The Tomcat Is Back, and Here Is What It Took to Get the Art Right

The F-14A and F-14B Tomcat are back on the Skin In The GameFX storefront. Custom nose art and tail art now place correctly on both flanks, verified with in game renders of both sides. The storefront now covers 23 aircraft, and every single one of them has passed a full placement check before going on sale. That last part matters more than it might sound, and this post is going to explain why.

Getting Custom Art onto a 3D Aircraft Is Harder Than It Looks

Most people think of a livery as a flat image wrapped around a shape, which is roughly true, but the "wrapped around" step is where things go sideways. A 3D aircraft model uses a flat texture sheet, sometimes called a UV map, where every surface of the aircraft is unfolded and laid out like a pattern on a cutting table. When Skin In The GameFX places your nose art onto that texture sheet, three things all have to be true at once. The F-14 had all three wrong. Here is what each one means in plain language.

Shape: The Box Has to Match What We Ask You to Upload

When you upload your artwork, the storefront tells you exactly what dimensions to prepare. That guidance is based on the shape of the placement region on the texture sheet. If the region on the texture is even slightly different in proportion from what the upload page describes, every image placed there will come out stretched, too tall or too wide, even if it looks perfect in the preview.

On the F-14, the nose art region was nine percent off in its proportions, and the tail region was fourteen percent off. Both are now exact.

Handedness: The Two Sides of the Aircraft Are Not the Same

This one surprises people. The left side and the right side of an aircraft are painted from different parts of the texture sheet, and on many aircraft, one side is mirrored relative to the other. That mirroring is intentional at the model level, used to save texture memory. But if the livery builder does not account for it, art placed on the mirrored side renders backwards. Lettering reads right to left. A shark mouth bites toward the tail. A squadron insignia faces the wrong direction.

The F-14 right side was mirrored, and placing art there without compensating for it produced exactly that result. It is completely invisible to any offline check. You only catch it with an actual in game render from the correct camera angle. We now check both flanks, every time.

Location: The Art Box Has to Be on the Right Part of the Aircraft

This one sounds almost too simple to be a real problem, but it is. The F-14 texture sheet has a lot of separate components, fuselage panels, gear doors, intake lips, pylons. The left side nose art region was mapped to a small secondary component rather than the main fuselage. Art placed there did not render in an obviously broken way; it just effectively disappeared, showing up on a surface too small and too tucked away to be visible under normal viewing conditions.

All three issues are now corrected and confirmed with in game screenshots taken from both flanks at normal viewing distances.

How We Proved the Fix Was Real

A symmetrical logo would have hidden the mirror bug completely. A perfectly centered design will look fine even when it is reversed, because it looks the same either way. So we did not use a symmetrical design to test the fix.

We rendered a deliberately lopsided test card onto the aircraft: a red stripe marking the top edge, a green stripe marking the left edge, and a single asymmetric letter in the corner. If the art comes back with the green stripe on the right instead of the left, the image is mirrored. If the red stripe is on the bottom, it is flipped. If anything is stretched, the stripes show it immediately because straight lines under distortion bend or change width.

That test card is unforgiving. It was designed to fail if anything was even slightly wrong, and it will fail in a way that is immediately obvious in a screenshot. That is the only kind of test worth running.

We Audited the Whole Fleet

While working through the Tomcat, we ran the same placement check across every aircraft in the Skin In The GameFX library. 24 of 31 aircraft now pass a complete placement check. Every aircraft currently listed for sale passes. The remaining aircraft are intentionally withheld from the storefront rather than sold with art placement we cannot stand behind.

The MiG-15 is a good example of how seriously we take that standard. It had cleared every offline check and was ready to return to the storefront. At the very last step, an in game render showed its nose art mirrored. The MiG-15 is still off sale. It comes back when the render is clean, not before.

We would rather have a shorter aircraft lineup than sell you a livery that does not look right on your aircraft. That is the standard we are holding to across the entire fleet.

The Tomcat Is Ready

If you have been waiting to put your squadron markings, your callsign, or your own nose art on an F-14A or F-14B, the wait is over. Browse the full lineup and build your livery at fox3servers.com/liveries. If you want a walkthrough of the build process from upload to installation, the help guide covers every step. And if you have a question that the guide does not answer, reach out directly and we will get you sorted.

You fly. We handle the rest.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is Skin In The GameFX and where can I use it?
Skin In The GameFX is the Fox3 custom DCS livery builder. You browse available aircraft, upload your artwork following the dimension guides provided, place your nose art and tail art using the SkyCraft builder at skycraft.fox3cloud.com, and then install the finished livery on your DCS installation. Full instructions are at fox3servers.com/help/liveries.

What does DCS custom livery nose art placement actually mean?
Every DCS aircraft uses a flat texture sheet where all the surfaces of the 3D model are laid out. Placing nose art means writing your uploaded image into the correct region of that sheet at the correct size, orientation, and proportions so it appears in the right place on the aircraft in game. If any of those three things are off, the art looks stretched, reversed, or simply does not appear.

Why does the right side of some aircraft show mirrored art?
Many DCS aircraft models reuse portions of the texture sheet for both sides of the fuselage, with one side mirrored at the model level to save memory. If the livery builder does not compensate for that mirroring, art placed on the affected side renders as a mirror image in game. Letters appear reversed and asymmetric logos face the wrong direction. The only reliable way to catch this is an in game render from the affected flank.

How do I know an aircraft I want is ready?
Every aircraft currently listed on fox3servers.com/liveries has passed a full placement audit including in game renders of both flanks. If an aircraft is not listed for sale, it has not yet passed that check and is withheld until it does.

What happened to the MiG-15, and when is it coming back?
The MiG-15 passed every offline check and was staged for return to the storefront. An in game render at the final step showed its nose art mirrored on one side. It is currently withheld until that is corrected. We do not have a specific date to share, but it will not return until the in game render is clean on both flanks.

Do I need a Fox3 DCS server subscription to order a custom livery?
No. Skin In The GameFX liveries are available to any DCS World player, whether or not you host a server with Fox3. Your finished livery installs directly into your DCS installation. That said, if you are looking for a hosted DCS server to fly your freshly painted Tomcat on with your squadron, Fox3 Servers has you covered there too.