PRISM v0.2.38

PRISM v0.2.38 — a skin viewer, painter and render studio for IL-2

PRISM shows the aircraft and vehicles of IL-2 Great Battles (with Tank Crew and Flying Circus) and IL-2 Korea
in your liveries, lets you paint and decorate those liveries, and renders pictures, turntables and Blender Cycles
images of them. It reads everything from your own installation: it never changes game files, and no game assets are
included with it.

A lot has happened since the last public release, v0.1.74. PRISM now has a full Painter, decals, a
Projects page, turntables, exhaust flames and gun smoke, a proper installer and two guided tours. Here is what the
current version does.

Download: https://github.com/riaanjutte/PRISM-Distribution/releases

User guide: https://riaanjutte.github.io/PRISM-Distribution/guide/

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New since v0.1.74

• Painter: paint colour and finish straight onto the skin, in layers, with the 3D vehicle live beside the
  texture sheet.
• Decals: markings, numbers, text and artwork placed on the vehicle's surface, with blend, finish and weathering.
• Projects page: every livery you are working on, planned, ready or released, as a card drawn in its own livery.
• Turntables: GIF or MP4 of the vehicle turning, from the viewport in seconds or from Blender Cycles.
• Exhaust flames in each engine's firing order, gun smoke and tracers with the muzzle flashes.
• Photo skies from Poly Haven, and an orthographic lens for flat, profile-style pictures.
• Auto vehicle exposure for a consistent look, whatever the vehicle or light.
• Export to game: write a livery straight into the game's Skins folder, keeping the files it replaces.
• An installer, built-in updates, Report a problem, and two guided tours that play over PRISM itself.

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The library and the viewport

• The game logos choose a collection: IL-2 Korea, Great Battles aircraft, Tank Crew ground vehicles or
  Flying Circus aircraft. Every vehicle is listed with a side-view picture; search knows full names such as
  Mustang or Thunderbolt. AI-only aircraft are marked.
• The viewport shows the vehicle as it will export. Orbit, pan, zoom and fit with the mouse; Ctrl + drag turns and
  pitches the vehicle itself and Ctrl + wheel banks it, and exports keep that pose.
• Lenses: Wide, Normal, Telephoto or Orthographic, matched in Blender renders. An export frame shows exactly
  the area your pictures will hold.

Liveries and your own skins

• The livery browser shows a picture of every livery, packed and loose, with favourites and recently used.
• Drop in your own DDS or PNG at full resolution; Great Battles two-sheet liveries load together.
• Live DDS follows a skin you are editing in Photoshop, GIMP or Affinity: save there and PRISM refreshes within
  about a second.
• Surface finish tools repair missing Great Battles alpha and show Korea's MRR channels. The skin inspector
  shows the flat texture beside the vehicle: click a panel to find it on the texture.

Scene

• Charcoal and Ivory studios, a plain background, the games' own IL-2 and IL-2 Korea hangars,
  sky with clouds, a transparent cutout with an optional ground shadow, and green and blue screen.
• A round platform sized to the vehicle, in diamond plate, glass, wood, marble, stainless steel or mirror.
• Skies: presets from clear blue to sunset and overcast, sun and haze, cumulus, stratus or cirrus clouds placed
  above or below the vehicle, optional countryside below, or photographed skies found and downloaded from Poly
  Haven inside PRISM.

Lighting and tone

• Lighting presets shown as small diagrams (Soft studio, Shape & detail, Polished metal, Rim highlights, Dramatic
  and more), and four lights to adjust one by one: softbox or spotlight, position, size, brightness and aim.
• Vehicle and background exposure, contrast, and Auto vehicle exposure.
• Ambient occlusion, screen-space reflections and supersampling in the viewport.

Vehicle details and effects

• Landing gear, flaps, canopy, bomb bay doors, open crew hatches on tanks, and the game's own loadouts.
• The game's seated pilots and gunners, in summer or winter kit, and navigation and landing lights.
• Spinning propellers with speed and shutter, for a photographic blur.
• Muzzle flashes caught mid-burst, with tracers in each nation's colour and gun smoke (sunlit volume or quick
  puffs).
• Exhaust flames on piston aircraft, each stub firing at its moment in the engine's firing order, timed from the
  propeller speed.
• Vehicle Data: the game's description, history and diagrams, where it has them.

Decals and watermarks

• Decals: add images or text, then move, resize and rotate them on the vehicle. Each is a layer with blend,
  finish and weathering. Save a project to keep them editable, or bake them into a skin for the game.
• Watermarks: the vehicle's official name or your own text, your signature, artwork, or the vehicle's badge from
  the game, snapped to a grid on every export.

The Painter

• Paint on the texture sheet with the 3D vehicle live beside it: 2D, Split or 3D layouts. Click the
  vehicle to find that spot on the sheet.
• Brush, Airbrush, Eraser, rectangle, ellipse and polygon selections with feathering, paths that
  can snap to UV lines, Bucket with patterns, Replace colour that keeps the shading, and an Eyedropper.
• Mirror left / right paints the matching spot on the vehicle's other side, wherever it lies on the sheet. A UV
  overlay shows how the sheet wraps the vehicle.
• Layers as in an image editor: visibility, locks, opacity, Normal or Multiply blending, masks, renaming and
  reordering.
• Finish layers paint how matt, glossy or metallic the skin is (Matt, Satin, Gloss, Bare metal or custom values),
  with Vary with grey for streaks and worn paint, and Finish by colour.
• In the 3D view, Light from camera lights whichever side you turn to the view, the underside too, and a
  Brightness slider lifts that view alone. A column of pose pictures (front, both sides, rear, top, bottom and
  both front quarters) resets the view in one click.
• Painting never changes the original skin. Save project keeps everything editable; Export skin writes the
  painted DDS sheets for the game; Export to game puts them straight into the game's Skins folder. If PRISM closes
  unexpectedly, it offers to recover your work.

Exporting

• Quick PNG on your graphics card in seconds: 2K, 4K and 8K (with a JPG), transparent backgrounds included, and an
  HSD JPG sized for HSD Online.
• Blender Cycles renders for the most realistic light, reflections and glass, in 2K, 4K or 8K, while you keep
  working. PRISM can download a portable Blender for you; Cycles renders on NVIDIA, AMD or Intel Arc graphics cards.
• Batch liveries: render a list of liveries with the same camera and scene.
• Showcase packs: coordinated sets of pictures in a presentation style, with saved views and an optional contact
  sheet.
• Turntable GIF or MP4: one seamless turn from the viewport or Blender, with a preview and a time estimate.

Projects and sessions

• The Projects page shows every project in your project folder as a card drawn in its livery, grouped as In
  progress, Ready to export, Planned and Released. Search, filter by game or tag, and edit a card's details:
  livery file name, stage, next step, notes, tags, unit, period and reference photos.
• Double-click a card to open it straight in the Painter, or Open project for the viewport. Plan a project
  starts a card for a vehicle you have not painted yet.
• Export to Skins folder from a card writes the livery into the game, keeping the files it replaces in the
  project rather than in the game. Every export is listed on its card.
• PRISM reopens where you left off, unsaved changes included, without touching your project files.

Installing, updates and help

• An installer that needs no administrator rights; a zip for testers.
• PRISM checks for updates, downloads them, verifies them and restarts on the new version.
• A four-minute tour of PRISM and a detailed Painter tour, played over the real window.
• An online user guide, and Report a problem, which packs the log and a few facts about your PC (without your
  user name) for a GitHub issue.
• Light and dark themes, and the Inter or Segoe UI Variable font.

What you need

• Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit, with a Direct3D 11 graphics card.
• IL-2 Great Battles, IL-2 Korea, or both.
• The Microsoft .NET 9 Desktop Runtime (x64); the installer tells you if it is missing.
• Blender only for Cycles renders, turntables in Cycles and showcase packs; PRISM can fetch it for you.

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Thank you to everyone who has tested PRISM and reported aircraft, vehicle, livery and export problems: many of the
fixes and features above started as one of your reports. Please keep them coming, through Report a problem in
PRISM's Settings or the Issues page on GitHub.

PRISM is an independent project, not made or endorsed by the makers of IL-2.

PRISM v0.1.74

PRISM v0.1.74 — forum changelog

Since the previous public GitHub release, v0.1.34, PRISM has grown from an
aircraft livery viewer into a broader IL-2 presentation tool. This update covers
work through v0.1.74.

Highlights

Tank Crew support

• Added an initial Tank Crew library for the 16 player-controlled Great
  Battles ground vehicles, including the Tiger I. PRISM now imports their hulls,
  turrets, guns, wheels, tracks and original materials for the viewport, Quick
  PNG and Blender/Cycles exports.
• Reconstructed the games' procedural track meshes for all supported tracked
  vehicles and corrected their surface orientation, eliminating the missing
  tracks and pale, inside-out-looking tread reflections.
• Restored the special tire meshes used by the Sd.Kfz.10-5 and GAZ-MM 72-K.
• Added Open crew hatches for 14 tanks and assault guns with authored hatch
  animations. The open/closed state is saved in projects and carried into both
  export paths.
• Corrected the M4A2 commander's roof machine gun so it uses its proper idle
  mount rather than the deployed anti-aircraft preview pose.

Improved library organisation

• Added dedicated Tank Crew and Flying Circus cards alongside Great
  Battles and Korea. Great Battles now shows WWII aircraft, Tank Crew shows
  ground vehicles, and Flying Circus shows WWI aircraft from the same installed
  game data.
• The shared inspector is now called Vehicle, which makes the interface and
  project/export wording work naturally for both aircraft and ground vehicles.

Aircraft loadouts and animated details

• Aircraft → Loadout now exposes every resolved static authored loadout in
  the installed Great Battles and Korea libraries: 2,015 renderable
  configurations across 126 aircraft in the development catalogue. This includes
  tanks, bombs, rockets, mixed stores and armament variants.
• Loadouts are retained in projects, restored sessions and batch work, and are
  included in viewport, Quick PNG and Blender/Cycles output.
• Clean configurations now use the games' authored empty-hardpoint pose,
  removing unwanted default racks and pylons, including on the P-47D-22 and
  P-47D-28.
• Added Bomb bay doors open for 13 verified Great Battles aircraft. It works
  with compatible clean and internal-bay loadouts in both export paths, including
  both door rows on the He 111 H-16.
• Loadout cache management prevents repeated configuration changes from filling
  the drive; recently used configurations remain quick to revisit.

More faithful aircraft presentation

• PRISM now loads the authored detailed cockpits and Korea jet ejection seats
  where available, with improved canopy behaviour and no duplicate gunner
  canopy/station geometry.
• Korea pilots now include the helmet, goggles and packed parachute their models
  specify. A Winter gear option is available on aircraft with seasonal crew
  assets and is saved with projects and preferences.
• Blender/Cycles spinning-propeller renders use a swept disc when the shutter
  would blur a blade through a full circle, removing the former grainy prop blur.
• Softbox shadows in the live viewport are substantially smoother. Blender/Cycles
  shadow rendering is unchanged.
• Korea's original hangar now responds to the existing Daylight control:
  lamps fade as sunlight rises, and the visible sky brightens with the setting.

New composition and skin tools

• Added Transparent cutout backgrounds for true-alpha Quick PNG and
  Blender/Cycles PNG exports, with an optional soft ground shadow.
• Added professional Green screen and Blue screen backgrounds for
  compositing.
• Korea surface-finish tools can selectively restore the metallic, roughness or
  reflectivity channel from the original MRR map. Dedicated MRR viewing modes
  make those channels easier to inspect without affecting exports or saved skins.
• Fixed Blender/Cycles aircraft-shadow artefacts from inward-facing duplicate
  shells.

Better everyday workflow

• PRISM reopens the aircraft, livery and scene it was viewing when it was last
  closed; this is separate from, and does not replace, normal project saves.
• Restored-project startup avoids a first-load shader compilation pause that
  could previously hold the UI for around 35 seconds.
• The updater window now matches PRISM's light and dark themes more closely.

Terrain note

The experimental muddy terrain surface was introduced and then deliberately
removed while its visual treatment is revised. Existing saved muddy-terrain
choices safely fall back to diamond plate; it is not being presented as a finished
feature in this release.

Thank you to everyone testing PRISM and reporting aircraft, vehicle, livery and
export edge cases. As ever, PRISM reads assets from your own IL-2 installation;
game assets are not bundled with the application.

PRISM v0.1.34

PRISM v0.1.34 improves aircraft and livery compatibility across IL-2 Great Battles and IL-2 Korea.

Highlights

• Correctly loads paired Great Battles livery sheets, including the C-47A, Li-2 and Handley Page O/400, throughout the viewport, Live DDS, thumbnail browser, projects, batch processing and Blender exports.
• Lists user-skinned Great Battles AI aircraft such as the B-25D when a matching loose colour DDS is installed.
• Prevents unsupported AI crew figures from appearing outside the aircraft while retaining valid pilot and gunner controls across all 117 flyable Great Battles aircraft and all eight Korea aircraft.
• Adds clearer guidance for ground-mode aircraft roll and contextual hints when sky or hangar scenes disable studio-light presets.

Installation

Extract the complete ZIP to a writable folder and run PRISM.exe. This package is framework-dependent and requires the .NET 9 Desktop Runtime for Windows x64. Blender remains optional and is used for Blender/Cycles exports.

Existing updater-enabled PRISM installations can install this release from the in-app update prompt.

PRISM v0.1.29

PRISM is a Windows livery viewer and rendering studio for flyable aircraft in IL-2 Great Battles and IL-2 Korea.

Highlights

• Browse installed and custom liveries on extracted game aircraft.
• Inspect colour, alpha/finish, normal and Korea MRR texture channels directly on the model.
• Use Live DDS mode while editing skins in Photoshop, GIMP, Affinity Photo and other tools.
• Configure aircraft, studio lighting, environments, watermarks and export framing.
• Create Quick PNG images and high-quality Blender/Cycles renders up to 8K.
• Save projects and batch-render selected liveries.

New in v0.1.29

• Added nonblocking automatic update checks with Download and install, Later and Skip this version choices.
• Added manual update checking and a setting to disable startup checks.
• Added a separate verified updater with SHA-256 validation, safe package extraction, preservation of extra user resources and rollback after an installation failure.

Install

1. Download PRISM-v0.1.29-win-x64.zip below.
2. Extract the complete ZIP to a writable folder.
3. Run PRISM.exe.

This package does not bundle .NET, Blender, or game assets. PRISM requires the .NET 9 Desktop Runtime (x64). Blender is optional and is used for Blender/Cycles exports.

This is the first updater-enabled release, so it must be installed manually. Later versions can be installed through PRISM's updater.

PRISM remains under active development and is an independent community project.