[Bee]

Hi all,
This is not a mod, just a proof of concept thing. Many others have more skill than I with this stuff. I just thought I'd put the info out there for discussion


If you are anything like me, you've cringed at the look of the craters that appear all over the 109 series when it takes damage. I started having a look-see at the way the damage is represented, Here is what I found.

The damaged model gets holes applied to it, probably via interchangeable wing/fuselage meshes that have these holes "built in". These then have a .tga overlay applied that adds detail (albeit poorly) to the top of these holes. The tga is damage2o.tga and the pathway is 3do\plane\bf-109e-4\damage2o.tga. The logic of this is probably the same for all aircraft.



I opened the tga with the splashscreen technique and found it looks like this.



All a bit confusing, until I remembered the void layouts. I removed the white in PS2 and put one of Canon UK's excellent skins underneath...



I was like, Ah! now it makes sense
So as you can see, I added some quick stringer and former detail to the rudder. Then took it up in QMB to buzz some flak. Here is what happened:




The new detail actually showed up
Early days, but it seems like it will be possible to change the visual damage for a more updated look. High resolution too. The original damage tga is 512x512 whereas my test one is 1024x1024.
I'd be interested to hear what people think of the idea.

Oh, and just as a recap, here is the stock damage model (yuk):