Airbrushing highlights on hellblades/drakes/talons

[OnboardG1]

Hi folks, all three of the aircraft mentioned in the title have a very distinctive armour layout on their wings where the panels are crossed by gold trim. I'm painting mine in my NL colour scheme which is the usual Kantor Blue base, Naggaroth Night/Kantor mix shadows and with Aliatoc and Hoeth blues as highlights. However I'm not sure whether to treat each "hex" on the wings as a separate panel for lighting purposes or whether to treat the whole wing as a single panel (or a combination of both). I was looking at glass office blocks as reference since they're the closest real world eq I can think of but a) I don't know how applicable that would be to armour plating and b) it seems to depend on the properties of the glass in each panel.

 

Here's a quick and dirty paint sketch of what I mean, where the panels on the left are treated as a separate entity for lighting sources while the right is treated as a single panel:

 

[Major_Gilbear]

The answer is, of course, both! :P

 

I would probably do a directional gradient on each panel rather than highlighting in the middle of each, using blues to get a reasonable effect. Then I would use a soft bright highlight across the whole volume of the model as a zenithal highlight. Finally, pick out the trim.

 

The example you used of office buildings is actually a good one. Each window has it's own reflection, but they all still have a light gradient as a whole across the building too. What you tend not to see though is dark edges with reflections in the centre of the panes (hidden frames and glass transparency notwithstanding, of course).

 

I won't lie though, as awesome as it looks when it's done, it's still a fair old bit of work since you're basically highlighting twice.

I'm also not sure if the effect would be too subtle for smaller craft as the trim takes up so much visual space. If this is the case, maybe treat the whole craft as a single entity and just highlight across all the panels rather than individually.

[OnboardG1]

What would you use for the soft highlight? The same colour as the highest panel highlight or a little lighter?

[Major_Gilbear]

Lighter than the highest panel highlight.

 

Here's a photo of the Bilbao Guggenheim museum to show what I mean a bit better. You can see each panel has it's own reflection, but that the overall building shape also has a broader reflection as well.

 

As I said though, the only real issue is that your craft all have a heavy trim, which might make the finished effect less pronounced than if it was something like Valkyrie for example. In this respect, it's like the difference between a modern leaded glass window and the frameless glass panels of a modern office building if that makes sense?

[OnboardG1]

Yeah I get roughly what you mean and the Guggenheim picture was what I was looking for in my initial research. I think a good start would be to do the individual panel highlights with differing intensity across the mini (like you see in the centre wing of the museum) and then decide from there if I need to do the zenithal.

 

EDIT: Is this roughly what you're getting at? 

 

Edited November 1, 2017 by OnboardG1

[Major_Gilbear]

Yes, that's it. :)

[OnboardG1]

Figured I'd post the WIP since I finally got round to working on it:

 

http://i.imgur.com/suuCfqy.jpg

[Golf33]

Looking pretty sweet!