| Some background information... |
Claudiu A. Dobre |
Born in Bucharest/Romania, my passion for
aviation started when I was about nine years
old when I first seen the movie "Top
Gun".
Back in 2002, I started
to paint liveries
for planes for Microsoft
Flight Simulator
2002. By the end of the
year Roberto Piazza,
a livery painter from Palermo
(Italy), contacted
me concerning a repaint
I did and together
we decided to create a
team of painters.
Initially we published
our repaints on a
website of a free provider
and the thought
of having a web domain
completely for us
was tickling my mind by
the end of 2002 and
so, in June 2003, a small
italo-romanian
group named Skycolors Team
poped up. The
name "Skycolors"
had been chosen
to reflect the almost unlimited
number of
paint schemes worn by the
aircraft all around
the world and in the same
time us, a group
specialized in aircraft
livery painting of
which goal was to provide
flight sim enthusiasts
all over the world with
aircraft repaints
as accurate and detailed
as possible in order
to bring realism into Flight
Simulator -
from here comes the team's
moto "our
repaints colour your sky";
Roberto was
painting military aircraft
while I was focusing
on the civil ones. We went
along for about
two years - more or less
until Winter 2004-2005
- when Roberto became too
busy with his job
and did not have any more
free time to dedicate
to Flight Simulator and
I was too busy with
the flying lessons for
the Private Pilot
License within the Aeroclub
Of Padua (Italy).
For a few months no new
repaints had been
released.
In April 2005, a guy - Andrei Visan - which
was studying in my hometown, Bucharest/Romania,
contacted me saying that he was specialized
in afcad sceneries and that he wanted to
become part of the team as afcad scenery
designer. I started to study how to use Afcad
and then I started to make afcad sceneries
too. Andrei Visan had been in the team for
about an year, until Summer 2006. Since then,
I am the only member of the team. A month
after Andrei Visan left the team, in July
2006, I have been contacted by Massimiliano
from Italian AI Traffic Project for an authorization
and since then, Skycolors Team and Italian
AI Traffic Project started a close |
cooperation repaints-flightplans.
At the begining, our repaints
were completely
hand-painted, but over
the years I noticed
that not even the most
wonderful digital
photo-effects made by the
most skilled painters
would be able to get even
close to what mother
nature creates and so I
decided to make photoreal
repaints in order to achieve
even more realism
from every single livery;
as you probably
noticed, something like
95 % of the repaints
you find on the web are
hand-painted - pretty
often made using paintkits
by people who
know only few things or
nothing at all about
aeronautics or about how
an aircraft is made,
not to talk about their
painting skills and
the attention they pay
when making the so
called "aircraft repaint"
which
in the end looks so ugly
that only their
mother could say that it
is beautiful and
that looks like an airplane
- and the common
thing in these repaints
is the lack of depth
and the toy-similar look.
Another thing which
results from using the
paintkits is that
all the aircraft made with
a paintkit look
exactly the same, having
the same level of
perfection, obtaining as
final product the
"stock-effect"
(the same which
can be seen with the autogen
buildings for
instance). With photoreal,
these "3
digital painting bugs"
are completely
absent because the colour/light/dirt/weathering
effects are made by the
mother nature and
captured within the photo,
which, once is
texturized and applied,
makes the aircraft
model look exactly as in
real life; when
the photoreal method is
used there are no
two aircraft wearing the
same livery looking
the same - each aircraft
is unique.
Written by Claudiu A. Dobre |
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