USAIR F18 addon - Battlefield 2

Better to post a pic of the actual content than a real world photo, that way people can see what it is you are offering. :)

Thanks my comrade!

thanks

This looks oddly similar to the f18 skin in the AU Australian army mod. Did you make this one or take it from another mod?

hey :D
This one is SO CLEAAN :D
Can you do the A10 for the next one?

Nice skin sniper67, thanks a mil' for uploading it. appreciated very much.

Lol! This texture was MY work so I hope it is being used here with permission of the Aus Forces team.

I made this for the Aus Forces mod in 2007. I wanted to do mod work and heard that Aus Forces was in development so asked to join the team. I loved Battlefield 2 and was an Australian Army reservist in the 90s. I had also tried to get into the RAAF to fly real Hornets. So, the Aus Forces mod was of great interest to me. Happily, they let me join and let me do the Hornet skin.

I joined the team quite late, only a few months before the 1.0 release. I'm listed last in the team members, as Air Elijah. So, I did not contribute much work. I’m not a quick worker - too much of a perfectionist.

If I recall correctly, I did the textures for the Stinger AA missile launcher, the USP pistol, and the F/A-18. I think I helped Beex with the Bushmaster texture too (and/or the ASLAV?). He did the model and main texture with camo, panels lines, and baked-in ambient occlusion shadows. I then took his texture and detailed it with extra road/safety/Army/unit markings.

Beex exported plain white skins for all of the models I worked on with ambient occlusion shadows baked in. You could throw those over the texture in Photoshop in a separate layer with the Multiply blend mode. They made it a lot easier to make nice textures. Just add base colours, markings, weathering. I also tried to research each item thoroughly and be very accurate though.

I don’t know what Beex did after the project ended. We fell out of touch. But he was a great guy and a seriously good modeller and texturer. He did very accurate work quickly while keeping the poly-count low. So impressive. The other modellers/artists did great work too!

I think I also textured the Minimi and the M72 LAW. I used both in the Army. I was in the infantry and for the last two years I was a Minimi gunner in my section (squad). The FN Minimi is the machine gun the USA adopted as the M-249 SAW. The Australian version has a heavier barrel and different carry handle. Great weapon. I once fired a 200 round burst from a Minimi in a Company-sized live-fire ambush exercise. Lots of fun!

About the Hornet skin:

I went to the RAAF airshow in 2006 which was at Richmond airbase in Sydney, Australia. I live in Sydney and it was a rare opportunity to see Hornets up close. One F/A-18 performed a flight display and another was used for a static ground display.

The plane on ground display was from 77 squadron with serial number A21-2. All RAAF classic Hornets have serial numbers beginning with A21-. The last digits after the dash are unique to the individual plane. The last digits are also shown on the front landing gear bay doors and the tops of the vertical tails. I took a lot of photos of A21-2 from all angles at the airshow. When I joined the Aus Forces team I wanted to texture the Hornet model as A21-2. However you will note that it has A81-8 on it and 8 on the tails and landing gear doors.

The reason for this is that certain parts of the texture are used for both sides of the plane to save texture memory. The problem was that some areas that are mirrored were parts where the aircraft number went. To avoid having backwards 2s on one side I decided to use 8s which can be flipped over without a problem. One side of the plane even says 8-18A since the whole serial number is reversed.

I was so happy to make a good skin for this plane. The original Hornet skin in BF-2 was just TERRIBLE. It did not look very realistic at all. The base colour was way too pail, almost white. The weathering and grime were over the top. There were really dirty patches in areas that made no sense. The nose tip was bright yellow instead of beige! The panel lines were too thick. The whole thing looked really low-res and lacked subtlety and accuracy. It looked like an afterthought, thrown together at the last moment. The rest of the game looked fine, but the Hornet skin looked notably out of place.

I also thought it was weird that they went for CAG markings (Commander of Air Group) rather than standard squadron member ones. I’m not sure if they were actually going for CAG markings or were just clueless about what real Hornet markings look like. But very few planes have these colourful markings like the red plane number on the nose, red unit number on the spine, black nose panel, and the colourful tail art. Moreover, if they wanted to use CAG markings that is one thing but on operations they usually re-paint those with low viz versions. The high viz ones looked so out of place.

Anyway, that is some background on the texture, the mod, and me. I’ve recently been bitten hard by the fighter plane bug again which is how I came to be here and see this. I’m thinking I might make some RAAF textures for the Hornets in DCS. Someone has already done some nice ones. Need to rebuild my gaming PC first though…

Nigel Hill
nigelhill74@gmail.com