In making airports look more realistic close up various scenery developers have provided us with grass and other runway weeds and flowers at objects. Usually with some translucent or opaque nature. I think that there are some freeware examples out there but I don't know for sure. I would like to place similar grass into various airport sceneries that could be distributed as freeware. Does anyone know where I can find 3-D grass objects for use at airports. I have examples of other vegetation ie shrubs, trees etc but can't find any grass examples?

Hi Bryan: I don't recall seeing any FSX freeware grass libraries, and there are of course some payware ones used in the OrbX FTX sceneries and AussieX sceneries. I'm pretty sure the grass libraries Joe Watson made in the last year or 2 were for his payware Florida airports. But, it is easy in Sketchup to made a blank model, then texture it using either new grass textures of your own, or those of the FS9 grass and misc. vegetation libraries that you may recall from your prior very generous work creating thumbnails for most known FS9 "EZ-Scenery" object libraries. End users could be advised to download and copy the textures from the required existing legacy format "EZ-Scenery" vegetation library into your "new" vegetation library package's paired \Texture folder in order for the updated models in your package's \Scenery folder (which "map" to the legacy textures) in order for your models to display properly. Perhaps the example walk-through in this thread might help explain the general Sketchup modeling process: http://www.fsdevelop...440&postcount=5 The "grass" and "vegetation" scenery library objects used in FTX sceneries are multiple planes set in grids at diagonal angles, as rectangles, or radial "spokes' in a 'wheel' with a circular periphery, all faces of which are textured with either the same... or a mix of... vegetation image(s). I haven't yet tested whether it is advantageous to FPS for one to "weld" all such planes together before texturing (probably not, as it creates more faces and vertices when working with a single cross-plane or multiple intersecting plane arrays; the latter "intersect with model" function in Sketchup also makes texturing more complicated when working with intersecting planes). So, AFAIK, if possible, keep multiple planes "un-welded" / "non-intersected" in one's scene before export to Arno's ModelConverterX for better FPS (based on my observation that some of the more complex OrbX vegetation objects ('as modeled' up to a month or so ago) kill FPS on my system. It would probably be important to use a LOD / MIP system for such complex ground vegetation so that their display drops off promptly when one is not looking directly at the objects (ex: such as we have with fences vanishing easily or even 'prematurely' in FSX) so that FPS are not dragged down at one's airports. Hope this helps ! GaryGB

Gary - very informative, thanks. I will be completing some freeware airport uploads in the fall once a return from an extended holiday and I can then spend the time to look into this more. Thanks for this advice.