New Repaint Created: FSP A340-300 Mandarin Airlines

I've created another repaint for the FSPainter Airbus A340-300. It represents the aircraft owned by China Airlines which is painted in their subsidiary Mandarin Airlines' livery, registration number B-18851. This plane is operated from Taipei to destinations throughout Asia and internationally. It also apparently flies charters to the Chinese mainland.

The colors of this aircraft have been matched to the AI Aardvark B737-800 available on avsim (aia_mandarin_airlines_b737-800.zip). It also fits right into the China Airlines Summer 2007 flightplans created by dustEagle, which are also available on avsim (chinaairlines-cal-rochina-su07.zip).

Completing this took a little longer than I expected - mostly because I had to recreate the logo as vector artwork - but I'm happy with the results. Plus, now I can use that logo wherever I may want to in the future.

A couple of things I noticed while doing this:

1. The FSPainter texture layout really leaves a lot to be desired. I've only done a couple of Aardvark paints and a few CDAI ones, but the difference in resolution is pretty substantial. The 3D model is OK, but there seems to be a lot of wasted space in the texture files.
2. On the A330/A340 textures, the 2 fuselage sides are not exact mirror images of each other either - it's not off by much, but still...
3. The window layout in the paintkit is incorrect. There aren't enough windows. That's why the titles and registrations don't match the pictures perfectly - there's no way to do it that I can see, short of creating an entirely new set of windows.
   

I'm sure it's been said before, but I think we would all use and appreciate a new set of widebody Airbus AI models. When those appear on the scene, the artwork I used for this repaint can be easily applied to the new aircraft.

Below is the full set of screenshots. The file is on Avsim: fsp_a340-300_mda.zip.















For some comparison shots, have a look at these photos on airliners.net (especially this one compared to the 7th in the list above).