little bit about our external textures (skins) for our aircraft.

Last year we asked for volunteers who would like to help us paint our A6M-2 and F4F-4. Several folks stepped up and we gave them access to our source materials and they used Substance Painter to create skins for these two planes. It was an interesting experiment and a great learning event for us which yielded some encouraging results. Matter or fact, we want to thank everyone who participated in that effort, but give special thanks to our friends Pépito who worked on the A6M and Maximusss who worked on the F4F and Anton Hulega who worked on both. We also want to recognize Tamas Mart who also contributed to the artwork and implement the skins in the engine. We have been utilizing those skins since FS Expo 2024 and they have been featured in all our screens and marketing since. We appreciate your important help when we were short on time and personnel to make these textures. Salute to you guys and everyone else who participated. Much was learned and your work allowed us to confidently market Combat Pilot.

As you guys know, for the last 20+ years, paintjobs for our virtual aircraft were created primarily with Photoshop or maybe Paint Shop Pro or Gimp. Nowadays, most textures are created in something called Substance Painter which allows you to paint directly on the 3D model and utilize all kinds of smart materials and make PBR textures quite easily. However, most of you in the community don’t have access to Substance and prefer to make skins the old-fashioned way with an editor like Photoshop.

To that end, our plans for future community skin making will include both the files necessary to create paint schemes in Substance Painter, but also include a Photoshop template so you can make skins with that as well, just like you always have. We also expect talented community artists will team up to get the best our of both methods in some kind of hybrid approach. We’re excited to see what you come up with when we release these templates for Carrier Qualification next year.

We also plan to eventually have a very nice object viewer in the UI so you can easily see and export images of your handiwork. Painting your aircraft is an important component of the combat flight-sim hobby so we plan to fully support it.

Recently, we have embarked on a new wave of texture creation to update the existing textures for the A6M and F4F and add new paint-schemes for he Carrier Qualification release. Included are some screens of our work-in-progress A6M textures. Yes, this is a dark green camo version for the Zeke which is not appropriate for Midway, but we are also working on the famous light grey-green scheme too. And of course, we are working on a new updated skin for the F4F-4. We’ll keep you posted on their progress when we have more to show soon.

Progress on the Hiryū

We continue to make progress on the IJN Hiryū. She now has all her motor launches and dinghies aboard and both the starboard and port side hulls complete including guns. Next up is the flight-deck and island.   

Refraction Possible?

For those of us who have been involved in the CFS hobby for a long time, we remember the passionate discussions about the natural phenomenon of glass or water bending light rays known as Refraction. How it affected windscreen frames and our vision out of them was a hot topic at times and options to depict refraction accurately by developers were limited. The Fw-190 being the most discussed example due to its thick armored glass and sharply angled windscreen. It’s low sitting cockpit in relation to the nose made good forward vision and gunnery seemingly impossible, or did it? The evil lower bar always seemed to win the day. Well, maybe not any more.

Carlos has taken it upon himself to solve this issue for Combat Pilot and wanted to see if he could make a true representation of it for our glass. Check out his video below to see the promising result. Can it be a real feature in a modern simulation? Time will tell as we explore the issue and technology further, but we have cool initial result.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3tJKH0qShg

Thanks to Nemesis for his great video from years ago. His original video is here if you are curious:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCGsyjt5ANU

For those that may ask, no we’re not making a Focke-Wulf, not yet any way.

For more information about our project, please visit www.combatpilot.com or any of our social media properties.

#combatpilot #wwii #imperialjapan #usnavy #usmc #battleofmidway