I have dabbled with BoX skins before but only now have I felt like doing something more serious. This is Spitfire Vb AB986, coded SK-E, of 165 Squadron and was the regular mount of Pilot Officer Warren E. 'Smokey' Schrader, RNZAF (later a Wing Commander with a DFC and Bar). It was with this aircraft that he had his first proper experience of combat while covering the Dieppe Raid on 19 August 1942. He would later go on to command 616 Squadron when it was the first unit equipped with the Meteor jet fighter to be based on the continent.

I used the pulbic 2k template then tweeked it to my tastes. This included making the aircraft less shiny overall (I find the generic BoX skins to be too shiny in general), knocking back the panel lines and rivets (especially on the wing leading edges), adding ROTOL logos to the prop blades and adjusting the walkway marking on the starboard wing. In regards to the Silver Fern logo, the top of the fern sits were the mapping changes from one part of the template to another, hence why it looks slightly fuzzy on the top edge.

That looks fantastic mate.

Cheers mate. Out of interest, does anyone else find that their screen shots from this sim have a slight blue tint to them?

I see that on your screenshots but not on my proper install. May be your gama setting is too high ?

It looks fine in game so I just tried viewing screenshots in programes other than Photoshop (e.g. Paint) and have found the problem is with Photoshop. I checked the Color Settings to see if a colour profile was being assigned to any pic I open but regardless of what I change it still looks blue-ish. Weird. Oh well, I can work around it.

A new w.i.p, this was the personal aircraft of Wing Commander Derek 'Bill' Kain in 1944 when he was in charge of maintaining fighter airfields in Nth Africa.
The aircraft had been repainted at some time to Temperate Land Scheme on the upper surfaces (Azure Blue on the undersides), it's hard to tell due to the quality of the photos but it appears the stencils weren't restored when the aircraft was repainted. Also this aircraft had a number of details that differ from the in-game version, such as an Aboukir filter, individual exhaust stacks and the MkIII IFF.
There's still plenty of work to do on the weathering of the wing's leading edge and the alpha channel.

About to start the long grind of creating two packs of 12 historic skins each for 486 (NZ) Squadron's Tempests. The packs will cover the squadron's time on the continent, the first pack being for late 1944 and the second for 1945 as there were some change to the markings worn by 2nd TAF aircraft in January 1945.

This image is very much w.i.p, there's a lot left to do before I the first skin is done but once it is the rest should be easy enough to do. I should point out that these will be 2k, I have an old version of Photoshop and it really struggles with saving 4k dds files.

W.I.P

Now that the template for the Hurricane MkII is out I'd like to do a pack of MkIIb aircraft used by 486 (NZ) Squadron in 1942. The squadron initially operated as a night fighter unit on 'Turbinlite' operations although the unit's single victory claimed during this period was not done in conjunction with a 'Turbinlite' Boston.

Photos from this period are rare so only two of the aircraft in the pack will be based off of photos, however I have a list of aircraft serial numbers and individual i.d. letters so those will be historically accurate. It does appear that the aircraft were very uniform in their appearance so I feel confident that the pack will be very close to accurate.

In photos that show the doped cloth patches over the gun muzzles, said patches appear as light (and sometimes lighter) than the yellow propeller tips so I highly doubt they were the usual red colour and I feel they would have been either white or yellow so I'm going with the latter.

Rather oddly virtually all photos of these aircraft only show the port side, so I knew the SA code is forward of the roundel on that side but I wasn't sure about the starboard side, maybe it would have been aft of the roundel. However I do have one photo in a book which shows a bit of the starboard side and I believe I can make out the SA code forward of the roundel as well although it's hard to see as ortho film sometimes renders the red rather dark so it is hard to distinguish it from the black paint scheme... but I'm 90% sure the code is forward of the roundel on both sides.

Harry if you look at some of there later Hawker mounts you will see the code in front of the roundel, so I would think you are correct.

Cheers Alan. The placement of the letters on both sides is something I fret over, years ago I did some skins I was really proud of only to find out afterwards that I had got the codes wrong on one side (Murphy's Law is that I often find photos of something I was looking for long after I need them )... their position can differ quite a lot between different squadrons and can change over time e.g. 486sqn moved the SA code aft of the starboard roundel sometime after they converted to the Tempest.