For various reasons this model has been lurking on my hard drive for a few years longer than planned. The only thing that really needs doing is sorting out the textures and tweaking the animations in the VC to line up with the gauges once they’re done.
I’m using Quixel to generate the base textures for the VC and then inserting the artwork for the gauges and cockpit labels. It’s fairly intuitive to work with once you’ve read a couple of tutorials and you can set up custom smart materials once you’ve found some settings you like. The only issue at the moment is the export function doesn’t really tweak the maps enough for Prepar3D as it’s putting a lot of detail in the Specular map that just doesn’t show up unless the light is in exactly the right place. I’ll need to look at generating some Photoshop actions to copy some of that detail from the Specular map to the Diffuse. At the moment though it’s looking like this.
The other problem I’m having is getting cockpit information for these early marks of Firefly. The instruments themselves are fine as they’re standard WW2 British parts but the rest of it is a bit of a mystery as the majority of references I’ve found, and surviving aircraft, are the later Mk 4, 5, and 6 which are quite different when it comes to the ancillary equipment.
Finally a post war ad from Fairey that I found while I was searching for Firefly stuff!
Bravo Zulu 