I’ve been working on something new over at Hangar Addons for a while now, and it has come a long way since I first started building it.
It’s called Livery Studio, and the goal is to make creating aircraft liveries for MSFS 2024 easier and more accessible while still providing enough tools to create some pretty detailed designs.
Everything runs through your browser, and Livery Studio handles much more than simply painting an aircraft.
You can add text, registration numbers, images, shapes, gradients and stripes, along with painting and drawing directly on the aircraft. Painting tools include brushes, pencils, erasing, trace fill and area filling using the aircraft’s 2D wireframes.
There is also a full layer system. You can name, duplicate, group, reorder and hide layers, along with undo/redo and a complete history of your changes.
Text can use different fonts, sizes, weights and rotation, and you can even upload your own custom fonts. Colors you’ve used are tracked for quick selection, aircraft regions can be shown or hidden, and there are quite a few other tools that have been added as the studio has grown.
You can also save your work as a template for other people to use as a starting point for their own liveries.
Bring Your Own Aircraft
You’re not limited to the aircraft that I’ve added to Livery Studio.
If the aircraft you want isn’t currently supported, you can upload your own aircraft model and use it to create your livery. Compress the textures, .gLTF file or .blend file into a zip archive and upload. The system will do the rest to ingest it into the studio.
From Design to MSFS 2024
One of the biggest things I wanted to accomplish was removing as much of the technical work as possible.
When you’re finished designing your livery, Livery Studio takes care of exporting and packaging it for MSFS 2024 for you. Support for MSFS 2020 and X-Plane is coming soon.
You don’t have to manually build the package yourself just to get what you created into the simulator.
Once it’s ready, you can either:
-
Download the completed MSFS 2024 package and install/use it yourself.
-
Release it directly on Hangar Addons for the community to download.
So you can essentially go from an idea, to designing the aircraft, to a packaged MSFS 2024 livery, to releasing it to the community without leaving Hangar Addons.
I Put It to the Test
I’ve been using the Studio myself to make sure it can actually create a finished livery rather than just testing individual tools.
One of the results is this Southwest Boeing 737 MAX 8, which I created using Livery Studio, packaged and then released on Hangar Addons:
There’s still plenty I want to add and improve, and I’m sure there are bugs I’ll find along the way, but it’s working pretty well now and I’m really happy with how far it has come.
My bigger goal is to lower the barrier to creating liveries. Someone shouldn’t necessarily need to understand aircraft texture layouts, package structures and all the other technical details just because they want to design something cool and fly it in the simulator.
If you already create liveries, or you’ve always wanted to make one but the process seemed intimidating, I’d really appreciate you giving Livery Studio a try.
I’d also love feedback on the workflow, tools, aircraft support and anything else you’d like to see added.
Give it a try:
And if you make something with it, I’d love to see what you come up with!