[Alex T.]

Way to go Canon!!!

That's definitely more realistic, that sort of skin damage would be caused by an exploding cannon round (big hole in the center and radial smaller holes of splinters), now it's a matter of getting all proportions right.
What we have now is not a 3d damage model (some planes do have it, but not all), what we can do here is working on the cosmetics so that a 2d skin file would look more realistic.

Now to make this one must consider the ballistics within bullet hits.

Average machine gun bullets would be armor piercing or incendiary, and the damage to the aircraft skin would generally be a hole surrounded by a metal depression and paint chipping (yes, just like those stickers u can buy..). Depending on the impact angle, bullet holes would look like this on a P-40 wing



or like this




note the size of the holes on the last one, it says it's a 1940 shot, so in theory that would be .303 machinegun damage, but considering the size of the holes and the dispersion I doubt so (maybe a night fighter with cannons?)


another important parameter is caliber and rate of fire, have a look at this A-10



this one is the damage caused by a small caliber/high rate of fire machinegun (probably groundfire, considering also the impact angle) and to me this is how a riddled Me109E would have looked like, since its main opponents of the time, RAF fighters and I-16s, had small caliber and high rate of fire machineguns.

My conclusions are:

light damage TGA: a mixture of the damage we see on the A-10 together with "scratch holes" like we see on the P-40 wing.

heavy damage TGA: a mixture of the huge holes we see on the german fuselage and the flak damage picture I posted above and that Canon used as inspiration.

I would avoid smoke/oil stains and streams, they look too cartoonish I think, but I hope someone can prove me wrong with its skills!




@ Bee: AFAIK there should be two TGAs, one for the light damage, one for the heavy damage, right?[/img]