Generating Icons for Aircraft

The new X-Plane 11 UI includes aircraft icons arranged in a grid on the Flight Configuration screen. The new icon style is a simple picture of the aircraft, seen from a particular angle, over a transparent background. By keeping your icons consistent with the X-Plane 11 default icons, your aircraft will both look professional and be identifiable at a glance.

Generate Icons

You have two options for creating X-Plane 11 icons for your aircraft:

• X-Plane can automatically generate an icon for each livery of your aircraft. This is the preferred method. To do so, start a flight in your aircraft, then, in the menu bar, click Developer > Regenerate icons for current aircraft (shift + R by default).
  • Note that we control for some variables in generating these images by moving the aircraft to PMDY and changing the window size.
• Alternatively, you can use your own 3-D modeling tool to generate the icons, following the specifications below.

X-Plane 11 aircraft icons are stored as follows within your aircraft folder:

• [Your aircraft directory]
  • [your ACF name].acf
  • [your ACF name]_icon11.png
  • [your ACF name]_icon11_thumb.png
    liveries
    • [your livery name]
      • [your ACF name]_icon11.png
      • [your ACF name]_icon11_thumb.png
    • [another livery name]
      • [your ACF name]_icon11.png
      • [your ACF name]_icon11_thumb.png

Note that there are actually two images on disk for each livery: the normal “_icon11.png” and the “_thumb” version. The former is an 800×450 image used when you click “Customize” for an aircraft; the latter is a 174×107 image used in the aircraft grid view. (The smaller size gives you both a better image quality and improved performance when scrolling through the grid.)