u/esPhys

As a long time fan of the series the amount of glazing I've seen over this entry does put a smile on my face.
The older entries are obviously dated, so in a lot of ways 8 is probably objectively the best Ace Combat entry now. It Feels a lot like how one would remember Ace Combat 5 with rose tinted glasses.

Couple of things. I've never painted chrome so take it with a grain of salt and do some tests yourself in photoshop first or something if you want to try and implement any of this.

First of all, I don't think your photo is doing you many favors, it's very bright and a little washed out in a way that I think it probably doesn't look in real life.

There is no highly reflecting spot reflection of the sun. You have some edge highlighting in white, and the brightness as it goes towards the horizin in the reflection, but especially given the setting, a bright point highlight for where the sun would be in the helmet and shoulders (and then also reflected in the relevant edges where it would catch) would go a long way.

And lastly, you are treating each individual armor plane as it's own thing rather than looking at the whole model. So each piece might individually look like chrome but all together they fight each other. Some of this is dependent on what you're imagining your prime viewing angle to be, like the top of the helmet dome COULD have ground visible around the bottom of the dome if you were looking down on the model. But if that were the case then the whole front visor would be ground reflection because it's lower angle than all of that, not split across the middle. That's just a high level description of the issue, but some examples (again, this is different depending on how you imagine your viewing angles) would be, the whole upper chest plane should be skyward, the thigh plates should have the ground start lower down, the (our) left shoulder pad should be mostly skyward (things that are rounded should probably have some semblance of distortion around the edges as they wrap away from the prime viewing angles, but in your case the shoulder distorts in the conventional viewing plane, not the obscured ones - though that might be because you painted it from the side in which case it makes more sense, but maybe not the best option.

Basically, if you imagine the mandalorian holding a big plate mirror in front of him, you see something similar to what you have in the thigh armor plate. If you cut that plate across the middle horizontally, you don't get 2 stacked plate mirrors with the same image, you get the same image split across the 2 plates. There is some complexity added because of slight curves in the armor but not to the degree you've painted in here.

I don't think I can find it again, it wasn't serious though. It was just a short clip of a small RC model of the killdozer harmlessly banging into the "Welcome to Granby" sign for the town.

I've just checked out of life or any real future. Every day is going to be worse than the last, and I have zero faith in humanity or myself, and know at this point that I'm not going to be able to meaningfully improve either of those. And there's no point in bothering to try and bring anybody else into this circle, it would only be bad for everybody involved.

For me the biggest issues here is a very consistent and flat skin tone over all of the skin. Skin varies across the surface based on what kind of tissue is underneath, and how thin it is. Glazing in some magenta or a bright red on spots like the nose/cheeks, elbows/knees/shoulders/chest would go a long way. Just enough to add some subtle detail.

I haven't used the rust yet, but I've used moss, and my understanding is that you have to shake the heck out of it before use or it doesn't work properly. Like excessive levels of shaking and then some more.

For the most part it probably isn't enough to really interfere with other colors that are full strength if that's the case. But you could try giving it a bit of a rinse with 90%+ isopropyl alcohol if you've got some. get it wet with IPA and let it sit for 20-30 seconds and then repeat the regular swishing and paper towel routine a few times with the IPA instead of water, and then rinse with clean water.

From the look of the brush there is probably just hard to clean paint up in the ferrule. As a general rule you shouldn't let the paint get too far up the bristles. Not so much for colour contamination, but because paint will dry in the ferrule and start to split the bristles and mess up how the hairs form the tip. The IPA cleaning option is still a good option here, just for future reference, try not to load your brush with paint past half way up the bristles at most. Larger brushes are useful for basecoating things and make doing this easier as well.

Can't say I've had this happen, though maybe it can with some kinds of synthetic brushes.

If it's still purple after 2 or 3 rounds of swishing it back and forth in water, and then dragging it across some paper towel, even if it's still purple so long as it's not leaving purple paint on anything when it's wet then you should be fine to just use it with more colors without an issue. But the take-away is that when wet it should just leave clean water if you brush it onto a paper towel, if it's leaving any purple it's just not clean.

What does the example with normal shadow maps on look like?

I need that guy at 16:20's frog shirt. Man I love frogs.

Hey, it's Cody, of Squidshark Ocean vs. Stopsign Sun fame.

lol, that may be true, but I'm not sure "well you won't have a social life, so what do you really need the money for anyway?" Is a great argument.

well damn

This is the greatest thing I've ever seen in my entire life.

Damn, that's a ton of progress for just 1 year. good work!

Who would have ever thought it mattered where you put -ss in the command?!

Yeah, it's 75mm. It looks like it's up on the neko galaxy store, at 52€ right now. Not everything they sell is always in stock from what I've seen over time.

I can't remember exactly, but general advice I think it's fair to say avoid yellows and try sticking more to browns and pale/golden-brown and sort of sandy colors. At least for this kind of more neutral look. I think this was like a medium neutral brown shadows, with a PA golden brown midtone, and an ivory highlight. Something along those lines anyway.

It's a custom made thing. Nothing crazy really though, just some cork, plasticard, wires, and bamboo skewers. I don't have too many in-progress pictures of it but you can see it unpainted if you scroll through here.

When I started painting her the scheme was inspired by UMP45 from Girls' Frontline, I didn't learn until after that the HSR MC also has the same color scheme. But it is a really nice scheme.

There has got to be a better way to accomplish whatever it is you're trying to do here.

At least that is more reasonable than my story where I forgot to stop recording and tried to get a clip playing gears of war with a friend and forgot to stop it and ended up recording everything I did on the computer for the next 5 days straight.

Wait, so we AREN'T invading Iran today now?
I can't keep track of all this.

It's not totally ramblings. It's sort of a natural conclusion you might come to learning a bit about anti-matter and matter-antimatter asymmetry (not the time thing, that's ramblings afaik, maybe at the time they thought antimatter experienced time backwards). It would be reasonable to assume the universe should have been 50-50 matter and anti-matter and just annihilated into pure energy at the beginning of the universe. We have evidence that this did not happen.

We don't know why the matter/antimatter exists in the quantities that it does (afaik?) so there has been speculation that maybe there are just huge regions of space that are totally antimatter. We would have no way to tell by looking at it if it were antimatter or regular matter. So maybe space is just spotted with equal regions of matter and anti-matter.

Except the known effects if that were the case have never been observed. At the boundaries between matter and antimatter regions of space you would have on-going matter annihilation that would be very easy to detect, and it's never been detected. So that scenario seems unlikely.

You'd think this is pretty straight forward, but wait till you see how the US orders the day/month/year on dates.