Hi to all... as some have seen my thread about the king air 350, I guess asking the good guys at AFG would not be possible for now since the AFG site and forums are down for the count... frustrated by the fact that there's no decent 350 model out there for FS9, I finally decided to face the facts and make my own... first things first - what tool should I use... I have version 3 of Abacus' FS Design Studio installed here (I have a copy of GMax too, not installed though)... which one should I use? and second is... how do I start these? for references, I have everything I could think of at my disposal (printed & electronic refs), including the real airplane itself, the only problem would be how do I translate the plane's model precisely & in detail into a 3D model... I plan to have a decent VC for it as well... any help will be much appreciated to get me started... I'm gonna need this, since my setup here could potentially be a vital tool for my job as a pilot of this airplane... thank you very much! P.S. I'm just gonna do the model, I plan to ask a friend to do the textures for me, and the rest (panel, gauges, sound) will be coming from the default - note though that I also have already edited some of them for better realism (sound.cfg, panel bitmap & cfg) and I do intend on making it downloadable here...

If you have FS Design Studio, I would try doing the tutorials for that. The truth is, GMax can be a bit of a steep learning curve, especially for a newcomer to 3D modeling concepts, whereas FSDS is easier to get into from scratch, and so you are likely to be encouraged by the speedy progress you can make with it. Early encouragement is essential when learning something new, as you will be inclined to keep going if you see yourself make easy progress. Set aside an evening or an afternoon, get a big pot of coffee on the desk next to you and then work methodically through the FSDS tutorials. Do that and you'll be confident with it in a few hours and will be ready to give it a crack at modeling something more complex. A biggish twin is ambitious for a first go, but if you are keen then you can certainly do it, although I must admit I sterted out by modeling simpler stuff such as simple training gliders and the like in FSDS, but don't let that put you off as I did end up making a Bell UH-1D Huey in GMax after that! So in saying the above, I'm not suggesting you should never give GMax a try, but rather that you should give it a try when you've got a model under your belt in the decidedly more 'noob-friendly' FSDS. You will see that essentially all you need is a decent three-view schematic drawing of the aeroplane you are intending to model, and some patience. It will help if you have some sectional profiles of the aerofoil and fuselage at various points, since a pure three-view can make sussing things out a bit tricky on occasion, so if you can, find a three view that includes some of those. A few pictures for additional reference on minor detailing will also help (such as antennas, exhausts, wheel and brake details etc), as will a 'walk around' set of pictures, see here for example: http://www.grubbyfin...alkaround.html. You can base the flight model on something roughly similar in FS and then tweak it from there, since FSDS will allow you to do that relatively easily. Good luck with it, you'll find it's actually quite enjoyable making a model when you get into it, so don't look at it as a chore, but rather a labour of love and you will have the right attitude to ensure that you complete it. Al

Thanks sir Al!I think I'm gonna do a simple model of the 350 first, just to see how the model will look like, then move on to the more fiddly bits of it piece by piece... reference-wise, that's one part that I won't have any problems whatsoever... except maybe the sectional parts, I'll ask around our maintenance unit if they have sectional diagrams on their maintenance manuals later... The flight model for this will be from the default one (which already has a tweak I put in, based on the one available here, can't remember his name though, I'll look for the file later, because he did a very good job of correcting the dynamics, as he came almost exactly how the real thing handles as I observed it) I'll post updates here when I get into it thanks again!

ok, starting proved to be a bit trickier than I thought... so now I'm thinking of asking permission from the AFG team to obtain a copy of their original source files for their king air 300, and stretch it to make the 350... I hope their e-mail addresses are still working, as the AFG site and forums is now gone... hopefully temporary... (to the AFG team if they are here in the AVSIM forums also... I hope you would consider this request, it would be a big help...) thanks!

I guess I'm going to be shot by asking this question... but here goes... is there a way to backward convert an FSX aircraft mdl to FS9 aircraft mdl (textures included of course)? I have an original copy of FSX Gold here, and have extracted the aircraft folder for this plane, and analyzing the mdl using a viewer, the FSX rendering of the 350 is as close to the real one as it can get (ok it suffers from a very slight wing placement error, but what the heck...) so I was thinking, if its possible to port this visual model to FS9 to replace their own rendition of the 350 there... I'm expecting some bashing, but I just need to know... thanks