fsx-se Making my own add on aircraft?

[Dragonmount 5]

I'm a hobby 3d artist and I was looking for something fun to do, and I haven't yet made a jet, or other airraft, and I thought what would be fun would make it usable in FSX. I'm not after super realistic physics or anything, I just want to see my own creation in FSX, and fully functional.  What do I need to get started once I have a model I'm happy with?

[fs4fun 366]

What 3D modeling program are you using? You'll need the SDK and set things up so you can export to an MDL file.

 

One that's done, then just to see your model in the sim you can copy an existing aircraft folder, replace the external MDL file with your own, edit the aircraft.cfg so your plane has a unique title and then you should be able to load up your aircraft and see your external model in the sim.

 

ModelConverterX (MCX) is handy for editing contact points and various other aircraft.cfg bits

 

If you have animated parts then you'll need to tag them with animations. If you're using a 3D program like gmax, 3ds or blender then they have tools for this, otherwise if you can get MCX to import the animations it can probably do the tagging.

 

You can get AirWrench from Flight1 for generating flight dynamics files

 

Then there's all the fun of creating a panel or VC and doing the gauges, that's still beyond me for the most part.

 

There's lots of help available at fsdeveloper and sim-outhouse.

[Dragonmount 5]

Thanks for the reply! I love vintage aircraft, and think that will be my project something that is no longer in the air.