Tutorial 3:

Painting Zimmerit and camouflage pattern

Since many people have asked about my Tiger 2 addon and particular methods of painting its textures, I decided to give you description of how I made the German camouflage and Zimmerit effect.
I show here (in my opinion) the optimal method of painting coarse surfaces of Geman armored vehicles from the final part of WW2, which were covered by antimagnetic Zimmerit paste. Appearance of such surfaces is quite specific, but you have to remember that Zimmerit was applied in several distinctive ways which depended on a vehicle..
Here you can find enough information on real application and pattern variants for particular vehicles:

http://www.panzerworld.net/Zimmerit.htm

http://www.panzerdiesel.com/data/e/270.html

I am going to focus this tutorial on the most widespread pattern (used also on King Tigers), which was result of impasting Zimmerit by some trowel or spatula in short horizontal rows. Following method described in this tutorial is based on use of Photoshop.
Let’s start working! The essence of next step is defining the right colours. In times Zimmerit was used, German army used several camouflage patterns composed from 3 colours: Dark Yellow (the basic coating of vehicle), Red Brown and Olive Green (complementary camouflaging tones).

All textures should be made in basic Dark Yellow colour at first. The picture shows ideal tone as it best fits into OFP environment. The colour is a bit desaturated in order to achieve more realistic appearance in game. If all the details and shading of texture is finished, you can start applying Zimmerit.

Let’s create new layer and start painting particular elements of Zimmerite surface (black colour #000000 should be used). Certain irregularity brought by your hand-painting is quite an asset, the surface will look much more natural. I strongly recommend using tablet for drawing this kind of details. After you finish first few (cca 3) columns, you can copy them onto the whole surface. Use the Move Tool while holding Alt button and drag the copied piece next to original piece. I can suggest placing the copied piece a bit lower and fill the rest in the same way. This will add some more irregularity and realism to your texture; the pattern will not regularly repeat. Although this may sound like a lame nitpicking, it is very important for natural look of the texture!

Then you should apply this on the parts of surface, where the regular horizontal-row pattern possibly appeared.

Zimmerit was not applied only in the regular pattern; some places with round edges should be girdled in the way very similar to the real method of application. The paste was apllied from the edge to centre in the way which resulted in radial pattern (shown on following picture). Your only chance here is careful work and painting each single row.

I would recommend to start with edge parts and get rid of the central parts later. This imitation of real application method ensures increased realism. Do not hesitate to spend some extra time on scoping on row spacing and size or possibly studying photos of real vehicle.

The surface should be filled up now, but it may appear to be kinda flat. Add a new layer, in which you paint some shines on the more distinct rows. The layer should be on top of our montage.

Let’s suppose that Zimmerit was applied successfuly and you can move to the second part of this tutorial, creation of camouflage pattern. I was always scared by textures, whose backgroung details are completely overlaid by the partly opaque top layer of camouflage. Apart of possible problems with texture merging, these textures are almost impossible to correct.
Let me explain the method which perfectly solves this problem. Camouflaging surfaces are applied without any loss of original structure, the layers remain available for further shape editing which will ease the process of texture matching.
Principle of this is quite easy! Later versions of Photoshop allow you to create so-called Layer Mask (command Add Layer Mask in „Layer“ menu) – you will make excellent use of this function. First you need to copy all the layers (background, its shades, zimmerit) except of the top „shine“ layer and merge them into one (you can make this also by copying whole original file, merge the layers and copy the result into original file). Copy this layer once more; there should finally appear two completed layers. These layers will serve as basis for creation of camouflage pattern in certain colour. I have prepared colour presets to ease your work. Select one of the two layers and hit Ctrl+U, now you need to „Load“ my colour preset in the menu. List in the „editcolor“ folder (downloadable from this site in ZIP archive) and choose RedBrown.ahu.

Use OliveGreen.ahu for the second layer:

Of course, this is no dogma. You can adjust the colour change by yourself, but I can assure you I tried my best to find the most matching colours for this particular Tiger 2 camouflage scheme.
Now here comes the use of great features of my beloved Photoshop! :)
Select one of these layers and hit icon „Add a Mask“ from „Layers“ tool menu (the small icon with a circle just on the bottom of menu window). Now you should see the white frame next to the preview icon in the „Layers“ window. Now you should click on the frame and „Select All“ (Ctrl+A) and then fill the whole surface with black. If you have black set as a background colours, you can just delete (Del) the layer, it will be filled with black too. Now you could notice that your brown (or green) layer disappeared. Don’t worry, it has just his own „something-like-alpha“ channel and is not visible due to the black colour used. Do this with the second layer.
Now we can spray the camouflage pattern. Choose one of the altered layers’ mask and choose some soft brush (I used the soft 17,but it depends on your experience and desired result). Choose white colour and set brush pressure to 100%. Now you can finally paint the camo – what is white in the mask, appears, what is black, doesn’t. Just a piece of cake...

I think that result is definitely worth the job. What do you think? :)

Marfy

It is strongly recommended to download the PSD texture, which will definitely help you understand this tutorial, and the colour change files.
WARNING! Optimal tones of complemetary colours are obtained only in case the colour change files (*.ahu) are applied on Dark Yellow tone (#A29067).
Note of translator: I tried to preserve sense of this tutorial unchanged, but some terms (e.g. the Photoshop slang) may slightly vary from the vocabulary used by native English speakers or Photoshop weirdos. In case you doubt the explanation is accurate and/or correct, ask me at Ivan Buchta instead of contacting Marfy. I am sure I could give proper explanation on particular issue.

Download the PSD texture

Download colour change file

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