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[Dauntless1]

Can't wait! 

[Bee]

Thanks guys.  It means a lot 

One last picture.  Numanula Road added.  Took the best part of the evening, but a welcome break from pixel shuffling.  I find after more than a decade of dead straight roads, a nice curly one is a thing of beauty. 

[baders]

Hey Bee. Nice progress so far ! Have you plans to model other relevant airfields in that area. Some I can think of, on New Britain > Gasmata, Kimbe, Cape Hoskins, Jacquinot Bay, and Kerevat. On New Ireland > Namatanai and Kavieng.

[Dauntless1]

 

[Bee]

Hi Baders, Kerevat, Gasmata and Kavieng are in also.  I'm not sure if I'll do Gasmata and Kavieng to similar detail as Vuna, Tobera and the others are getting, as they are a long ways off and texture slots are few.  I'll see how I go though. 

Couple more shots.  One of the area southeast of Lakunai, and a quick image of Vunakanau.  I've swapped out the placeholder texture for the surrounding landscape and thinned out the taxiways etc.  Still need to get the colours sorted, but it looks a lot more believable than the previous versions (I think...).

[baders]

I love the narrower taxi ways Bee, very accurate to period !! Again, if I can help in any way to see this project to fruition, let me know.

[Bee]

A few more shots.  The first one is Gasmata, way down in the southwest.  I think its starting to look alright.  Using high resolution strike photos I was able to get every crater exactly in the size and position it should be. the line of beach etc is accurate too and the coastline has been corrected to a more realistic shape.  Took me a whole week, but was worth it in the end.
Second shot is Kavieng, just after I screwed up big time and saved the PSD template as a grayscale image.  Now I need to start over if I want to do any improvements   
Last shot is the little atoll just above the allied base at Green/Nissan island.  Been trying to get the reefs to look natural.  It's a bugger of a job.

[SAS~Tom2]

Very cool!
Amazing details. 
 

Tom

[ggrewe]

Superb! - a true labour of dedication & love. Will be well worth the wait, with all the effort you have put in, and attention to detail. Magnificent effort - well done 

[SAS~Poltava]

Great job! 

[Batbomb]

How did you achieve such a high realism? What textures did you use?

[Bee]

Hi Batbomb,  I've been making my own textures for these.  Originally I only wanted to darken the forests and change the industrial complex texture that the township had.  Things just kind of snowballed from there....

I am using the Carsmaster mod that allows 2048x size textures, with the ",-2" at the end of each texture name in the load.ini  This lets the texture cover a broad enough expanse of land to not look repetitive, without being too heavy on resources.

I tend to choose a basic colour palette that all the textures will be based on.  In this case a fairly dark green, as I wanted to give the landscape a more unfriendly look (no tropical Loveland here).  The core ground texture that I use has a grass/earth layer, with a semi-transparent landscape contour layer on top.  I got this by taking an image of hills, then converting it to grayscale, upping the contrast, then using the remove-white photoshop plugin to create a sort of shadow layer.  Open fields have these shadows only slightly visible.  The texture underneath the forests has a much more obvious shadow layer to the same texture.  Because the texture is basically the same thing from one to the other, they blend together very well and don't jar the eye too much at all.

Here's a shot of the most basic field and forest-floor textures.  Not much difference between them 








The technique I used to create the shadow layer also has been useful for doing details and contours around airfields.  I found some very good aerial images on Fold3.com of airfields in the Rabaul area.  By doing the remove-white trick I could make the photo layer just visible over the basic ground texture.  Painting on a layer under and over this was good for doing runways and tracks etc. 

Craters are made using a modified version of the one that was made for the Close Combat series  http://closecombat.matrixgames.com/ClassicCC/dodamtutorials/Big%20crater%20tutorial.htm
I've had a bit of practice making my own now too and feel a bit more confident with it, but for this one I'll stick to variations of the same type, for continuity.  Hope that helps!