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'.

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....

As we are slowly easing into the last month of Q1 of 2011, I think it is safe to relax, sit down and look back at what was a hectic, but also a successful 2010.

In our second full year of operation as a pay-ware outfit (we started halfway 2008 with the first E-Jet), we released as many as thirteen World Airliners for the PMDG MD-11, the Captain Sim 757 and the FeelThere E-Jets v2. One would say quality would suffer from the sheer quantity, but our first AVSIM Gold Star award (for the E-Jets v2), which we received in November has proven otherwise. We worked hard, shifted from Normal Definition to primarily High And Ultra High Definition repaints, brought in some new talented people, while some of the main stayers upped their ante and had fun in the process.

That was 2010 in a nutshell. Time to look forward at what 2011 has in store for us.

As a design studio specialized in exterior textures we have worked for and with 'the big boys', (the) PMDG (MD-11) being the latest in the list of developers that already consisted of Wilco, FeelThere, Level-D, Flight1, Captain Sim and Coolsky.

Now, if you ask me (and for the sake of virtually having a conversation, I'll just pretend you are indeed asking me) ; the only one missing from the list, the cherry on the pie, the cream of the crop, is the PMDG 737NGX. As talks with Robert -from PMDG- progress it is just a matter of time, before we've achieved the (highest?) goal we set for ourselves when we first started doing freeware repaints as a group back in 2007 : adding a flagship PMDG product to our portfolio.

With the vast majority of operators and liveries of the 737 it is a project that will keep us occupied for the most part of 2011 (and perhaps even into 2012). But if wheeling in the NGX was 'The Goal', the highest achievable, we set for ourselves, what's next? Does it end? Retire and spend our days on our yacht (we don't have a yacht), hop on our private jet (nope, no jet either) and relax by the pool of our beach house (wait, no beach house?) in the Maldives?

H to the No, it is time to move on and broaden our horizon, something we have been doing behind the scenes for the past couple of months as we were hired by Flight1 to do all the artwork for the Coolsky DC-9. This means we are responsible for not only the exterior (HD) textures, but also the interior, but most noticeably ; the 3D model, both exterior, virtual cockpit and virtual cabin. Being 'eye-candy enthusiasts from the EGA (some even CGA) era' we set the bar high and in my next entry I will let you guys get a taste some of the stuff we've been doing.

For now, back to work on the PMDG MD-11 World Airliners 5 and the first couple of Level-D 767 World Airliners.  Duty calls..