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Repainting Tutorial Part 4a
Welcome to Part 4a. In this part I will explain in detail how to do shadows and dirt on the aircraft.
The things that bring the repaint alive!
No aircraft, no livery is completely white. Especially ones that are some years old. Therefore, no repaint you make will look realistic and life-like if it has no shadows or dirt at all. For that reason, in this Part we will learn about making realistic dirt and shadow effects.
Routine things again!
We start with the usual things; opening Photoshop, and our fuselage file. We will now need to create two new layers to work on; A layer called Dirt, and a layer called shadows!. Make sure these layers are on top of “Paint Here" but below all the logos and window layers. Also, “Dirt" should be on top of Shadows.
When you've done this, we are ready to do some shadows;
Shadowing the aircraft
Firstly, select the layer Shadows. Firstly we will do the main gradient-type shadow on the fuselage. There are many ways to do this. We will use the Gradient tool, and Semi-transparent layers to do this.
It might sound complicated from what I said above, but it is actually extremely easy, and will take only about 1 minute to make our first shadow.
Firstly, we will need to draw a selection starting from a little more than half-way down the fuselage down to the very bottom. Something like this:
If the metal ring at the back is selected, deselect it by setting the Magic tool mode to Subtraction and clicking on it. Next thing we will need the Gradient tool. Select the gradient tool from the toolbox
and drag with your mouse a straight, vertical line from bottom to top within the selection we had just created. Then, release the mouse button. You should end up with this:
Now, this doesn't look very pleasant, and is no where near a realistic-looking shadow. What we will have to do is to reduce the layer's transparency. While the Shadows layer is selected, look on the right-top corner of the Layers window. You will see a place called Opacity, with an arrow to click. Click on the arrow. You should see this:
Now drag the slider to about 45% and Voila! You have a nice looking gradient shadow!
It is not just as we want it yet, though, since if you come closer you will see a darker line separating the white part from our gradient shadow. It is barely noticeable, but for a good paint, we'll need to make that line disappear so we will have a smoother gradient. How, you will ask? Easy; we will use the Eraser tool with reduced opacity. So select the Eraser tool, set it's brush to “Soft round 35 pixels"
and then reduce it's opacity to 40% from the above slider. Now click on the very front of the fuselage where roughly the gradient starts from. Then shift-click on the very back of the fuselage, again, roughly where the gradient starts from. You will see if you zoom in now that we have a smoother gradient with no visible lines separating it from the white.
Congratulations! You have done a smooth and nice gradient shadow on the fuselage. Next thing we will do is the horizontal stabilizer shadow.
Creating a shadow for the Horizontal stabilizer
This is one of the harder shadows to make. Actually, it's not that hard to make but quite hard to make it look good!
On this shadow we will not use the gradient tool, instead we will use a brush. To start with, you will need to draw a selection with the Lasso tool
under the horizontal stabilizer joint, similar to the one I just did:
When you get it looking similar to the one I did, let's move on. After making sure that you are still on the shadows layer, select the Brush tool. Put the brush mode on “Soft round 35 pixels", select a dark grey colour, make sure it's opacity is 100% and finally draw a grey line within the selection as shown in the picture:
Because we had made the Horizontal tail joint a new layer, we won't have to worry about the shadow going over it, because it won't
Now, after drawing the first line, reduce the brush opacity to around 80% and do another line underneath, reduce opacity to 60% and another line, 40% and another line, then stop. It should look like this once you deselect the area (right click > deselect)
Try over and over again until it looks smooth and nice.
Now, we will blur the sides. Select the blur tool from the Toolbox, set it's size to around 15 or 20 and click-drag it along the edges of our shadow to make them softer an nice. The whole fuselage by now should be looking like this:
That's it! We've done the stabilizer shadow and therefore have finished the shadowing section!
Now let's get onto the next big part, and even the biggest part let's say; Dirt! Before moving on, remember to save your work also
Adding dirt
When you first think of adding dirt, you might think of it being a complex thing. It is NOT complex at all, and is in fact easier than many other things in painting. However, it takes some time – a LOT of time on a very dirty plane. Thankfully our plane will not be very dirty, but it is still a time consuming job. It pays of fully though at the end!
Adding Dirt - Doors
The first place to go to before adding dirt are the underside of doors. They usually get quite dirty, along with the underside of windows.
As does almost everything in painting an aircraft, the dirtying process also has countless different ways to do that all give quite similar results. The way I do it is by using the pencil and smudge tools.
So let's get going! Firstly we will need to switch from the shadow layer to the dirt layer. Then, switch to the Pencil tool, make sure it's size is 1 pixel, and make sure it's colour is Black.
Now zoom into the first door a little, and draw two lines similar to the picture below:
Yes, I know it looks nothing even similar to dirt, but that is obviously not where we finish either
Now select the Smudge tool. 
The properties of the smudge tool are crucial for making dirt. I find that the best setting for smudging dirt is size “30" and Strength of “25%". You will see both options in the menu above.
Now is the hard part to explain. Starting from the bottom of one of the lines we just drew below the door, smudge it firstly sideways (do not move the mouse too much) and then start moving up slowly while making smaller and smaller sideway movements. When you get to the top of the line, just before releasing the mouse button again, pull downwards. This is what it should look similar to:
Experiment with this until you get good results, because it's really a hard thing to do before getting the hang of it. Once you are done, read on
Now we will do this to all the doors. Draw two black lines under each door, and by using the same method, make them into dirt (Make smaller dirt under the smaller doors, and once you've dirtied the smaller doors, erase over the dirt with the eraser opacity at 40%). If the dirt seems a little too visible and looks bad, you might want to try smudging it a little more. Do not forget to save after every successful dirt you have done, because it might be hard to do it all again if you ever lose it. The final result should be something like this:
If it does look like the picture above, Congratulations! Don't expect it to be perfect yet, because it will get much better with practice! Now let's move on to the window dirt…
Adding Dirt - Windows
Adding dirt to the windows is very easy, but is one of the most time consuming parts of the dirtying process. Imagine you are painting a 747, and you will have to make dirt under every single window, on BOTH SIDES! There are hundreds of windows, and it's a real big pain doing that sometimes
Anyway, we are not painting a 747, we are painting an A320, which has about 40 windows. We won't need to dirty every single window, what we will do is to chose random ones and dirty them.
We will start by drawing two lines again. For windows, let's keep them quite short. Something like this will do:
It looks like the window is dripping, eh?
Anyway, since the lines are smaller and the object we are dirtying is smaller, let's put the smudge size on 10 or 15. Also the dirt on the windows shouldn't be too clear, so set the smudge strength to 50%. Smudge each line separately, using the same method as the one we used for the doors. The result should look like this:
Now select random windows and make them dirty. You don't have to do too many, but about half of the windows should do. Don't forget that dirt won't be identical everywhere, so make the lines different sizes, sometimes make only one line, smudge some of them more, etc. When you're done, check with the picture below to see how good yours is !
It takes some time to get them all look good, but it really does pay off ! Check back on your dirt to see if there is anything too obvious or too dark that needs more smudging. Correct these parts by erasing, smudging and trying different things. You will soon get the hang of it and find your own ways to do it the best anyway
Now, we will add some general dirt on our paint…
Adding dirt - General
Adding general dirt means adding some dirt to random parts of the fuselage. No aircraft that has dirty window undersides will have an extremely clean fuselage, right?
For this type of dirt, we will need to make our smudge tool size around 40 and strength also around 40.
Once you've set those, let's get on with the easiest and the most fun type of dirt to do! We will start by drawing some random long and short lines on the fuselage with our trusted pencil. It doesn't matter where, but draw some lines that look something like this.
http://images.fs2004...ge021_QQG8H.jpg
Now, smudge the lines by going Up and down, sideways and diagonal until they look like dirt. Then go over them with an eraser at 70% opacity to fade them out more. You should decide whether they look good or not
Do as many dirt lines as you want on random places on the fuselage, just as long as they don't look too overdone. You can experiment with different smudge and erase settings as well if you want! Congratulations, we have finished adding dirt and shadows to the fuselage. The next thing we will do is to add shadows and dirt to the tail…
Adding shadow & dirt – Tail
We will first add some shadows to our tail. Let's open the Tail.psd file we had created before in Part 3. At the first glance at the tail we had painted, you will see how “2d" and simple it looks. Shadowing will take this all away and we'll have a much more realistic looking tail!
Create a new layer called shadows, and place it above all other layers on the tail. We will use the gradient tool again for the main shadow. Select about half of the tail vertically with the rectangular marquee tool, and then choose the magic wand to subtract the selection outside the tail. Your selection should look like this:
Now, get the gradient tool, and draw a line starting from the very left of the selection to the very right of the selection. Then, deselect the area. It should look like this:
Looks very ugly, but it won't in a couple of minutes!
Let's now reduce the shadow layer opacity to 25%. It now looks much better, but still has a line separating the gradient and the rest of the tail:
To prevent this, go over that line with the Eraser tool until it disappears and we have a smooth gradient. Make sure the eraser's opacity is set to around 50%. You might also want to fade out some of the white-ish bits of the gradient with the eraser. Another thing to experiment on is the Eraser opacity. Erase different parts with different opacities to get a very nice result. It's all up to you and what looks right to you
This is what I ended up with:
If you think the shadow is too dark, or it changes too suddenly, feel free to lower the opacity of the Shadows layer. I reduced the opacity a bit more after taking the screenshot above to get a better result. Save your work, and that's it for the tail shadows! Now let's do some dirt…
As we did before for the shadows, we will create a new layer called “Dirt". Doing tail dirt is quite different than fuselage dirt. We will still use the same tool, but the way we will do it is a little different.
Most dirt on an aircraft tail will be near the joint of the rudder. To replicate this dirt, we will firstly draw a straight line with our pencil along the joint-line of the rudder. Start from the bottom, and don't make it too long either. It should look like this:
Next, let's select the smudge tool once again. Set it's size to something smaller this time, about 9 or 10 will do. Set the strength to around 50% too. Start from the line we drew, and smudge it to the left, 3 or 4 times for each area. When the whole line is smudged, set the smudge tool size to 20 and smudge the already smudged bits further left. If you have got what I meant, it should appear like this:
This dirt is a little darker that what we need, so let's go over it with the eraser again. Set the opacity of an eraser to a value that satisfies you, and go over the dirt until it looks nice. I used 45% of opacity, and got quite a nice result:
Now, draw some more random dirt lines on the tail and turn them into dirt. It's something completely up to you on how dirty you want it. Because, once you've learned how to do it, you can find your own ways anyway My personal advice to you is; Don't stop trying until you are completely satisfied with what you have done. After playing around with some dirt and opacity settings, I got this result for the final tail dirt:
And that's how tail dirt is done!
Pretty easy, but needs a little practice as well. We will now go on to Engine dirt. Don't forget to save your work as always before we move on…Adding dirt – Engine
Engine dirt is very similar to the dirt on the tail. It's actually almost identical. Let's open up the Engine.psd texture that we had made while painting the engines and create a new layer called Dirt. We will not need to add shadows to our Engine; iFDG has already added enough!
On the new dirt layer, let's get the pencil, and just as we did on the tail, draw a straight-ish line just in front of the Thrust reverser openings on the first engine. They can be different sizes. You will understand where I mean on the picture here:
Again, as we did on the tail, smudge these to the left with firstly a small, then a larger smudge tool size. Since it's very similar to the tail, you should be able to do it easily. Play around and fly the correct settings that satisfy you, then apply dirt to all four engines. Mine looks like this:
ANNNNNDD that's it for Part 4a!!! Part 4b will be here quite soon, hopefully, and will teach how to add realistic windows and to paint the gear doors!
Please comment on it, and if you don't understand something, please state what you don't understand, thanks
Great job Robin. You learn something new everyday.
Thanks a load!!!
And im kinda tired 
Nice job!!!! 4b4b4b4b4b4b4!!!!!
