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868RM

Well Known Member
Does anyone have any thought's on the paint scheme programs ? Which one seems to work the best. Thanks Ron RV8A
 
I bought this, some catches to it, though

www.airplanecolor.com
The program is called Model Airplane Colour Design

This is for RC models, but it's inexpensive, and has a model for an RV-8.
I bought the software recently.

What it does not do, that I need, is model the curvature of the fuselage.
It's great for upper and lower wings and horizontal stabilizer, and for the side view of the fuselage. The upper and lower edges of the projected fuselage are bled together when the 3D views are presented.

If you are looking at projecting an image onto the curved surfaces, this will not be adequate.

However, for a lot of paint schemes, this thing would be very good.
Excellent viewing tools, and a free demo (not an rv-8). The program also allows side-by-side comparison of two models.

Again, if you have some detail to put on the top, or on the bottom of the fuselage, this tool is not going to do well.

I'm looking back at the RV-8 model for Microsoft Flight Simulator next, unless someone else has a better idea here.
 
Here's a sample of the first scheme I did with Model Airplane Color Design.

To mirror the above statement, it's not a perfect 2D projection onto a 3D surface, but it was far better than using crayons on the Van's 3-View drawings.

black-and-grey-outward-swoops-with-cs-small-small.jpg
 
I've used a variety of thing from Corel Draw, Photoshop Elements, MS Paint, MS Flight Simulator, and MS Expression. In short, you can use everything from crayons to some high-end graphics tools and do the job!

This was done with Expression:
RV-6%20TG%20(rev1).jpg


Here's some work with MS FSX:
RCAF_Top.jpg


And some older work in Coral (I think)..
RV7_paint_rcaf%20(yellow).jpg
 
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any tips on the FSX route?

The short peek I had via google showed what appeared to be a steep learning curve.

Any tips?
 
for the fsx route,
the magic lies in the base model and wheter or not you have a paintkit available.
there was a great RV-7A on the market for fs9 from flightfactory simulations which ceased to exist...
at the moment, there is no decent RV available, neither pay- nor freeware that i know of.
the flightfactory model could be ported to fsx, although the panel and other functions wouldn't work due to some naggy registration routines.
but for all intents and purposes of repainting it was good enough.
especially because there was a paintkit available (layered photoshop source files) that could be used to generate the texture files.
for the conversion into the right format, you need a tool like bmp2dxt.
http://www.flyvans.com/subproj/final_hbymt.html
and it turned out great in real life! computer planning definitely helped a lot to optimize for all the various viewing angles.

bernie
 
Thanks

I bought the RV-7 set from Flightfactory Simulations for FS2004, and I liked flying it.

I've elected an alternate path now (that it's warm out).
I bought the Hangar 9 RC version of the RV-8 (mostly white, cheap compared to painting an RV); I'm going to hang it up on a wall, and use an overhead projector and PC paint program to investigate how the plan view image looks from the sides.

It won't be perfect, but will give me close to correct outlines for projected edges, to use on the MACD program.
 
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