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....

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)

My better half always rubs my nose in 'The Fact' that women are better at multi-tasking than men, and although I usually agree with her (trust me, THE ingredient for a healthy relationship), I have to disagree with her on this. The past couple of weeks have been crazy at the McPhat Studios offices. Working on (or Alt-Tabbing as I call it) between 3 three Texture- and 2 full 3D and artwork projects simultaneously is something we could not have managed a couple of years ago.

Although the 'main podium' may seem calm and serene from an audience perspective, backstage is one big dynamic, crazy mess.

Like the Boeing assembly line, every single member of the team works on and supplies his or her part of the final product. Dhierin's working on the PMDG 747-X GE's, Tito on the LDS767 RB211's, Frank's pathing the 747 fuselage like a mad man, Snorri's working on the 747 wings and tail, Sara's brushing her way through the DC-9 gauges and main panel, Jamal tries to keep up, mapping the DC-9 VC, Luke is shaping the exterior 3D model, Nicolas crafts a yet to be disclosed twin, Kevin tries to keep the website from not crumbling under the weight of the 25.000 odd monthly visitors, while I'm working on the 767 pay-ware World Airliner and freeware liveries.

Where we used to have a weekly , relaxing Friday afternoon 'how are things going'- meeting, these are now replaced and pushed to late night 23.00 quick and occasional Skype talks due to the hefty workloads. I sometimes catch Frank at home, still online at 2A.M, Snorri pushed it to almost 5AM a couple of days ago and I get a regular 'I'm off to bed, see you tomorrow' at 12AM from Dhierin and Kevin.

If one would look at this as a bad thing or a problem, finding a cause of what or who to blame so a solution can be found, is part of my job as a Lead Designer and after a lot of tinkering I can only point the finger to ourselves.. It's us. We did this ourselves, we're the ones to blame.

Raising our own and subsequently also the entire industry's bar when it comes to aircraft graphics by launching High- and Ultra High Definition Textures is where things quickly 'went south'. The days that we could start and wrap up a repaint in a mere few hours went down the drain when I first talked to Leen (our Quality Controller) about 3 years ago, asking him the question : "Say Leen, what if we blew up those tiles to 4096?" Words I sometimes wish I never uttered in the first place. It was a good thing though, PMDG followed with the J41 (2048), Captain Sim with their 767 (2048), Carenado has a whole line of (brilliantly) 2048 mapped GA planes and we take care of the remainder.

Choosing to go Flight Simulator X only was our second 'mistake'. Not only do we have to redo stock kits from the ground up for the diffuse maps ; Specular and Bump maps have to be HD as well. If that paint chips off on the diffuse map, it better chip off from the spec and bump as well. How else would you make a tail look like this? How else would you 'detach' the wing root joints from an ageing Super 80 so it looks like this and not this, without touching the actual 3D model?

Looking back, as we near our third anniversary as a real, 'tax paying company', I can only say : 'We raised that bar, we took it, threw it up high in the air and yes sometimes when we're at work in the middle of the night, it comes tumbling down on us like a Stuka bomber, but we can only blame ourselves'. Still, I think I speak for the entire team when I say :

It's a 'mistake' I don't regret making..