Rivets, rib lines, and panel lines

[yukonjohn]

Would people please share their opinions on their preferred method to digitally represent panel lines, rib lines, and rivets in their designs and repaints. I guess I am primarily referring to aviation here. I am a basic user of CorelDraw X6.

I realize this is probably "in the eye of the beholder", and there would be a variety of context - newly painted, weathered skin, aluminum skin. I am experimenting with darker/lighter shades for rivets on top of the paint colour, white vs grey vs black, different colour for panel vs rivet, shading methods.

Please point me to posts or off-site tutorials (maybe simpaints) that you have found useful. All your experience and input would be appreciated from whoever has time .

Regards,
John

[Plumdragon]

Hello there yukonjohn :-) I'd be more than happy to tell you how I go about doing those things, but first I need to ask a couple of questions. Coreldraw has, I believe, layers? like Photoshop 7 (which is the program I use) is that right? Because that's the most useful facility for creating these effects. Second, do you use the vector app when designing? Because if so, I have no idea how to help you because I'm an old fashioned 'line drawing' man! My programs are creaky (much like my knees!) but I'll find up some detail pics of the work I'vecreated using PS7 and post them in this thread, to see if my take on things is approaching what you had in mind. Bear with me :-)
Plumdragon

[Burning Beard]

When I do a repaint, firstly I trace around all the pieces and group each piece separately. You can name each group in the object manager, ie, fuselage section one, etc. Then I trace the panel lines on the piece and group them and place them in the group as a separate layer. Then I make a layer of all the oddball things on the individual piece like, glue canopy here, cut this out after assembly, that sort of thing, and of course put that in the individual group with that piece, you get the idea. Rivet lines can be made using the line tool, you can open up the properties and make it dots or dashes, thinkness or whatever. Anyhoo, put those in that piece group also. Make a reference point on the original layer somewhere, out side the drawing so you can easily line it up.

To paint this you can export it into photo paint. Make it one layer, then open a new layer on top of it to add your color, weathering, mud, grease or bullet holes. I usually do these each on their own layer. You can hide any individual layer by clicking the eye, or move them forward or backwards by draging them up and down on the layer docker. After you have those the way you like them, light up each layer you want to use and copy and paste it back to the corel document. Then use the reference point to line it up.

Now this will be on the top in you corel drawing (also in the object manager). Ungroup it and drag the individual layers into the original piece group (do this in the object manager, and be prepared it may be frustrating). They can be placed on top of or under objects in that group. So you can put the paint under the panels and rivet lines. All the glue here or cut outs on top so every thing will be where you want it.

Now the neat part of the vector program is you can change the weights of any of the lines or make them any degree of transparent. So you can make your rivets less distinctive than the panel lines, and make the panels lines not as strong as a louver or some very distinct thing on the piece you are redrawing. I don't like a harsh panel line so I give them some degree of transparency, but that is personal taste.

Sometime you can load the vectors from a PDF directly (open the PDF in corel and ungroup it), which will save a bunch of time. If I can't do this I hand trace everything, sounds hard but it really isn't to bad.

Beard

[Plumdragon]

Pic1: Sopwith Camel, about 1/33 scale. Shows wing tapes and subtle highlighting/shading. Note the highlight on the curved edge of the aileron.
Pic 2 shows better the elements of the composition without the colour/markings layers. Each element is on a different layer, so it can be easily altered. There are 12 layers to this composition; outlines, wing tapes, ribs, highlights etc etc and I always work on a grey ground as white is murder on the eyes!
Pic 3: Lockheed Starfighter. The rivets vary in size; I make one that looks perfect to me, and clone it ad nauseum until the required amount is needed! Sounds tedious, but it's exponential (1+1=2, 2+2=4, then 8,16,32 - you get my drift....) after a little while, it soon adds up to long lines of rivets, which I keep in a special folder along with all the other fastenings and fixings, nuts, catches, canvas stitching, even rib shading, because once done all those 'stock' parts can be easily lifted onto the next model....
Pic 4: Lancaster wing. Here are those long lines of rivets out of the 'stock box' used to create this effect. I'm very pedantic so make sure all the rivets are where they should be, but you can see how it's straightforward enough to add lines of the things. These rivets are black....
which leads to pic 5 which shows that they all ended up white! When you look at a Lanc, the rivet lines define the panel lines and to my mind they looked better white. A bit radical, but, once again, because all those rivets are on their own layer, they can be easily altered....
Pic 6 shows my Typhoon wing. Here you can see highlighted ribs on the ailerons; there are no rivets as they were filled smooth on the real machine. Here I started to get really subtle, and made a distinction in my artwork between gaps (black outlines, quite heavy), access panel edges (black again, but a lot thinner) and panel joins, which I erase to about 60% so they aren't as noticeable, just as on the real thing. Although the vast majority of paper models you'll see don't make this distinction, I wanted to avoid that over-lined look where everything is done with a thick black line.
Pic 7 shows the effect of subtly altering the 'density' of different elements.

Of course, all of this is largely subjective; it depends on scale, whether you take lighting into consideration, whether you have the patience to individually apply 50,000 rivets (!) and moreover whether anything you create gives you pleasure. I never find anything like this a chore, in fact I love doing it, and I'm always pushing my art further - sometimes too far! It's Horses for Courses, and the most important thing, I think, is to put a little of yourself into the work you create
Plumdragon (you can have a break now XD !)

[Plumdragon]

woops, I could only do 5 at a time

[Necroscope]

Hi team,

first of all - there is long lasting fight between “Rivets should looks cool” and “Rivets should looks realistic” camps. And currently there no any sign of compromise.
I’m from the second camp, so please take my words accordingly.

Partially quoting myself from here:
MIRAGE 3C - new projrct
1. Rivets and lines should be in scale.
My own calculation gives me size of real rivet (33x33mm) on printout around 0.25x0.25mm for 1\33 scale. It’s about 2-3 pixels in 600DPI file.

2. Rivets, bolts and panels are not black. All of them are painted in the same color as panels. Even if paint will be removed from bolt (scratched for example) – it should be painted again by ground crew. So only point when we can get black – between rivet-head and material around it, the thin black circle around colored rivet head. But keeping in mind our .25mm – there no way to paint it properly.

3. In my model I’ve paint rivets black, but layer opacity reduced to 25-50% (depends on colors under rivets) to make rivets colored and darkened at the same time.

4. Painting rivets we have to keep in mind the shape of the head of rivet. If rivet is flat-shaped – it should be same color as paint around it or darker, if it’s button-headed – lighter.

5. No dirt or stains gathering around rivets and lines (except heavy-dirtied areas as exhaust panels and panels under leakage of oil or gas). I’m saying so because I have a chat with former fighter pilot and he said that every plane is a subject to washing at list weekly. He also said that sometimes crew do not bothering itself to wash away cleaner-fluid, but looking for good cloud to fly through in the next flight to get nice-n-shiny plane.
Some pics:
http://s019.radikal.ru/i618/1302/16/7ea8e9f068d0.jpg
http://s017.radikal.ru/i437/1302/c1/e59656af833d.jpg

[Plumdragon]

Well, I had no idea there was a long standing fight between rivet appreciaters! Anyway, there's a prototype for everything, as this pic of an in-service Italian Starfighter proves. Plenty of dirty rivets and panel lines there! With anything, researching your prototype is important, but against that, as I said before, putting something of yourself into your creations is a good thing, and developing your style too. Look at early hand-drawn Fiddlers Green aircraft - panel gaps you could fall into and rivets the size of dinner plates, but utterly charming!
Again, this is all subjective, and there's no need to get bogged down with the 'right' way or otherwise to represent things on a model. I think if you can hold your finished model in your hands and say to yourself "that's a job well done" then there's no more needed
Plumdragon

[yukonjohn]

Thanks for the great input. Gives me more to experiment with.

Regards,
John

[John Dell]

You might want to check out some of the tutorials at this website. The members do mostly aircraft profile art but it easily applies to what we do. I’ve picked up a few rendering ideas from there.

Simmers Paint Shop