***mod posted***A hasty snow camo Panzer IIIG

[gautrek]

This is my version of the hasty Panzer IIIG seen on page 21 of the first Panzer colours book.

i have used mikeyd's redrawn base art for this mod.

Thanks.

Ihave included all his BMP's into my mod so you can install this mod as is.Just in case you havn't already downloaded his panzer IIIg mod ( and if not why not?).

I did try adding snow to this mod but its not happening at the moment so i decided to release this mod with out snow.

I am halfway through snowing up a panzer 4 at the moment

[patboy]

Hi,

Nice to see your mods back ; and thanks for this cool early war winterized mod.

I'm watching your WIP mods site and I asked myself when you'll decide to release your Railtracks? Just curious.

Cheers

Pat

[gautrek]

Originally posted by patboy:

Hi,

Nice to see your mods back ; and thanks for this cool early war winterized mod.

I'm watching your WIP mods site and I asked myself when you'll decide to release your Railtracks? Just curious.

Cheers

Pat

I will release them once i can work out how to do the curves.Its beyond me at the moment.

[Philippe]

Every time I think I know how to do curves I find out that there's something incredibly complicated in Photoshop that I haven't understood yet.

The approach that I haven't tried, but might work, is to make a huge bmp, about four times the size of what is required.

Then draw a diagonal line from the upper left to the lower right corner.

Then (and I'm warning you -- this is really anal) draw a series of mechanically perfect concentric circles one pixel apart with each circle in a different color. You need that diagonal line to mark the start and end points.

After you've done several hundred of these, you have a geometrically precise railroad track template.

Then, all you have to do is figure out which lines to keep and discard the rest (probably by selecting their color in Photoshop and discarding the color of the circles you want to get rid of).

Then you change the color of the lines you want to keep.

This is a really half-assed way to go about it, and I haven't steeled myself to give it a shot. And it may not even work.

The alternate method of calculating where the curve enters and leaves the bmp and using Photoshop to bend the curve doesn't seem to give a smooth result.

Somewhere on these boards there has got to be a graphic artist who knows how to do this.

If it were easy we would have been flooded with double tracks by now.

[gautrek]

My problem is that all i managed to find on the net was a straight bit of track.So i need to be able to bend my straight image round a corner.

I'm not clever enough to actualy be able to redraw new railtracks.

[Philippe]

Bending the image around a corner is the big stumbling block.

A high resolution rail is about five pixels wide. So a curve of single track is going to require ten perfectly concentric circle segments.

If you don't draw them from scratch (which I think is the best way to go about it), you have to figure out how to bend small segments of the image. This can be done in Photoshop with about ten segments, but the result will not be a mechanically smooth curve.

There's also the problem of the railroad ties, but that is trivial by comparison. Best solution, I think, is to draw or bend the track, then manually superimpose each tie one tie at a time.

It's easy enough to calculate where the rails have to enter and leave each bmp.

The problem is execution.

Many aeons ago someone did a low resolution double track mod for CMBO. I don't remember who it was but I did try to contact him, because he had obviously solved the problem of how to draw the concentric circles. Or rather, the concentric arcs.

If you can draw five adjacent concentric arcs, you've drawn a stretch of rail. All you have to do is recolor it to turn it into track.

I suppose the next thing to do would be to search under mechanical drawing in Google. There's got to be a trick to this.

[gautrek]

here is a sneak preview of my PZ 4 mod.

its based on a famous photo of a PZ4 thats been covered in chalk.

I have tried to add some snow to this.

Look closely at the wheels and the corners of the hull

This is very rough and ready at the moment

Edited cause i'm piss poor at speeling

[ October 20, 2005, 04:26 PM: Message edited by: gautrek ]

[JaegerMeister]

Nice mods (as always), thanks a lot Gautrek.