Model Download: July 26, 1943 — The Last Mission
This WWII scene by BMF has a personal story attached.
During WWII, my father was the pilot of a B-17F-90-BO (serial number 230208) assigned to the 388th Bomb Group, 563rd Bomb Squadron at Kneittishal, England; arriving with his crew in June 1943.
This model/scene is meant as a tribute to the entire crew of that B-17 which flew it’s last mission on July 26, 1943.
Be sure to read the entire story behind this model on Blend Swap.
Great model, and nice tribute to your father and the valor of his company. Veterans get my immediate respect.
I appreciate your comment. Thanks.
BMF
Great tribute.
My Irish grandfather fought in WW1 for the British and lost some brothers from 14 to 18. Two of his younger brothers died in WW2 at Caen after D day and crossing the Rhine. At caen my father has met German families from the other side in WW2 and made some good friends with them as we have a lot in common and little in difference. The German ex-soldier guy my grandather built a house for in the 50’s beside our place in Ireland lost most of his family, between combat and bombing raids. When I was a kid, the veterans regardless of what side they were on were brilliant people. Locally they taught crafts, stood their ground and were generally helpful. thinking back, they seemed to compete to teach us things as kids. It is good to honour them, remember them and remember all the suffering regardless of wether they were military or civilian :)
Good modelling :)
Thank you for your comments and especially for sharing the experiences of you and your family.
I spent three years in combat in the US Marine Corps. It’s an experience that you want to forget but can never be forgotten. It’s still an emotional experience for me whenever I visit the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC. The names of a lot of my good Marines are on that wall.
Take care and I thank your family for their service during one of the most horrific wars in modern times. They were truly members of the Greatest Generation.
BMF
How many polys for just the plane, would it display smoothly on Sketchfab?
Upload it and try ;-)
Another question: The navy ship Yamato on Sketchfab has so many millions of polygons that it chugs. Will getting a GPU card fix that, or is this mostly a bandwidth problem?
Did you mean this one?
https://sketchfab.com/models/uozbngKdPzMdD9ILEJvmPV62KLp
I get fairly decent performance on my old iMac: ~10 fps I’d guess. WebGL is pretty fast. Are you saying you don’t have a GPU?
That’s what I’m saying, and I’ll have to see if there are any external GPU solutions that will work on my current notebook. I doubt it though, all I have are USB ports on this machine. And maybe that means I will have to trade the entire notebook in.
Yeah I don’t think you can get decent GPU performance over USB man..
BMF, my congratulations! You did this model, which you described me some months ago!
Did you find better reference materials (scale plans) for the B-17?
Do you plan to add more details to this model?
Witold,
Yes, this is the B-17 tribute to my father that we talked about a long time ago. It was a challenge for me as don’t have a lot of time to spend using Blender so it takes me forever to finish a complex model.
No, I didn’t find better reference materials. Good detailed references like you had for the P-40B Warhawk don’t exist. The references are either to simplified or they are incomplete, or they are grainy. I doubt any of them are to factory specifications. Good photographic references are also lacking. There are very few usable photographs of the B-17F-90-BO taken during the summer of 1943 and most of those are only partial (like the crew beside their aircraft), black and white, and grainy.
Photographs of restored B-17’s were helpful, but most of them are for the B-17G and it had too many modifications to be used to model the F model.
The other problem was that B-17 markings were not standardized until late in the war. It was difficult to find a usable photograph of a B-17 in the 388th Bomb Group much less a useable photograph of one in the 563rd Bomb Squadron.
I ran into the same problem with interiors. The B-17s were manufactured in different locations and manufacturers used whatever was available. So in the same Bomb Squadron it’s possible for just about every interior to be somewhat different in both equipment and paint schemes. The Army didn’t keep accurate records except for some references to paint mixtures that were allowed.
The most helpful for me personally was that I paid to take a 30 minute ride on one of the few B-17F models still flying (the Nine-O-Nine). Not only did I get a detailed look at the exterior and interior, but I was stunned at how small and cramped it was for the crew inside. It’s difficult to move around in the aircraft on the ground and even more so in flight.
The view from the bombardier’s seat while in flight was spectacular. The same for the view from the top turret. And I’ll never forget the roar of those four Wright Cyclone R-1820 engines as they started up and in flight. The entire experience was well worth the money and I got perhaps a small glimpse of what it was like when my father flew them.
I do plan to upgrade this model. There are some improvements I can make to the external parts of the model, I can perhaps retopologize the turrets (especially the ball turret), I want to redo the internal parts of the waist gun positions, the tail gun position, the cockpit, and the navigator/bombardier compartment. The tail gun hatch and right side door are missing as are all of the major access panels. The bombay needs to be completed, and I need to model the crew.
Texturing probably needs to be completely redone. I wanted to add the rivets but I couldn’t make it happen. The rivet patter on a B-17 is a nightmare to reconstruct–but it was one of the reasons it was so difficult to shoot down. I experimented with textures I made in Photoshop, but they were too blurry and wouldn’t align properly–probably because my UV unwrapping isn’t right. Maybe after I complete your tutorial for the P-40 I’ll see if I can get the rivets to look right. I’d really like to see them in 3D like real rivets but I don’t yet know how to do that easily. I tried experimenting with normal of a test rivet texture, but I couldn’t get them to display correctly (realistically).
So yes, this model is only about 75% complete and because of the topology mistakes I made, it likely will never be as detailed as I would like. I may take a deep breath and just start over from scratch to see if I can do better, but not before completing your tutorial.
By the way, how are you coming on the Douglas SDB Dauntless. As I recall you mentioned that would be your next project. If so, I can’t wait to see the amazing details.
Take care and keep in touch
BMF
Fred,
I have just asked about possible sources of detailed B-17F drawings on a small but specialized forum of 3D military vehicles modelers (military-meshes.com). I hope that I will be able to find in this or other way a more decent drawings of this model. (It is a great surprise that we have so few good reference materials about such a massively produced airplane).
You can easily obtain texture of rivets and all the other aircraft skin details using Inkscape (see especially sections 11.34 and 11.39 from the book). The B-17 had dome rivets, so just use white color instead of black in their dotted lines. Cycles will convert each of these dots into dome. Of course, just ask me when you get stuck somewhere.
I think that I will start my SBD this autumn – when I finish my “publishing” tasks for this year. (Creation of a complete workflow that automatically builds e-books took more time than I expected. Ultimately, it is finished and I can produce a high-quality EPUB from my Word manuscript in less than hour. Such a tool allows me to keep my guide up-to-date: I will publish this summer its third edition, updated to Blender 2.7x and GIMP 2.8).
Witold
Thanks. I appreciate your help in locating quality diagrams of the B-17.
I too was surprised at how little technical information there is for one of the most iconic aircraft of the 20th Century. When I say there is not much technical information, I am of course referring to the level of detail that others probably don’t care about.
With regards so texturing and rivets, I expect to learn much more as I complete your tutorial. When I bought you tutorial, I was already well into version 20 of the B-17 so I wanted to go ahead and finish it–though I felt that was in doubt several times in the process. I actually ended up with 41 versions–each being a new branch to add additional detail or to rework major parts of the topology.
I’m glad to hear that you will be starting your SDB. I’d love to see your progress from time to time as you create it.
I’m doing something different for the moment, but I’ll return to aircraft in the near future.
In parallel to working through your massive tutorial, I’m thinking about creating a scene of some major aviation event. Some initial considerations are the Spirit of St. Louis, Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra during her final hour searching for Howland Island, the Hindenburg disaster, and the most challenging one–the moment LtCol Doolittle’s B-25 takes off from the deck of the USS Hornet in April 1942. That would be 16 unique B-25 textures the USS Hornet (or major parts of it), and the ocean. It would be fun to do, but I don’t think my skills are up to something like that yet, but I could reduce the size of the scene to make it a bit easier.
I have a number of other ideas as well. I’m not sure what the final decision will be, but I’m sure it will come to me in the middle of the night in the coming months.
Anyway, take care.
BMF
I have sent you (via e-mail) links to various reference materials about B-17, I have found so far. It may happen that you know some of these sources, but maybe the others will be useful?