Just completed a dirty PzIIIJ camoed mod (road dirt look)

[tracer]

I just completed a PzIIIJ with a dirty look to it. Go check it out at http://cm.cozog.com/. I think I might be gettin a little better at modding. I used Gordon's "Mud Tutorial" as a reference, it has a road dirt look to it. All feed back is very welcomed.

[Bullethead]

I think it looks like a realistic light coating of dust and road grime. Good job.

Just my personal preference, but I like my tanks FILTHY! Not only that, but also looking in need of fresh paint, a valve job, and new bearing seals throughout, plus a few battle scars and some obscene graphitti scrawled by bitter and disillusioned soldiers (NOTE: In a real life combat zone, all this would take maybe a week to accumulate at most.) So feel free to knock yourself out on all aspects of weathering. The more battered, dirty, and war-weary the tank looks, the better I like it.

[tracer]

LOL Bullethead,I will do my best. I tried varying the Camo colors a little, because I've read that a lot of times the camo weas applied out in the field on tanks, and vehicles, and helmets. I even read that after 1943, the Wermacht issued OD green paint to the armor units.

[Bullethead]

tracer said:

I tried varying the Camo colors a little, because I've read that a lot of times the camo weas applied out in the field on tanks, and vehicles, and helmets.

This was certainly true in the Gulf War. One day we got the word we were going so we put our vehicles and gear on a boat. Then we sat around wondering how we could do any training without our stuff for the month or so it took the boats to cross the ocean, then we flew over to meet it.

Naturally, our stuff was just as we'd last seen it, with the Euro-style green/black/brown camo, plus all the peacetime reflectors and stuff. So one of our 1st tasks in-country was applying warpaint. Naturally, with all the troops then flooding the theater, there was a shortage of tan paint and painting equipment, so we stole as much as we could from others, thinned the paint to cover all our stuff, and improvised tools we didn't have. We had about 24 hours to do the job before we went to the front, but because of the sniper threat we did it all at night without any lights save those provided by nature. This was before the rains came and the oil wells burned so the moon and stars could still be seen.

The net results were extremely crude but effective enough. The vehicles looked tan even up close, but up close you could see ALL KINDS of imperfections. These were as follows:

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• The thin paint let the outlines of the underlying camo pattern show through. This was because everywhere 2 camo colors met, there was some overlap so the camo paint there was thicker and darker. So there were these dark tannish-grayish wavy lines all over the vehicles, about 3" wide, tracing the green/black/brown pattern.</font>
• We didn't have stencils and such so we just masked over the unit's tactical markings and vehicle serial numbers. So these markings were still in black on irregular rectangles of the underlying Euro camo pattern.</font>
• We didn't want to replace or remove the reflectors so we put duct tape over them and then painted over that. The tape patches were quite evident, even though painted tan.</font>
• We didn't bother masking the tires and windshields (which we laid down anyway) so these items had substantial (as in about 8" wide) areas of overspray on them. And surprisingly, this overspray on the tires lasted the whole war and however many hundreds of miles we drove during it.</font>
• Towards the end of the night, some of our paint stations were running low on paint so didn't paint over the brown spots in the Euro camo. But they weren't too careful with the edges so the tan overlapped the brown by up to 1 foot, in a sort of jagged pattern from arms swinging in varying distances from different directions. The edges of the overlap weren't sharp, however, but faded out as overspray.</font>
• OTOH, some stations had some extra paint (theirs was thinned more so the Euro camo on their vehicles was even more evident, some of the green and black showing through). In these, guys painted their flak jackets and/or helmets because only a few guys in my unit had gotten desert camo covers for them before supply ran out. A few guys also tanned their black M16s.
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At the same time, we filled the beds and floors of all our trucks and hummers with 2 layers of sandbags, removed their roofs and laid the windshields down, and took the front doors off the hummers. The sandbags oozed, rotted, and accumlated stains over the next few months, solidifying into a cement-like block that took forever to remove when it was time to go home.

A couple weeks later when the shooting started and "friendly fire" incidents started happening, 2 measures were taken. First, we cut up day-glo orange air marker panels and duct-taped bits of varying size on top of the vehicles to deter over-zealous aircraft. Then, when ground forces started scoring "own goals", we had to paint black chevrons on front, rear, and sides. All we had for this was canned spraypaint we stole from the Seabees. Some guys did a minimal job, a single freehand, wavy, light pass, making the 2 legs of the ^ uneven so it look like hasty graphitti. I guess they were afraid of ruining the desert camo effect too much, but it kinda looked like the Arabic numbers on enemy vehicles.... Others used the whole can, making fairly straight, even, wide, and dark bands, plus added personal markings like the ace of spades. The army had their chevrons professionally stenciled somehow, but they also had food and extra socks and all the comforts of home, so that's only to be expected.

OK, so then things started getting interesting over there. Wear and tear accumulated at an incredible rate as machines were pushed to war needs as opposed to peacetime pampering under the sadistic rule of the motorpool's mastersergeant. Every bearing leaked oil or grease, which oozings quickly built up coral-like encrustations of sand. Plus we were burning Jet-A instead of diesel so soot accumulation was immediate and intense, like black spray paint everywhere the exhaust gases touched. The rains started and the desert dust became this horrible adobe mud that somehow solidified even under continuous rain. Shell splinters made holes and nicks here and there. And then all the oil wells burned and the smoke mixed into (and maybe caused) the constant rain, and it left this nasty black scum on all the upper surfaces and running down the sides in long drips. You could still see the tan paint through this stuff, it was kinda transparent.

So basically, we started off with everything having a half-ass paintjob, but with some variation due to different amounts of available paint. Same for personal equipment--no real uniformity except in having the same basic constraints in the painting process. Then within a week or 2 everything was FILTHY just from soot, dirt, and leaks attracting crud. Recognition symbols were added on top of the early layers of filth, and then the whole was covered with more mud/dirt and that oil smoke gunk. At various times, enemy fire made its mark. By the time the war "ended" 2 months after the process began, our vehicles looked like they'd not only been through a war, but had then been left for dead on the battlefield for several years. Looking at them, you'd have been amazed any of them would still crank.

Obviously, the oil smoke thing was kinda unique to my war. But I think the rest of it would have been pretty much the norm in WW2

[Lee_DiSantis]

That's a pretty crazy story.

[JaegerMeister]

Hi Tracer...like the new improved weathered look, but i also agree with Bullethead, the tanks would be pretty filthy, grimey, oil-stained and maybe have minor battle damage. ie AP-scarring, burn marks, scrapes etc. Might be a tall order, but how about releasing the mod with options to suit the above. Just like other mods have options for tactical markings etc, you could have new, dusty, muddy and battle-damaged...that way everyone would be happy !...of course if you have the time.

Great work anyway, appreciate your efforts.

[tracer]

sounds, good, I forgot about options like they had in CMBO as far as damage and such. Thanks for the feed back.