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Deciding on the colour and pattern design of your latest model masterpiece can often be quite a tricky process. It's not always that easy to be sure just how your ideas might look on the finished model, and sometimes you might just wish you could pre-view and compare various colour combinations before committing yourself to spending what can be quite a bit of money on those precious covering materials. 

Well, William Busto's Model Airplane Color Design website offers you just that possibility! From this site you can download some quite delightful software that allows you to 'paint' your own colour designs onto model profiles and then view them in full 3D.

MACD is a PC program that helps design paint schemes for r/c aircraft. It really is very easy to use, and if you have used paint programs before you will will already know exactly how to go about using this one. William Busto started this program a couple of years ago as a means of helping his fellow modellers and himself visualize colour schemes for their models and it has come a long way since then. 

On offer are four separate MACD programs, each featuring a different basic model profile - a sport high winger, a sport low winger, a CAP232 style aerobatic and a pattern plane. Downloading and installing the programs is simplicity itself, with extremely professional routines and an installation wizard that instals the selected program and puts a short-cut on your desktop for quick and easy launching. Downloading time is in the region of 3½ minutes for each program and installation time is just a second or two.

On running each program, you are presented with a smart opening screen showing a rotating view of the chosen plane (the example shown here is the sport high winger). Two clicks of the mouse and you are through to the control panel - choose paint booth and up comes this screen on the right for you to start work on the fuselage colour scheme. Click on the color button, pick up a colour from the colour palette that then appears and you can apply that colour to any of the different pattern areas by moving the little spray-gun icon within the required area and left-clicking. The images on the screen immediately change to display your newly-applied colour. If you want to see the full effect of your handiwork at this stage, just toggle the rotate/stop button or simply left click and drag on the left-hand plane image and you can move the plane around its axes, smooth as silk! 

When you have applied all your colours to the fuselage, a click on the next button moves you on to the next screen for the right wing. Repeat the process and move through successive screens for the left wing, right and left stabilisers, wheel pants, struts and spinner. Right click to return to the control panel at any stage, select view model and up comes a display of the finished model, in full 3D (left).. Two very smart little sets of mouse-driven controls allow you to rotate about any axis, zoom in and out, and move left, right, up or down.

Open a second application of the program, re-size the windows and you can make side-by-side comparisons of alternative schemes - fantastic!

Further options in the program allow you to 'fly' the plane by joystick or mouse on a plain background and you can drop in a background to the view screens to see your model against a scenery background - you can even substitute the default background bitmap for one of your own flying field (or any other bitmap) just for fun and extra realism! 

Colour schemes can be saved and William is developing the program to allow schemes to be sent directly to the printer, but you can achieve much the same result by taking a screen shot with the Print Screen button on your keyboard, pasting it into Paint or your favourite graphics program and printing it out from there.

This free software is excellent - delightful and fun to use, smooth in action, with good strong colours and a good Help facility. I have downloaded all four programs and just love to play around with them, even though I'm not looking for a colour scheme right now!

One other thing - amongst the links provided on the site there are two interesting articles specifically to do with choice of colours for r/c aircraft - don't miss them!

You can find the site, the software, hints and tips and other interesting links at

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/wbusto/

Thank you very much, William, for this useful and thoroughly enjoyable software - congratulations on a superb production!

With acknowledgement to Alan Tong's R/C links website, where I found the link to this site.