[GUIDE] How to create a unified aircraft thumbnails for your livery

    This guide is intended for those who seek to have a consistent thumbnail for their liveries.

    Here's what it looks like :



    How to achieve


    Prerequisite :

    • Developer mode must be ON
      (If not familiar, Go to Options -> General -> Developers)


    • Menu animations should also be turned ON, This is normally turned ON by default.
      (If not familiar, Go to Options -> General -> Accessibility -> Menu Animations)

      When you have menu animations turned off, you can take a screenshot at whatever angle you look at it from. For our case though, we want it to be at default angle, so it's not necessary to turn it off.


    Instructions :


    1. You must take a screenshot of your aircraft inside your hanger. To do so, head to the Profile -> My Hanger
    2. On the developer menu, click on [DevMode], hit New project and click OK to create the project.
                    

    3. Project Editor panel will be open.
    4. Click on the + sign to add a package and name it whatever you want, it doesn't really matter and hit Create


    5. On the Project Editor panel, go to View and open Inspector


    6. On the Inspector panel, click on the button "Capture aircraft thumbnail" and chose the place where you want to save the aircraft's photo.
    7. After that, you can use photo editors such as Photoshop... to crop the photo to match the default thumbnails that can be found in the game. Doing this manually can be tricky, so that's why we're going to use a little app I made to help you save multiple clicks.
      It's called "Default thumbnail generator" and you can download it here : https://flightsim.to/file/1197/default-thumbnail-generator

    8. Unzip the app and extract it at the same place as your aircraft's photo.
    9. (With the latest version, this is optional) You should now have this :
      Make sure that the aircraft's photo name is SCREENCAPTURE0_LE.PNG
    10. Open the app and it's quite self explanatory, you click on your desired aircraft model, for instance I'm making one for A320neo, I simply click on the A320neo button and the app will crop the original image and export two thumbnail images that I can use as thumbnails for MSFS2020.
    11. Final results :

    This is what the thumbnails look like in-game :


    I hope this helped you to create beautiful and unified thumbnails for your livery. If you have any question, just ask ;)


    [UPDATE-1] With the latest release, you have the possibility to browse your file and import it to the app. The app will then export the generated thumbnails at the same path of the imported image.