This is a little project I've been working on for FSX. It seemed like there was a big hole in the ORBX coverage on the way to Portland over Salem (Oregon, of course) with the default airport down there, so I set about fixing it. The result has seasonally edited photo textures and I designed it so the blend mask cuts off the photo scenery right at the perimeter road. For the most part, it does exactly that:

 

 

Here's a view of the tower and terminal:

 

 

I created several of the buildings and many of those are also in the Google Earth 3d Buildings Layer. Other buildings were already modeled and I converted them to FSX model format. Some buildings are a hybrid, the tower uses a "generic" control booth, on top of a photo textured structure. The red effect lights were created and placed by me:

 

 

The Aviation Department building in the foreground and the weather balloon shelter in the background were both made by me, with photo textures and items from the 3D Warehouse added for realism.

 

A few shots of the National Guard base on the other side of the field..

The entrance gate:

 

 

Did you notice the Huey?:

 

 

Here's the apron; mostly Blackhawks (of course), but it's not implausible that some Kiowa's would stop for supplies and lunch at the Flight Deck:

 

 

Finally, in the background, you probably saw this:

 

 

The control booth was free online, but the AAI RQ-7B Shadow drone, I made. It is my practice to assemble polygons in a likeness, then apply textures to imitate reality and it was proving extremely difficult to find good images of a radially finned, air-cooled Wankel motor. Finally I located, on an entirely Asian - Chinese I think - website, a PDF of a cut-and-paste paper model. I Photshopped it into a .jpg and that is what you see as the back of the motor - and I didn't even do the author justice. Apparently he intended the modeler to fold the paper exactly like the fins of the motor, radially and in such a way that would dissipate heat as the wind blew through them, like a processor cooler. Theoretically that could be done in Sketch-up, I have seen images of turbine sections made with a trigonometric algorithm, but then you have all those extra polygons to render, besides the effort.

 

Right now the scenery weighs a hefty 430 odd mb. I'm not so worried about the size but I am getting a few FSUIPC dings when I zoom out or mess around too much. I believe the snags are tied to light effects - and all the rich detail, of course; but some lights are much worse than others, so I am still juggling combinations.

 

Here's a link to a few more pictures:

http://s96.photobucket.com/user/aarque/slideshow/KSLE%20McNary%20Field%20Salem%20Oregon%20USA?sort=6

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Great work!

Cool aircraft and project!

Thanks, I plan to have it uploaded it by Saturday 4/20.

Looking good