MSFS Livery Toolkit: create, paint, and compile MSFS liveries with no config files and no command line

MSFS Livery Toolkit

Create Microsoft Flight Simulator liveries - create, paint, and compile sim-ready assets from one free Windows app.

Download the latest release View on GitHub

Code Generated by AI Design Human Directed

The toolkit is free and always will be. I design it, test every change in the simulator and decide what gets built. An AI subscription helps me write the code, and I pay for it myself, £18 every month. If it saves you time, a coffee helps fund the development of new features.

☕ Buy me a coffee

Key features

✓One Workspace: your project as a tree, the aircraft in 3D beside it, and the settings for whatever you select, all on one page. If you know Blender, it will feel familiar.
✓Texture painting: paint your textures inside the toolkit, in 2D or straight onto the aircraft in 3D. Layers, masks and groups, stripes drawn as curves, stickers, fill, clone stamp and selections, with your original image kept safe.
✓Automated livery setup: scans your installed aircraft, detects the profile, and builds a correct, sim-ready package structure for you.
✓One-click texture extraction: decodes compiled KTX2/DDS art back into editable PNGs, even specially compressed files other tools can't open.
✓Instant UV wireframes: generates a paint-alignment UV map straight from the aircraft's own 3D model.
✓Ready-made 2D paintkits: builds a layered Photoshop file from any aircraft's own textures and UV layout, even when no paintkit was ever published.
✓3D paintkits (experimental): exports the parts you are painting as a 3D model you can open in Blender or other 3D painting software, so you can see your artwork on the aircraft instead of working it out from a flat UV map.
✓Built-in 3D view: see your paint on the aircraft as you work, without compiling or launching the sim, and see exactly which part of the airframe each texture covers before you start. Click a part to add its texture, and see anything that would turn pink before it does.
✓Stock aircraft with the sim closed: once you have loaded a stock or Marketplace aircraft, the toolkit can keep its own copy of the 3D model, so you can keep working on it, and build its mesh liveries, without the simulator running.
✓Mesh liveries: add your own 3D model to a livery, such as stripes or lettering as real geometry, and have it ride the aircraft's doors and control surfaces. MSFS 2024 aircraft.
✓Fine control over modular aircraft: choose exactly which of an aircraft's configurations each livery appears under, and change it later without deleting your artwork.
✓Rendered thumbnails (experimental): writes every thumbnail image MSFS expects, at the right size and with the right transparency, drawn from your own paint. No trip into Developer Mode and the Aircraft Capture Tool.
✓Seamless compile & package: builds a sim-ready package with the official MSFS SDK, no command line.

Explore the docs

Getting startedFirst-run setup and creating your first project. The WorkspaceThe project tree, the 3D viewport, and the keys that drive them. Creating liveriesChoosing textures, editing compile flags, and linking your artwork. Texture paintingPainting your textures in 2D and on the aircraft in 3D. Mesh liveriesAdding your own 3D model to a livery. Paintkit BuilderBuilding a layered Photoshop paintkit from any installed aircraft. CompilingBuilding your package and testing it in the sim. ConfigurationSDK paths, aircraft source folders, and settings. Trust & safetyWhat the app does on your machine, and what it never does. AI-assisted developmentHow this toolkit was designed, built, and verified. ChangelogWhat's new in each release, pulled live from GitHub.

What it does

The toolkit takes you through the whole livery pipeline:

  1. Create: pick an installed base aircraft, and the app detects its profile (2020 monolithic, 2024 monolithic, or 2024 modular) and builds out a correct, sim-ready livery package structure.
  2. Work: choose which of the aircraft’s textures to repaint, generate correctly-sized blank canvases or extract the aircraft’s own compiled textures back to editable PNGs, and edit each texture’s compile flags. Paint the textures in the toolkit itself, or in your own program. The aircraft sits in 3D beside your project, showing your artwork as you paint, so you can catch a misplaced decal without compiling first. Add your own 3D model if you want geometry as well as paint. When the paint is done, the app renders your livery’s thumbnail images for you, so the sim’s own capture tool is one less thing to learn.
  3. Compile: turn your PNG artwork into sim-ready DDS/KTX2 using the official MSFS SDK, build a full package ready to use in your community folder, then regenerate layout.json and launch the sim to test.

A project is a single deployable package that can hold one or many liveries sharing the same base aircraft.

Requirements

  • Windows 11 (64-bit)
  • Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and/or 2024
  • The matching MSFS SDK (installed through the sim’s Dev Mode)

(MSFSLayoutGenerator, which the app also needs, is now bundled - nothing to download.)

How it was built

  • Hobbyist Built: I am a livery painter, not a professional software developer. This toolkit was built to automate the tedious backend chores of package layout so we can all spend more time creating.
  • AI-Assisted Architecture: Because I lacked the coding experience to build a full Windows application from scratch, I used a personally funded Claude Pro subscription to bridge the gap.
  • Human-Driven Logic: This is not unthinking “AI slop.” Every workflow step, simulator profile rule, and configuration logic choice was explicitly designed by me based on real flight-sim SDK behavior and manually verified at every milestone. Countless man-hours have gone into this project, even with Claude writing the code.
  • Always Free: Leveraging these modern tools made it possible to build a polished desktop utility in my spare time and release it completely free to the flight simulation community. I will never monetize this app (besides entirely optional donations) or lock functionality behind a paid-for tier.

Support the project

I’ve funded this project out of my own pocket with a Claude Pro subscription. I will never monetize this application or offer a premium tier - I’m developing it as a perpetually free tool for the livery painting community. However, to keep enhancing and developing it, I would be grateful for any donations via my Buy Me a Coffee page.

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