Question on painting windows on static aircraft.

[spike9]

I'm new to the forums, but have been repainting MSFS aircraft for years. so far I've found the tutorials on this sight to be most useful and my painting has improved vastly.

Just recently, I've started working with a group of freeware scenery designers on a project involving alot WWII British Commonwealth training aircraft. My task involves painting low poly count aircraft models from scratch that are to be used as static aircraft in the scenery. The problem I'm experiencing is how to paint the windows on these aircraft so they look somewhat decent. My biggest problem is none of these aircraft have modeled windows, so you are essentially attempting to paint the windows. Obviously, it's a lot easier to just paint the frames when the windows are modeled, but how do you make the glass look decent? I've tried just putting blue where the glass should be, but it looks to fake. Others have suggested getting a photo of the real aircraft with crew sitting in it and cut and paste the cocckpit images as a new layer. The problem I find with this is depending on how the modeller mapped the textures you can get some really funky stretching around the nose. Ther must be a relatively simple way to come up with something that looks okay form the air or while taxing by, remembering that these are simple models. I've inserted an example of what I'm talking about.

PS it's a work in progress and my first attempt.

[Rixster]

yeah that's a tough one...gonna be hard to make anything realistic looking..I've yet to see a static aircraft that had decent looking windows..most of them are just blacked out...

[sergio kauffman]

Well, it look awesome to me. Nice work dude.

[adlabs6]

Hi, nice looking work.

Perhaps you might experiment with reducing the saturation of the blue, so that they are not a very strong color element compared to the aircraft colors. Say a light/medium gray, which has just a hint of blue.

You might also consider a very faint darker tone, feathered in on the bottom most edge of the window group. This might add some depth.

EDIT: Take a look at this example:
http://www.simmerspaintshop.com/foru...king-air-2798/

[spike9]

Thanks I'll give that a try.