MSFS Livery Toolkit

Create MSFS liveries the visual way. No config files, no command line.

MSFS Livery Toolkit is a free, standalone Windows desktop application. It walks you through the whole livery creation pipeline: pick an installed aircraft, repaint its textures, check your work in 3D, and compile a sim-ready package. It’s the successor to my earlier ImageToMSFSKTX2 script - but it does a lot more! It works with MSFS 2020 and 2024 (simple/monolithic and modular aircraft).

Version 2.0

Version 2 adds texture painting: you can now paint your livery textures inside the toolkit, in 2D or straight onto the aircraft in 3D. Version 1.0 was the first full release, out of beta with everything I set out to build in it. Thank you to everyone who tested the beta versions and reported problems. Feedback from real users still shapes where it goes next, so please let me know if anything doesn't work as expected (see below).

Note that support for the Steam version of MSFS 2020 / 2024 is somewhat untested. There is an option in the Settings page to use the Steam version for the MSFS SDK compilation process. If Steam users run into problems please share as much feedback as possible so I can investigate.

What it does

• 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.
• Automated livery setup:scans your installed aircraft, detects the profile, and builds a correct, sim-ready package structure for you.
• Works with stock and marketplace aircraft, not just add-ons in your Community folder, once you switch on the sim's Virtual File System projector in Dev Mode. Chips at the top of the window show whether the sim is running and the VFS is connected.
• 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.
• Limited support for encrypted aircraft: some MSFS 2024 aircraft are partly protected by the simulator. Modular protected aircraft appear with a padlock, and you can make liveries and texture paintkits for them. 3D previews and UV maps aren't available for these aircraft, because the toolkit never decrypts, bypasses or reverse engineers protected files: it reads only the files the simulator itself leaves readable, the same files any livery artist works from.
• One-click texture extraction: decodes compiled KTX2/DDS art back into editable PNGs, even specially compressed files other tools can't open.
• Built-in 3D view: see your own artwork on the aircraft as you paint, with no compiling and no sim launch. It also answers the question a texture name never does: which part of the aircraft is this? Select a texture and the part it covers lights up, so you can see what you are taking on before you paint a single pixel. Click a part to add its texture to your livery, and see anything that would turn pink before it does.
• 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.
• 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.
• Instant UV wireframes: generates a paint-alignment UV map straight from the aircraft's own 3D model.
• Ready-made 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.
• 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 and package: builds a sim-ready package with the official MSFS SDK. No command line.
• Compile MSFS 2020 liveries without MSFS 2020 installed: 2020 liveries normally need the 2020 SDK, which means keeping the older simulator around just to build them. The toolkit can compile them on its own instead, using a bundled converter rather than the SDK. Select it in Settings, and you can keep making 2020 liveries long after you have uninstalled the sim.
• Tells you when a new version is out: once a day it reads the public list of releases on GitHub, and What's new shows what changed. Nothing about you or your computer is sent, and you can turn it off in Settings.

What it does not do

This isn't a full image editor, and it won't paint a livery for you. The painting tools cover the essentials, such as brushes, stripes, stickers and fills. For detailed artwork, livery artists can still use their normal painting tools and workflows, and link a texture to the file they make there.

Getting started

The download is the complete, self-contained app. Everything it needs to run is included.

1. Unzip the download anywhere.
2. Double-click MSFS Livery Toolkit at the top of the folder. (Everything else lives in the "app" subfolder, which you can ignore.)
3. Windows may warn about an unsigned app; if you are comfortable running it, click More info > Run anyway

First-run setup (SDK paths and aircraft folders) takes a few seconds, then you are ready to go.

Updating: delete your old MSFS Livery Toolkit folder first, or unzip the new version somewhere else. Your settings and projects are kept elsewhere, so nothing is lost.

Found a bug or have an idea?

This is the most helpful thing you can do during the beta:

• Preferred: open a GitHub issue here. Please say what you did, and attach your log file if you can (in the app: Settings > Diagnostics > Open session log file).
• Alternatively: just drop a comment right here on this page.

Documentation

You can find online documentation here. To see which features work on which kind of aircraft (2020 or 2024, monolithic or modular, encrypted or not), see Supported aircraft.

Free for the community

This app will remain free for the livery-artist community. It was built in my spare time and will never be monetized beyond optional donations, and there will be no paid tiers. The coding was done with AI assistance (Claude Code), but all the requirements and logic design were painstakingly created by me, with countless hours of work to test, refine and enhance it based on my own experience as a livery creator. See here for more information on how it was built.

If you like it and it saves you time, an optional coffee is always appreciated and helps fund a Claude Pro subscription to drive more enhancements.