Re: Panel Lines

Here's my take. Imagine the weathering and look of finished model compared to the real thing as being on a scale from 1 to 10.   1 being the model straight-painted and looking like a toy and 10 being somehow magically looking 'exactly' like a perfect miniature rendition of the real thing including scaled down lighting mimicking the sun, etc.  You can't ever make the model a '10', but you don't want to leave it at 1 so you do some paint tricks like pre-shading, weathering, panel lines, pastel fading, to get the kit on the other side of '5'. The aircraft doesn't *really and literally* have anything on it's aluminum skin even close to what you just did to the model, but these effects will get you to 5 or 6 or 8 or whatever.  They're all just optical tricks, so you can't look at them as literal translations from the A/C to the model.

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