Attention! This news was published on the old version of the website. There may be some problems with news display in specific browser versions.

BAC Lightning F1 - User Created Content - Snozzeltoff

The War Thunder CDK allows players to recreate some of their favorite historical locations, new missions and also unleash their creative potential with 3D vehicle modeling. Many famous and iconic machines have been constructed by numerous skilled modelers within the community and their work is truly something spectacular to behold. Today we would like to share once such remarkable creation and gain some insight to the processes, steps and evolution of such a project.

BAC Lightning F1 - Created by Snozzeltoff

Try out Snozzeltoff's Lighting F.1 yourself! Download it here.

Tell us a little bit about yourself, your experience with War Thunder and how you came to choose the Lightning as your subject?

I have been a player of War Thunder for just over a year and have always had a keen interest in planes and tanks but specifically WW2. I began as a Tanker but after climbing the German tech tree I made the switch to planes.

I work professionally as a freelance 3D artist and once I saw the War Thunder CDK I knew I had to get involved. I knew wanted to work on a Jet aircraft as that was the goal I was working towards with climbing the British tech tree. After looking into the War Thunder forums I could see the love for British jets including the Hawker Hunter, Avro Vulcan and the English Electric Lightning. With the development of 1.53 I knew the Hunter was already in development so I decided the Lightning was the aircraft to make. Being War Thunder I wanted to use the earliest produced Lightning, the F1. It does have hard points for air to air missiles but I ignored those as that definitely isn't something happening in War Thunder.

How did you design and construct the aircraft?

To create the aircraft I researched a lot of images and photos of the aircraft via Google Image search, I also found blueprint style images that also had cross section cut out drawings. I often use www.the-blueprints.com - It is probably one of the biggest blueprint websites available. From these images I could begin modelling using 3Ds Max.

Over time the overall shape is constructed and only when I'm happy with all the main components do I then start to build in the details. I cannot give an exact time scale for the whole project as I was doing this in my spare time without running a timer.

After the modelling comes the UV unwrap. Imagine a cube and unfolding that into a 2D shape, you can then draw onto that template and create the texture of the aircraft.

This is a copy of the texture for the lightning. The black lines are the polygon lines of the unfolded object.

The model is unwrapped in 3Ds Max and then the template of the model is then saved out as an image to be imported into Photoshop. Any 2D drawing package would do the job really but Photoshop is the program of choice for most artists. There are all sorts of methods but it just takes time to build it all up in layers and keep adding the details. Halfway through the texture creation, War Thunder changed the rendering engine to the new Dagor one that now ran PBR (Physically Based Rendering). This meant tweaking my texture but mostly the normal map RGBA channels.