Paintkit Builder

Many aircraft never ship a paintkit. Without one you are painting blind: no idea where the panel lines fall on the texture sheet, no idea which part of the image is the tail, and nothing underneath to trace.

The Paintkit Builder solves that by building a paintkit from the aircraft itself. It reads the aircraft’s own compiled textures and its 3D model, and gives you two ways to work: a layered Photoshop file you can start painting on straight away, and a 3D model of the parts you are painting that you can open in Blender. You can build either on its own, or both together.

It works on any aircraft you have installed, and it does not need a project. You can point it at an aircraft you are only considering, look at what its textures are like, and decide from there.

You will find it in the navigation pane, just above Settings. It uses the same layout as the Workspace: build options on the left, the aircraft in 3D in the middle, and its materials on the right.

The Paintkit Builder: build options on the left, the aircraft in the middle with the selected materials lit up, and the materials list on the right

What you get

Everything is saved into a folder named after the aircraft, split into a 2D Paintkit folder and a 3D Paintkit folder so the Photoshop files and the model stay apart.

The 2D paintkit

One .psd per texture, with these layers:

Layer	What it is
UV Wireframe	The outline of the model’s UV islands, so you can see exactly where each part of the aircraft lands on the image.
Paintable Areas	A black and white mask of those same islands, grown very slightly, for loading as a selection.
Albedo	The aircraft’s existing paintwork, to paint over or trace.
Ambient Occlusion	Baked shading, taken from the aircraft’s composite texture.
Roughness	How rough or glossy each part of the surface is.
Metalness	How metallic each part of the surface is.
Normal	The surface detail map.

Only the UV Wireframe and Albedo are switched on when the file opens. The rest are included but hidden, so they are there when you want to inspect or sample them without getting in your way.

Two details worth knowing:

The UV Wireframe uses Difference blending, so it stays visible whether the paintwork underneath is light or dark. A plain white wireframe disappears over a white fuselage.
Paintable Areas is a true black and white mask rather than a transparent layer, so you can load it as a selection (Ctrl-click the layer thumbnail in Photoshop) and paint without spilling outside the islands. It is grown by a few pixels on purpose, so paint can run slightly over an island edge without leaving a seam in the sim.

The 3D paintkit

Experimental

A .gltf model containing only the parts of the aircraft that use the textures you picked. Open it in Blender, or any other 3D painting software, to see where your artwork actually lands on the aircraft instead of working it out from a flat UV map.

Each material is named after the paintkit it belongs to, so it is obvious which .psd paints which surface.
The model arrives wearing the aircraft’s current paintwork, so you can see what you are starting from and paint over it.
Parts stay separate. Movable surfaces such as a rudder or an elevator keep their own place in the model tree, so you can rotate one out of the way to reach what is behind it.

You can build the model on its own, without any Photoshop files, if that is all you want.

Parent nodes for mesh liveries

Two options under Build 3D paintkit are for mesh liveries, where you model your own decals in Blender and they must follow the aircraft’s moving parts:

Include parent nodes for merged models adds the aircraft’s moving-part nodes (doors, rudders and so on) to the model, so you can see which parts hang under which node.
Also write parent nodes as a separate file writes just those nodes, for every part of the aircraft and with none of its geometry, as their own file. Build your mesh livery in this file, using the paintkit model as a reference. See Mesh liveries.

What “experimental” means here

On most aircraft the model is accurate. A few small parts can still look out of place, for example a propeller drawn in several animation states at once, or some ground equipment. The main airframe is not affected.

It is worth knowing about before you rely on a small part being exactly where the model puts it.

Using it

1. Choose an aircraft. Click Discover aircraft and pick one from the list. Each entry shows where it was found and whether it is an MSFS 2020 or MSFS 2024 aircraft, so you can tell two installs of the same aircraft apart. Once you have picked one, the list folds away into a card; select Change to pick another.

Stock and Marketplace aircraft need the sim’s Virtual File System running, exactly as elsewhere in the app. See Getting started for how to start it.

2. Choose what to build. If the aircraft has several variants, pick the one you are painting under Aircraft variant first. It is worth doing even if you only want a rough look, because without it the app cannot tell the variants’ parts apart. See When an aircraft cannot be narrowed to one variant.

Then select the materials you want a paintkit for, in the list on the right or by clicking the aircraft. Select all and Clear all sit above the list. See The viewport below.

Under Paintkits to build, choose the outputs. Build 2D paintkit gives you the Photoshop files, and you can choose which layers each one should contain. Build 3D paintkit gives you the model. Either can be used on its own, and your choices are remembered for next time.

3. Choose where to save it, under Save paintkits to subfolder in, and click Build paintkits at the top. A folder named after the aircraft is created inside the location you pick, so building for several aircraft keeps them separate, and inside it you get a 2D Paintkit folder, a 3D Paintkit folder, or both, depending on what you asked for. Overwrite existing replaces paintkits you built before instead of skipping them. You can set a default location in Settings.

The viewport

Texture names like A330_FUSE_1002_ALBD tell you very little about which part of the aircraft they actually cover, so the aircraft is in the middle of the page. Select Load aircraft model if it is not loaded already; Settings can load it for you.

The Paintkit Builder's viewport with Colour by material on, each selected material in its own colour

It starts with the airframe faintly visible and nothing selected. As you select materials, the parts they cover light up, so the aircraft builds itself as you work down the list. Click a part on the aircraft to select or clear its material, instead of working down the list.

Aircraft visibility, on the toolbar, controls what the parts you have not selected look like: a faint ghost, solid grey, or hidden entirely.
Colour by material, in Display options, gives every selected material its own colour, which is the quickest way to see where one ends and the next begins.
Lighting, also in Display options, offers three setups. Studio is a good general choice, Even is nearly shadowless for reading fine detail, and Dramatic uses a single hard light for judging shape and panel lines.

It moves the same way as the Workspace’s viewport. See Mouse and keyboard.

There are no textures here, because at this point in the workflow they have not been extracted yet: the view is about coverage, not paint. To see actual artwork on the aircraft, use the Workspace.

When an aircraft cannot be narrowed to one variant

Modular aircraft ship as a set of parts, and the app works out which parts belong to the variant you picked so the preview and the model show that variant and nothing else.

Sometimes it cannot. There may be no variants to choose from, or you may have chosen “applies to all variants” deliberately. When that happens, what you are looking at is every variant’s parts at once, and because the app also cannot work out where each part belongs, some of them sit where they were designed rather than where they go on the finished aircraft. You may see two fuselages, four wings, or engines in the wrong place.

The catch is that this still looks like a perfectly normal aeroplane, so the viewport says so in a banner across the top whenever it applies.

If you build a 3D Paintkit in this state, the model has the same problem, and unlike the preview it is saved to disk where you might open it days later. So the warning also appears in the build result and in the 3D-Paintkit-report.txt file written beside the model.

If the aircraft does offer variants, picking one clears all of this up. Where you can pick one, the app holds the preview back until you do rather than showing you something misleading.

None of this affects the 2D paintkits, or which textures cover which parts. Coverage is still correct; it is the arrangement of the parts on screen that is not.

Which textures should I paint?

Larger aircraft can list a lot of materials, and most of them are not what you are looking for. Clicking the aircraft is the quickest way to find the right one, and two things in the materials list help too:

The copy count badge (for example x7). This is how many places that texture appears across the aircraft, which usually means how many of the aircraft’s own liveries repaint it. A texture that lots of liveries repaint is almost always one of the main painted surfaces, so the list is sorted by this to begin with. You can also sort by name or resolution.
The textures listed under each material tell you which maps it actually has. A material with no composite texture simply cannot contribute Ambient Occlusion, Roughness or Metalness layers, and those layers will be left out of that particular file.

Starting from an existing paint scheme

If the aircraft ships more than one livery, a Use textures from box appears. Leave it on Aircraft default to build from the aircraft’s own base paintwork, or pick one of its liveries to build from that scheme instead.

Anything the livery you pick does not repaint is taken from the aircraft’s own textures, which is exactly how the simulator itself resolves a livery. Only liveries that belong to the variant you selected are offered, so you will not be shown a scheme that does not fit.

Encrypted aircraft

Encrypted 2024 modular aircraft, the ones the simulator partly protects, appear in the aircraft list with a padlock. For those, the Paintkit Builder builds the albedo, composite and normal layers from the aircraft’s own textures. The UV wireframe and paintable-area layers, the 3D paintkit and the 3D view are unavailable, because they need the highest-detail 3D models, which the simulator does not let any tool read. See Supported aircraft for the full picture.

Notes

Paintkits can be large. A full set of layers at 4K is typically well under 100 MB, but an 8K texture with every layer switched on can reach around half a gigabyte. Turning off layers you do not need keeps the files much smaller.
For very large textures (above 8K) a half resolution option appears. Photoshop files have a hard 2 GB size limit, and this keeps you comfortably under it. You will rarely see this option.
The generated files are ordinary layered .psd files. They are designed and tested against Adobe Photoshop.
Building a lot of textures at once takes a while. The app stays locked while it works, and there is a Cancel button if you change your mind.
The 3D model is written as a .gltf with a .bin beside it and one image per material. Keep those files together, since the model refers to them by name.
A short report file is written next to the model, listing which of the aircraft’s model files were used and where each rigged part was placed. It is worth a look if something in the model seems out of place.
Some parts of an aircraft are positioned by a skeleton rather than sitting where they are drawn. If one of those comes out wrong, the Reposition rigged parts setting beside the 3D option lets you override how they are handled. Leave it on Automatic unless you have a reason not to: it is correct on every aircraft tested, and the other settings exist only as an escape hatch.