Photo Manipulation Questions.

[EDanaII]

As some may remember, I just recently built an 1/48 scale B-17G for my father. Long story short, I sent the plane off to Grimbergen for the celebration but the plane never arrived. Frustrated by that failure, I started building a new model to replace the lost one. As fate (and irony) would have it, not long after I started the second one, the first was returned to me, damaged. So, now I'm in the process of repairing the first and finishing the second.

Since I'm working on a second one, I'm thinking of marking it after another one of the planes my father served on. The first plane, the Hard Seventeen, was easy to do as the nose art featured a blackjack hand. The others are not quite so easy as they feature more unique art.

My question is this: what techniques might I use to lift the nose art of the photos of the plane? By this I mean, I'd like to modify the image so that I have only the nose art and that it isn't curved or at an angle.

Any advice and tips appreciated, and while I'm not asking anyone to do it for me, if it's easy enough to do, I won't complain to loudly if they did.

Photos follow:
Gambler's Choice:


Lady Jane:


My intention is to simply use the images as templates to create a more detailed image to place on the nose of the second model.

Any and all help appreciated.

Ed.

[JaXanim]

I think the first thing to remember is you can't automatically make any modified image more detailed than its parent. So if the image you have is seen at an angle, ie. it's forshortened, you can stretch it to the flat full on width/height, but the detail will be the same. I guess you could then hand work it in a paint program if necessary to create better detail. This is the sort of thing 3D renderers do very well, eg. LightWave, Imagine, Tornado, Cinema4D, etc. They can project flat images onto a flat 'screen' then warp the screen along with the image. This effect could be done in reverse by projecting the  forshortened image onto a screen orientated like the surface in the original photo. Moving the viewpoint will give you a more or less full face image. It will still retain any curvature if the screen is curved, but even that could be morphed into a flat surface and the image would follow suit.
Sounds like a lot of work after a lot of learning.

JaX

[metalman]

method #1
use grid points to convert points on curved surface to a flat sheet layout by triangulation

Method #2
Make a transparency of logo,
project onto a curved surface that matches the original surface and angle of photo.
trace the projected image.

[EDanaII]

Thanks, guys. I'll consider those approaches.

I thought, however, there might be a method I could follow using a paint program using rotate and skew functions. I was hoping someone had done similar and new a method.

I could, in the venerable old DPaint program, for example, load a brush with the image, translate, rotate and then, maybe, apply some skewing to the image as well. (I don't remember if DPaint could do skewing, but I do remember the 3D translate functions.)

Ed.

[metalman]

 You need to do the triangulation to know how much to skew, and stretch to get back to the origonal flat sheet image.