2012 has seen a rocky start for us here at McPhat Studios.

And by 'rocky' I mean 'Earthquake-buildings-collapsing-all-around-you-rocky'.

The past couple of weeks we've been busy -mostly- with troubleshooting one after the other unstable DC-9 Virtual Cockpit compile. Where one problem got resolved, another one surfaced. I spend most of yesterday -my usually relaxing Sunday- on troubleshooting faulty gauges, trying, testing, tinkering, discussing an issue that was not there a day before. Frustrating.

And here I thought we'd be doing some artsy stuff, creating 3D cubes and tubes, smooth them out, slap some textures on them and be done with it.

While we're making great progress and are already able to show some of the awesome results we're getting, developing the graphical side of the Coolsky DC-9 has proven to be much more than a challenge. Maybe it was wishful (or should I say ignorant) thinking that it would be a smooth ride, who knows? All I can say is that I spend most of my time deep frying my brains, trying to figure out solutions and taking mandatory time outs once in a while to keep myself from throwing in the towel.

And by 'throwing in the towel', I really mean "Getting shot between the eyes for the 11th time in a row by a 12 year old kid named Noobkiller playing BF3-Rage-Quitting"..

One of the things I've been mostly proud of in our short puny existence is not just the graphics we've been able to pull out a 5 -going on 6- year old platform, but also the fact that we never missed a deadline. Ever.

If it meant working in the weekend and nights, we did it. If it meant running on a 4 hour sleep cycle for weeks, we did it. If it meant going round the clock, not sleeping at all. We did it, or at least I did.

And for some reason I always thought having your own business equalled working less hours...

We're running late. Late late, passed deadline late and although the end is near and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, I bet we'll see one or two bumps in the road in the coming days/weeks...

In the early days, when McPhat was still a 'young boy', I always figured that making a good (looking) product would be enough. We'd reach enough people, sell enough packs and take the Flight Simulation world by storm all while doing what we love doing best: Making beautiful graphics..

Boy, was I wrong.

In the past couple of years the harsh reality hit me. You can make the most beautiful product in the world, but if nobody knows you and knows where to find you, you're left out stranded. It'll be just you, your good intentions, great ideas and your product..

So much for 'If you build it, they will come' right? Thanks for nothing, Mister Costner...

Fast forward to today, I can honestly say : 'Long gone are the days that I spend my time solely on what I do best and nowadays my hours are divided between running McPhat Studios and making an occasional texture here and there, when.. IF I find the time'. Something I wish was the other way around. With 'running McPhat Studios', I really mean keeping taps and track on our Facebook page, our Twitter account, our YouTube channel, blog, newsletter and just today yet another, new social media outlet hit the mainstreams:

Google+ brought in the brand pages!

For those of you not familiar with Google+, it's basically Facebook, but less clouded with a million features that change every fortnight. It also gives the opportunity to share with 'circles', which is basically a hipster name for self made groups of people who you can then choose to share only relevant information with. Great if you want to reminisce that night of mayhem with your buddies, but don't want your Chief Pilot (or your mom) to get the wrong impression of you (if she hasn't already). 

While I was eager to try out Google+ privately, I am not jumping up and down in sheer happiness about the implementation of the new brand pages. Like our Facebook fan page, it gives us a way to communicate with our users and customers, without them having to come to our website, check out our forum, our community page or our blog (do come back though), saving them time...

More convenient for you, the user, but more work for me, the guy who has to update all those pages, mostly on a daily basis.

Do me a favour though okay?

Join our Google+ brandpage, so me updating it, at least has some sort of a purpose...

CLICK TO JOIN!

For those of you that may remember, back in the days, our slogan used to be 'We tear 'em up, we wear 'em down, for you to fly..'. Dirt, grime, weather, wear and tear was what we 'did'. In a clean aircraft dominated repaint world, we had to differentiate ourselves, right of the bat. So we did exactly that.

When we made the transition to and started focusing on (Ultra) High Definition Textures, not too long after, we found a new way to do things 'a little different' than the rest. For some reason we ditched the wear and tear and focused on clean(er), but High Definition Textures instead.

Gone were the days that I -tediously- spend hours scratching off paint, dual brushing myself through panel lines, grooves and rivets. No more nitpicking ordeals, just straight up, back to the basic 'painting'. When you think of it, in some ways it was a necessity; By going HD, we added hundreds of hours of development time. We went from 50MB Normal Definition paintkits, to 2GB UHDT kits and all those extra bytes really meant extra time, lots of it and we had  compensate, somehow..

Lately -while working on the NGX-  we stumbled upon a 'problem': We couldn't regulate the level of gloss any longer, which meant that we lost a lot of detail from the glossy effect. Even on UHDT it meant our textures were coming out somewhat bland. Flavourless one could even say..

So what now?

The answer was easy. Where my Intuos tablet was getting used to being a place holder for my Wacom mouse, it was time to take out the trusty 1024 pressure point airbush grip pen again. It was time to go back to our roots: Roughing up paint, piercing through rivets, adding dirt, dust, oil, dents, scratches and grease. One pixel at a time.

Within minutes I found myself setting (or is it messing?) up pressure points, finding the sweet spot on the angle slider, combining tip shapes, dual colour and brushes, textures, spacings and all that other good stuff that puts the Artist in Texture Artist. Like nothing ever changed, the minutes became hours, the hours became days and the past couple of weeks I was back to doing what I like doing best: Textures in the purest form of the word.

In some ways, the NGX came right in time to get (re-)acquainted with our old 'motto'. As our 3D modelers are setting up Coolsky to go 'Beta' on the DC9, I am ready to rough this old 'gal' up like it's going out of style (which she really is, going out of style). I get to chip of paint from the corners of bolts and screws, scratch it of from panels or add it a little too thick where the tech guy that did some maintenance was a little to enthusiastic with his bucket of blue paint. I get to play with adding 'texture' to the 'Initial Cruise Segment EPR Card', making sure it reflects differently than the surrounding panel area it is glued on, making sure the paper itself has a different texture than the metal. All hand painted so we can match the diffuse, specular and bump map seamlessly.  In the past year, I may have glanced at the DC-9 project as big hurdle once in a while, but now I can (happily) say:

'She's right up my alley'.

The first couple of years it was just me and the other texture guys. We did our thing, opened Photoshop every day and bragged about who had the better skills. Nicknames were being thrown at each other (guess who Captain Raster-Ize and Captain Merge-A-Lot are) but they usually meant no harm. If anything, they brightened up the day. We were the Masters of the Universe, ruling the world with smart objects, masks, dual brushes and layer styles. Could there be a better profession than being a Texture Artist? Was there a better program than Photoshop? What was more fun than brushing your way through the day?

Nothing. Right?

Wrong.

The time ; A year ago. The gate to our Photoshopped Fortress opened and in came the first couple 3D Artists. A new breed of people entered our domain. For the first time I looked at my work, often tediously detailed and crafted with much love and care and compared it to theirs and for the first time I saw the limitations of working on a flat, 2D canvas creating flat, 2D artistry. Did theirs look cooler? Did that extra dimension really added 'that extra dimension?' I knew the answer, but choose not to think about it. In the mean time, Nicolas -my fellow Lead Designer and Texture Artist in crime- made the switch and gradually started subbing Adobe's Photoshop for Autodesk's 3dsMax and is now in charge of the 3D Artists, where as I 'still get to play' with the Texture Artists.

All went well, the feeling gradually disappeared. In the end, it was 'us' -Texture Artists- pimping up 'their' 3D models. They needed us. They needed us badly. Or at least, that's what I said to myself. I was comfortably back on my Photoshop high horse, looking down, raining havoc in the form of beautiful textures on the footsoldiers I called 3D Artists. We'd Gaussian Blurr the hell out of Chuck Norris and still had time to rasterize The Rock in the mean time. 3D had nothing on Textures. Nothing. Textures still were the highest form of creativity.

Right?

Wrong.

The time ; Not too long ago.  We decided to bring back some life into our YouTube channel, which sole existence seemed to revolve around an oh so badly manufactured three year old Windows Movie Maker made, with an even worse aspect ratio E-Jet clip. We hired an After Effects wizard to do our intro and outro and at the same time, in came two new guys. Video Editors. The discussion -fumed by our two already inhouse Vegas experts Snorri and Juan- lighted up and my Photoshop stronghold started to tremble again.

I opened up Vegas to check out what the fuzz was all about and soon got 'the (motion) picture'. Things were moving a long a time line,  no longer was the canvas a stationary, flat and 2d plane. A story could be told. Music and sound could be mixed, effects, transitions, colour correction, layers, blends. All that good stuff.

It was like Photoshop... but... better...

I sometimes envy the guys that get to work with 3 dimension, I envy the guys that get to work with moving footage, sound and music, but in the end it are our our bump and specular maps that you see shine, pop and glow on the models in our videos.

Right?

I can still remember the days when me and my pc (including screen, joystick, speakers and what not) would hop on the train for a 3 day, long weekend Flight Sim fest at my buddy Kevin's house. Three hours in the train, packed with my 'nerdgear' (I tried, there's no sexier name for it), ready for some serious on-line flightsimmin' and with 'serious', I mean : SE-RI-OUS. As in all-through-the-night-long-haul-kinda-serious. The real deal. At least, you know, virtually...

We would sleep for a few of hours a night -on the couch- just a couple of feet from our roaring pc's, cause you knew that when that dreaded 'beep' sounded it was 'IVAO' and we best be ready to answer... in a non-sleepy voice. The days were long. Planning the flight, staring at my screen for hours at a time with my headset on, landing and whilst the engines were spooling down, thinkering were to head on next.

After each and every landing, I would 'hit replay', usually in slow motion (who doesn't like slow motion), 10, 15 times. We always had a blast, cause flightsimmin' was IT. I am not afraid to say I sometimes left my pc on, while sleeping cause there was something soothing about hearing perfectly good running jet engines in the background.

Those days are over though. One could even say : Long gone. Girlfriends (there's something really confronting about a woman's disapproving and loathing look when she looks at you 'talking to another geek at the other end of the world, 'asking for permission to 'taxi') , flying for realsies and the X-box basically killed the Flight Simulator 'game'. But the true reason for not flying is none of the above. 

It's 'McPhat'.

I don't have time to fondle around with FMC's, flying for hours, enjoying REX generated clouds, or any of ORBX' sceneries while on final. I still fire up FSX, hell, I would even say at least 20 times a day, but only to make screen-shots, check bump & specular effects and  to align textures. Flight Simulator has become all work. No play.

That all changed last Thursday. Like every sane person in the FS community, I was eagerly waiting for PMDG to release their NGX. I wouldn't go as far to say that my index finger and F5 button were best buddies, but I checked. I checked plenty. Robert told me to buy nothing, to wait for him to supply us with the model and paintkit, but on friday, Nicolas and I  pulled our creditcards : four NGX licenses. One for each participating NGX project member, but most importantly : One for me.

The past couple of days I found myself inside FSX. Not to check the DC-9 VC textures, or to make last minute changes to the PMDG 747 HDT fuselage, but to take the NGX for a spin. Landing, replaying, flying circuits (or like you Yanks like to call it : Traffic Patterns), checking out the great modelling from all sides and angles, listening to the CFM's ref up and down. As a long time PMDG customer owning all but the J41, including the FS9 models it was like being 'home' again.

Firing FSX, just for the fun, joy and thrill of it...

The last time I did that, was right before I started McPhat Studios, three and a half years ago....

We ended 2010 with a bang, started 2011 with a (although slightly smaller) bang and now -halfway on our way to 2012- there's still 'banging', but this time mostly in the form of hands, shaped like fists on my door and on my desk...

The year has been hectic. Although we wheeled in some new talent, 'old' talent also left. People whom had been with us for years left and the toll it has taken is apparent. Yes, some of the new guys (and girl) are just as talented or perhaps even more, but you take a hit when people leave, who know the company inside and out and we took the hit alright. Hard. Right on the nose. Twice.

Where our frontliners (Texture Artists and a handful of painters) used to solely focus on the core of our business (that would be Textures), supported by staff who lead the company, most of them now have dual roles. From basic overhead, to project management, from creating Youtube content to research and from Marketing to Support. Because this change happened gradually, over time and because it was a necessity (as is the mother of invention) opposed to being planned, along come the 'challenges' of all us getting comfortable within our new roles.

The last couple of weeks I've seen my attention shift from the frontline to -almost on a daily basis- talks, meetings and discussions with my team. Some lengthy, some exhaustingly lengthy, some ridiculously lengthy.

And if that isn't enough, with the DC-9 3D development phase nearing its end and with four 3D Artists on the team (and another 2 joining soon), guess what has to happen? Indeed :  talking and discussing our next steps with the ones on board, and creating, shaping, explaining and enrolling with the ones who are about to join.

All and all, there's been a lot of talking lately and although it apparently is part of my job description, I hope I can soon get back to 'work'...

If you ever read the AVSIM feature on McPhat Studios (if not, click and read it) and especially the part where we're called 'Dutch Masters', you would think our team consists only of 'Dutchies'. Where it started out as solely a Dutch outfit , this soon changed and with a couple of Argies (people from Argentina, yes I make up words on the fly), a Canadian, an Icelander, Brit and a couple of Yanks you could even say we've been overrun by foreigners. Masters we still are, but Dutch, you could hardly call us and the next team member I'm introducing doesn't quite balance that out in favour of us cheese eating, wooden shoes wearing, electronic music loving inhabitants of the world :

Luke van de Rest

The name may imply Luke's from 'The motherland', but he's not. He's from the one place on earth where women have sexy accents and people are always enjoying themselves : Australia. Don't ask me where it is exactly I got that mental picture of Australia, but it works out for me like that. It's basically England, but sans all the sour looking people, the hooligans and with a whole lot more sun. Or so I imagine.

Luke's role is to mould, create and shape the exterior 3D model of the DC-9 (dash 30). Initially supplied with the Super 80 source files, he soon decided to start from the ground up, getting rid of all the work previously done. The Super 80 may look good and has awesome performance, it also was a development once made for Flight Simulator 9. Besides, 3D Artists don't like working of somebody else's work/work flow. Or so I've been told.

The main reason for starting with a clean sheet, was that our assignment was to make the model not only up to today's standards, but it also has to last for at least a couple more years. Like the guys and girls at Microsoft proved ; Sometimes it's best to leave the old cornerstones for what they are and build from a fresh and new foundation.

With that being said, we gave Luke a pile of work that kept him occupied for a good few months. Me, asking for renders every other day (who doesn't love renders right?), didn't really speed things up, but it gave us a fair idea of the quality of his work :  He made the model look sweet like apple pie and with (how he likes to call it) the usual McPhat One-Two (as in textures), you guys are in for great looking exterior graphics.

As a closing remark, I'd like you to check out the first ever render of what you may expect not here in this blog, or on our website even, but at our freshly created Facebook fan page.

Don't forget to hit that 'I like' button guys!

A couple of months ago -while doing my usual weekly rounds, checking out forums, portals and websites from our colleagues and fellow developers- I landed on the Captain Sim forums. Browsing the repaint section to see what was new, my attention was soon drawn to some pretty skilful texture work.

Those of you familiar with Captain Sim's artwork know that you don't have to be no Van Gogh to shell out a top notch repaint, using their paintkits. The detail and quality their stock paintkit delivers is truly that good. Yet, here I saw someone take the time and effort to alter and customize the already solid textures, tweaking specular and bump maps and even taking it to the next level, by going High Definition.

There was only one thing I could do : Wheel her in and do it fast, before somebody else would.

Beccause I've been a Captain Sim customer, since the first Block for the 757 came out for Flight Simulator 9, many, many years ago I am also a forum member. Being an absolute mess when it comes to backing up my installers, I bought the 757 at least three times, (and some of their other products) therefor having multiple accounts. Being somewhat inconsistent  with the whole password thing (and because I am -at times- a lazy sob), I gave up logging in after 3 tries and asked our 'Captain Sim man' Dave Sweetman to do it for me and recruit her. Her name?

Sara Louise Coupon.

In charge of slapping some colour on Jamal's 3D Virtual Cockpit, Sara's has been working mainly on the 3D gauges for the Coolsky DC-9. All 40 or so, in all their different states (powered up, down, flags showing etc). She''s the kind of Texture Artist that vectors all her work, jumbo size, just because she can and if you think she makes just one gauge per instrument, guess again. She tracked down all three Altimeters used on the -30 and made them all. Again, just because she can (and because she hopes Espen will throw weeks of work overboard picking the best looking and not the one he already did the work for). All screenshots are scaled down (50%) : Type 1, Type 2, Type 3.

During the years I have learned a great deal from the Texture Artists we have on staff. Everybody has their own ways, skills and even though I've been Photoshoppin' for over 12 years, once in a while I scratch the back of my head when I see the resourcefulness displayed and techniques utilized by some of these guys. Six out of ten times though, I don't have to open the source files to see what it is they did. The other 40% I open and is usually in the 'Ah yes, of course'-category.

Not Sara though, for weeks I've been eyeballing her gauge textures, pondering my head, trying to figure out what it is exactly she did. Today she send me one of her PSD's, and where I usually go 'Aaaaha', followed by an 'Ofcourse', all I could now think was 'Huh'?, followed by a 'I didn't know you could do that with Photoshop', immediately followed by 'So THAT's what's that is for'...

As she works on the gauges, I work on the remainder of the VC. Interior and Exterior textures are two completely different skill sets and although I am fairly confident I got a good thing going on when it comes to l'outside, I can also say Sara has found her niche and at least for now, is untouchable.

(Next up, Luke van de Rest, 3D Artist, exterior modeller)

Go outside and ask a random person what Photoshop is and in most cases people will know. You ask them if they ever heard of 3DsMax and they'll probably gaze at you in awe, then uttering something like : '3Dswhatnow?'.. 

In the past couple of years, we discovered that finding talented, skilled Texture Artists is one thing. With applications pouring in on a weekly basis, we've literally seen dozens of them. In the end, only a handful remained, cause the definition of 'talented' seemed to be a 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder'-thing.

Finding 3D Artists is what one would call 'a whole different ballgame' though.  First of all, there's not that many of 'em. As Lead Designer, with a slight fetish for detail, I thoroughly enjoy textures, and although we texture guys sometimes (okay, all the time) think we're the centre of the creative universe, we only create on a two dimensional, flat plane. True creation is when you can add that third dimension.

So, I tried my hands on 3D'ing more than once and right away came to the conclusion why there aren't that many 3D Artists floatin' around as there are Texture Artists : Mastering (cause that is what we're talking about) 3DsMax is painstakingly difficult, awesomely time consuming and has a seriously steep learning curve.

Because we could count the applications for a 3D Artist position on one hand (alright, we had only 1 in 3 years), we had to go out and find them ourselves. The first one we picked up was... : 

Jamal Ingram.

Responsible for the Virtual Cockpit, Jamal's been with us and working on said part of the project for almost 8 months now. As he was at that time the only 3D Artist we had on staff, he was more or less on his own. No backup, no watercooler 3D talk, just him amongst 10 odd Texture Artists. Jamal is what we call a behind the scenes-no-nonsense-kinda guy. You won't see him on the public forums, you won't see flashy Work In Progress renders. Raw 3D, focused on the end product only. Being designers, (read as : Showboat Flash Ponies) we had to get used to his style. Alot. Why work hard, focusing on finishing, when you can stop and show off right?

Having worked on military projects in the past (even seen his work published by Flight1) and with a love for military jets, we gave him the absolute unfamiliar : A tube. An old tube. One that has seen more modifications, over the past 40 years than M.J. (may his soul rest in peace). It was a difficult task, getting to know commercial airliner instruments, what they do, how they should be animated, how they behave : 'Does that switch tumble?', 'Does it rotate?' 'Can you push it in?' or 'Can you perhaps push it in AND rotate?'

He's proven to be a skilful 3D artist, working on the VC for months at a time, silently, by himself but when the time came for Coolsky to Quality Control the work ingame for the first time, only a few minor changes came up. I guess it pays of being focused on the job.  

It is safe to say, we are nearing the end of building the 'virtual pit', texturing has slowly begun and teamed up with him, responsible for the VC textures is another little gem, Sara Louise Capon. But that's a different story (or should I say blog), for a next time.

It was the year 1977.  A little boy named Terrence was born. His parents probably had big plans for him, but at the age of three years -in his infinite wisdom-, he already made his own strategic plan to infinite happiness. He had no dreams about being a fire fighter, or a police officer, or a doctor. No sir, he wanted to fly planes. He wanted to be a pilot.

Because the authorities seemed to have a problem with toddlers flying planes AND because he had to give his parents some time to shell out the 100 grand to pay for his training, he started drawing planes at a young age. Sometimes on paper with crayons, but like some people play air guitar, he also drew planes, in the air air. People would catch him 'drawing' planes with his feet, on the ground while waiting in line at the grocery store, or in the sand on the beach. He often caught himself doing the same, but then with his thumbs on the inside of his index finger...

We fast forward to 2011. After a long (and expensive) endeavour the dream has come true. Flying planes, high in the sky, looking down on the world I live in, is the best job a person could have. Although one would think flying equals an unmatched sense of freedom, there are thousands of ICAO, FAA, JAA, local and company rules, laws, regulations and procedures that prohibit you from being creative high up in the sky. It's a good thing though, things would get real messy, really fast if not.

So whenever I'm back on the ground -safe and sound- I still find myself drawing planes. The paper, I replaced with a Wacom tablet, the crayons with a 1,024 levels sensitive pressured pen.

If you ever wondered why we choose to do planes, here's your reason. I don't like drawing in general. I like planes...