Next up is a build of the Ernst Udet, Fokker DVII LO!. The model is a repaint using a Fokker DVII Udet skin from the
www.sas1946.com website to go with the Kartanowa Kolekcia Fokker D.VII Udet kit. There are plenty of other Fokker DVII skins out there but the Udet Fokker is special to me. Sometime in the early '70s I built a 1/72 Udet model, this being before lozenge decals became available on the open market so the lozenge details were omitted in the built kit. Now I can do a little better.
Fitters has a Udet kit, but I am not in possession of this kit and perhaps its graphics will make an Udet repaint un-necessary for everyone else. The Kartanowa kit interior, cockpit parts are good so I will not touch them.
Starting off is a description of the technique utilized to create the repaint. Skins used in the aircraft combat games pose some unique challenges that need to be addressed to execute the repaint correctly, which arises from what I can surmise is the files have specific characteristics (transparency, Alpha value) that allow shadows and light to appear on the airplane. What I discovered that if one simply cuts and paste (I use GIMP) and resize the image into the target kit graphic, the copied image if blurry. As it has been explained by someone who knows computer graphics better than I, the image data becomes damaged and fixing work damage is a complicated endeavor.
The workaround is to cut, copy and paste the skin image into the target graphics, target graphics that have been resized and rotated if needed, eliminating the need to edit and damage the skin graphics.
How is this done.
Open the skin in its own separate file:
Select and cut a part from the skin:
Open the page from the kit that you want to repaint and paste the copied part into the file and position it over the corresponding part in the kit.
The size is too small. At this point you want to find out the scale factor between the as pasted part and the part that is fully sized to the kit.
In gimp, when the resize option is used, this dialogue box appears when the selected image is to be resized.
Copy the numbers 89 and 104. Now, resize the part to fill the copied into the kit image.
The dialogue box numbers are now 112 and 131. The average of the ratios of 89/112 and 104/131 is .7943. This scale factor is the reduction in size that the kit page needs to be so the skin will fill the kit graphics.
Now, create a new image file.
This dialogue box appears.
The image size in this case is 554 and 790 These need to be reduced by the scale factor of .7943. This results in an image size of 440 and 627.
Hit OK in the dialogue box and this appears:
Now copy the entire kit page and paste it into the newly created image file:
You get this.
Because the image being pasted into the image file is bigger, only part of the page shows. Now, resize the pasted image to fit inside of the smaller box.
Resize the image
Go back to the skin file and copy and paste the image that you started with and paste it into the file you have just created and resized and move the image to its proper location on the kit page. Do the same for other parts. Note in this example that the skin and the kit do not agree 100%, so the width is matched as this is (at least at this point) a more important feature to base the resizing on. Later on I colored in some red to fill out the image. The copied image will be properly sized to the kit page and no editing is needed. It is avoiding editing that allows the copied image to be identical to the image in the skin file.
The various images in the skin file will not all be to the same scale factor so this process will have to be repeated for families of skin images. For example, in this example the fuselage parts had the same scale factor, the wings had another scale factor and the rudder and horizontal and vertical stabilizers had another. A word about the wing: This image had to be turned 90 degrees, this was done by swapping the X and Y scaled coordinate so the image file is landscape mode.
This example did not require any changes in light level, sometimes the image has to be brightened. In Gimp go to Color, Level and change Clamp the input level at 1.47.
