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Born in 1982, my passion for
aviation started when I was about nine years
old when I first saw 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 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 were released.
In April 2005, a guy -
Andrei Visan - 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 has 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, Massimiliano
from Italian AI Traffic
Project contacted me for an authorization
and since then, Skycolors
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 |
| Claudio Adriano Dobre |
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", 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 Claudio Adriano
Dobre |
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| If you like my repaints and sceneries please
support Skycolors by making a donation here: |
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