I would like to present to the CS community, McPhat's first freeware, UHDT repaint for the 757. Sirs, ladies and Gentlemen, I give you!!!!! American Airlines 'One World' scheme Please visit the McPhat website and get your free copy of this repaint. McPhat Studios Direct Link to the McPhat 757 page. Open source command line interface for Visual Studio Team Services from Windows, Linux, and Mac. Manage pull requests, builds, work items, and more directly from a command prompt or from scripts. See the docs for more information. For manual download and install steps check out these links – Windows, Linux, Mac.

• Mcphat Studios Liveries
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Introduction

“We don’t make the airplanes you buy. We make them look better.” This might be texture artists McPhat’s slogan, if BASF Chemical Company hadn’t thought of it first. Instead their slogan is “We tear ‘em up, we wear ‘em down… for you to fly.”

Indeed, their work is known for the honest grime of hard-working jets in regular service. If you like shiny-fresh airplanes that look like they have just rolled out of the painting facility, McPhat might not be your style (and good luck finding their squeaky-clean equal). And that is about as close to anything negative as this review will deliver.

McPhat artists are the Dutch masters of flight sim painting. And when I say they are artists, I’m not using journalistic license. (I am about the Dutch part: they’re not all Dutch.) They are temperamentally driven to produce beautiful and accurate graphics in ever-increasing detail. Since McPhat is playing only against itself by this point commercially, you might think they would be tempted to rest on their laurels. Think again.

Their latest gift to the flight sim community is the glorious bare metal American Airline livery for the Flight 1 Coolsky Super 80 Pro in Ultra High Definition Texture (UHDT). It may be the best livery ever and it is available as a free download.

The Best Paint Ever? Flight 1 Coolsky Super 80 Pro Ultra High Definition American Airlines Bare Metal Livery

How can I say it is the best? Objectively, it has 253 pixels per meter (measured at the fuselage), or eight times more detail than PMDG’s MD-11, four times more than the original Super 80 Pro, and more than three times than even the 757 from Captain Sim, themselves no slouches at graphics. But why should you take my word for it, when you can download it yourself, if you have the add-on? (And if you don’t, what better excuse to get an airplane that is arguably -- when you consider frame rates, systems, looks and support -- the all-around best tube liner for FSX?)

What you will find is crisp decals that don’t dissolve in close-ups. The skin does not look like polished granite, but subtly rippled metal that has experienced many pressure changes and the occasional bump from a hurried ground crew. Upon even closer inspection, the wing root displays joined metal, not some smooth organic growth, and there are layered paint chips that react differently to rolling light. The screenshots do not do it justice. It is meant to be seen alive, in dynamic light, where the details can be savored in flight.

The Fundamentals

By now, it should be clear we are not just speaking of the pretty colors of the flat texture, the diffuse map, or what we normally think of as liveries. Alitalia’s green stripe, Lufthansa’s dark blue and golden crane design, and Delta’s widget tell us whose airplane we‘re flying.

But no matter how pretty or realistic, it takes more than a layer of dirt to bring the diffuse map to life. This is where McPhat’s mastery of the specular and bump mapping comes into play. You can see how they work when you take a careful look at the American Airlines paint.

These are both per-pixel lighting techniques available to FSX. You may have seen textures that emulate the reflectivity of bare metal by actually painting on the shine. This sort of trompe l’oeil technique doesn’t look bad -- until, that is, you see a good specular job.

Specularity means that shine no longer has to be static, but can move and change depending on its angle to the sun. Bump mapping does something similar for close-ups. According to Microsoft, “bump mapping enables a surface to appear wrinkled or dimpled without the need to model these depressions geometrically.”

You could model a golf ball with every dimple as part of the 3D model. But imagine the work and the rendering challenge for your system. With a bump map, you could take a smooth billiard ball and skin it with dimples, turning it into a golf ball. Think of it as emulating a 3D surface texture for the 3D model, allowing for things like ripples, dents, rivets, chips and joints, all hardly a single frame per second lost.

The American Airline UHDT paint for the Super 80 Pro is the best example of both of these techniques. (TWA is available for those who prefer their metal painted. Classic Super 80 fans will not be forgotten.)

Of course McPhat is not the only one that gets a lot out of the per-pixel lighting techniques offered by FSX. To give just one example of some of the other excellent work out there, you can download the OzX Grumman Goose HD Redux, and that’s freeware. The McPhat difference is that they have organized sometimes prickly artistic sensibilities into a professional studio that cranks out an incredible number of beautiful, detailed paints for commercial add-ons, and then have used that as a platform to push the boundaries of FSX graphics.

The Boss Artist

Terrence Klaverwiede is head honcho at McPhat, and what he does now is emblematic of McPhat attention to detail; bump maps. that’s it. Other artists do the diffuse map, i.e. livery. But if it looks like you could run your finger across your screen and feel the bumps and chips, that’s probably Terrence’s work.

“I’ve been working on that the past couple of days,” he writes of the final touches on the Super 80, “to add this reflective effect to all the parts where the paintjob is worn and/or chipped off. Sometimes I wonder why I do such things, because most people won’t notice and the rest won’t care.” The emoticon wink ;-) at the end of the line he emails is not entirely convincing. Terrence sees things differently than normal people, and he knows it.Clanbook tzimisce pdf ita.

“When I get up in the morning, I do not see my toothbrush, I see the dried up toothpaste that got left behind, because I cleansed it off too quickly the night before. I do not see the paste itself; I see the structure, the colour, and the density. I do not see the tap when I take a shower, I see the rings of chalk, the dried up shampoo, and the way drops of water stick to the wall. I do not just see chalk, shampoo and water, I see the different shapes of the rings of chalk, the colour of the dried up shampoo and how drops stick and attach in different ways, depending on the amount of dirt and grease on the bathroom tiles.”

I’m neither sharing housecleaning confessions nor channeling Doctor Manhattan; just repeating what Terrence has written on the McPhat website. To have an artist‘s eye like that is to see detail and beauty wherever your gaze lights: dried toothpaste crusted onto bristles; grime on the blued and brownish metal of a jet engine. It‘s all the same. Before you paint it, you have to see it, and where most of us would see shiny silver metal, Terrence sees the better part of a box of Crayolas.

When I mentioned that McPhat’s filthy Air France A330 was one of my favorites, Terrence scoffs at his own previous efforts. “That’s really old. Even the E-jets are old by our standards now.” The difference is chiefly in the bumps and specs, which the older stuff lacks. Maybe so, but they still look great.

Then again, even as McPhat releases the UHDT Super 80, Terrence is already plotting its obsolescence. He’s talking about squeezing more out of FSX, looking better, looking ahead. He won’t divulge details, but when he says he says: “UHDT is really nice and all, but we have its successor standing by already,” it is hard to doubt him. Perhaps Extreme Ultra High Super Happy Resolution.

McPhat will shortly begin offering payware for those who are willing to part with some cash for something beyond normal definition. The Captain Sim 757 will probably be the only 757 that will get the McPhat UHDT touch, due to an exclusive deal. The Super 80 had better enjoy its moment at the top of the texture heap, because the Captain’s 757 will have 283 pixels per meter. Payware will run 14.90 Euros for a ten-pack of UHDT; 9.90 Euros for a 15-pack of Normal Definition. But Terrence promises that every UHDT line will see a one or two freebies.

Draw you own conclusions as to McPhat’s perceived value to developers: Captain Sim signed an exclusive contract for 757s, so whatever merit the competition brings to the table, it will not include McPhat artwork. But while Captain Sim’s new 767 will also be getting the McPhat touch, so too will the LDS 767, and -- it’s official -- the PMDG MD-11. If you want to know when, I recommend going to the McPhat website and start asking. (Not really.)

The Studio

Mcphat Studios Liveries

It all started with Terrence drawing airplanes as a kid. Well, no. I drew airplanes as a kid; so did every boy. For some reason Terrence stuck with it, and also went on to become a pilot. It really started with some freeware CLS A330s just two years ago. McPhat shopped their portfolio to Wilco and wound up doing 76 liveries for their E-jet.

Their next project was the Coolsky Super 80 Pro. They eventually adapted their work for the Classic, producing about 50 freeware liveries altogether. Now that McPhat was becoming a force to be reckoned with, Ariane approached them with a deal to do liveries for their Next Gen 737s. A lot of liveries.

FeelThere (note the absence of “Wilco” at this point) has not made much of a secret about their upcoming new ERJ (they posted a picture of it on their support website as a teaser) so it is perhaps not too big of a blab to say you can expect McPhat involvement with that project.

Mcphat Studios Downloads

Along the way, McPhat has learned a lot of tricks. Some developers give them more detail to work with than others. If the entire fuselage is crammed onto one 1024 tile, it doesn’t take a graphics whiz to realize that it is going to have less workable detail than a smaller airplane spread across four 1024 tiles, like Captain Sim‘s stock 757.

At first, McPhat used developers’ standard paint kits. Now, they build their own, which means months of work before they can even start a paint. Back when low-res kits reduced details to something resembling the slurry in the bottom of your cereal bowl, they were not that important. But UHDT is crisply merciless. Before a McPhat airplane can say “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille,” artists have spent months poring over pictures at Airliners.net, getting every decal and rivet just right, building their own kit, and only then painting the thing.

Detail has exceeded the capacity of one person to do everything and still keep the production line rolling. For instance, on the Captain Sim 757 Ultra High Definition project, Snorri Snorasson is working on the specular for the Pratt and Whitney engines. Stefan Lodewijckx did the diffuse on those same engines.

Meanwhile Nicolas Nastri is doing the diffuse on the fuselage, while Dale Reitz is handling the diffuse for the RB211 engines. And when the fuselage is done, remember who does the bump maps, just the bumps ma‘am: Terrence. Along the way and before it goes out the door, Leen de Jager is constantly checking work against the real thing as Quality Control.

McPhat invented a new standard to go with their techniques. 100-199 pixels per meter is High Definition. (Most of what you see from developers does not approach anywhere near this.) 200 and up is Ultra High Definition.

While this means better-looking airplanes, it does impact freeware production. Since they are developing custom kits to get the detail people expect, they simply cannot keep up with the level of freeware releases they had when they were using the developers’ stock kits.

“Up until now,” Terrence explains, “we did fifty-fifty: fifty percent freeware and fifty percent payware. It is a mixed feeling I have about this. Especially with HDT and UHDT, we’re looking at months and months of development on a kit. It is already not doable anymore to make freeware stuff without going bust. Something has to pay the bills, and my people…. I could release a [CS767] livery tomorrow if I wanted, and perhaps even one every two days for the next month if I dispatched my entire team to the 767. But that also means we have to use their kit. And that is something we don’t do anymore, with all due respect to Captain Sim and the work they did on the stock kit.”

This doesn’t mean there won’t be the occasional exception. McPhat’s Dave Sweetman has already released a Delta paint for the Captain Sim 767.

Right now team McPhat is scattered across the globe. Terrence directs everything from Amsterdam.

The Website

The name McPhat has to do with a hat, the same one featured in their logo. If you’re really curious about the sordid details (“she wasn‘t the shiniest penny in the roll“), it is one of the many reasons a trip to their website is worthwhile. For all their professional products, McPhat is not exactly corporate in their image. Their website can be surprisingly and refreshingly unguarded. Under “Aspiring painters/TAs, read please,” you can find things like: “If you want to join to learn, so you can leave and start your own Texture Studios: Please, please don’t join. We’ve had enough of those already.”

The public area of the forum is filled with fascinating previews and insights, sometimes laced with McPhattitude. Occasionally, you might even run across something inflammatory posted by another McPhatty before Terrence -- whose role as boss makes him have to play Mr. Responsible, possibly against type -- has a chance to yank it.

They may or may not be a tiny cult of chain-smoking, coffee-guzzling thirty-something geniuses obsessing over airplanes and badly-hidden personal photographs, but let’s just say I would definitely tune in for the “Pimp My Airplane” reality show. At any rate, it is all there on the website so you can judge for yourself.

In short, it looks like an operation run by Dutch artists. (Things got a little wild around Vincent Van Gogh’s place, too.) But at the end of the day, somehow you end up with this:

The Utra High Definition Art

Here are some shots of McPhat payware UHDT liveries for the Super 80.

Closing Remarks

For all I know, some might have read this far with raising their blood pressure. “But what about ME? I can paint better than them!” Maybe so. I mentioned one freeware offering that I happened to be familiar with. I am sure there are others worthy of praise. For all I know, they might even be better than McPhat, although I haven‘t seen it, certainly not on commercial products.

What sets McPhat apart is that they have reached a high level of artistry and technical accomplishment while meeting deadlines on very large commercial projects. Like it or not, they are a recognized economic factor in the payware community, not because they have a clever image or memorable name, but because they do excellent and timely work. I know I will more readily buy a payware airplane if I know I can count on McPhat paints, and I doubt I am the only one.

From time to time you hear people complain that McPhat paints look worse than the real airplanes do. Setting aside whether this should be a surprise when their slogan is “We wear ‘em down, we tear ‘em up… for you to fly,” it is their style. That is the way they like to make airplanes, and how they spend many hours of each day.

With a real airplane, there are a lot of cues to show how hard-working it is: smells, stains, the way a switch feels, a rub here, a scratch there. On a computer screen, however, the artist is limited to a visual representation to get across the idea of hard service. To make up for loss of the other cues, I can accept a certain exaggeration of wear and dirt, if hard service is the reality the artist is attempting to convey.

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Another artist might want to emphasize colorful liveries, or the clean lines of engineers’ math made metal. Still another might want to replicate what he saw at the nearest airport as faithfully as possible.

To take the most recent example, the Flight 1 Coolsky MD Super 80’s virtual cockpit is attractive, functional and easy on frame rates. It gets the job done but does not really immerse me into a well-used flight deck.

That was not its intention, and I would not give up the FPS on this airplane to have it. When I want to luxuriate in rich detail while limping a bit where frame rates are concerned, I have other favorite airplanes for that. So with the MD-80, I appreciate the efforts of McPhat all the more to give me an airplane with character, even if they use a little artistic license to do so.

Actually, if you look at McPhat’s more recent paints, especially the UHDT payware, it looks like they’ve cleaned up their act a bit.

There are few people you can confidently call the best. McPhat is the best commercial painting studio in the flight simming today. They are laps ahead of the competition due to their studio system, experience and talent.