Screenshot during taxiing

[intross 0]

Hello

My name is Andrew and I'm working for business jet company as a marketing specialist. And I need your advice as flight simulators users.

I need to take a photo of our fleet (Hawker, Challenger, Legacy, Yak-42, Sukhoy SSJ100, Tu-204) all together while taxing but can't do it because of strict regulations in our base airport Vnukovo.

Is it possible to vizualize this picture in Simulator with the best possible quality and take a screenshot at specific angle on the ground?

Thank you 

 

[Woozie 732]

Hi Andrew

Welcome to the forums.

In general it should be possible, depending on availability of high fidelity models of the aircrafts you mentioned. You could either hook up with a few friends using a multiplayer network like VATSIM or IVAO or you could use a payware tool called WAMA which allows you to place AI aircraft permanently on the ground. http://secure.simmarket.com/lorby-si-where-are-my-aircraft-wama_fsx-p3d.phtml

However, i'm not sure if this tool can place AI aircraft only on dedicated parking spots or if free placement is possible. 

Thats just for P3D, i dont know if Xplane offers better options to achieve what you are looking for. 

However, dont expect it to look anything like a real photo, we are not there yet ;) But with some photosphop skills you might be able get a reasonably realistic result

[Chock 17,769]

Yes, it certainly is possible, in fact, I have actually done that for an airline client of mine in the past (Thomas Cook). Basically I had to fake an aerial formation flying shot: They were merging with another airline and wanted a picture of one of their Boeings in formation with a Boeing from the airline they were merging with.

Initially, I told them they could fly both airliners down to Almeria (southern Spain) so they could take them out over the Mediterranean where the weather would be nice, then hire another aeroplane as a camera ship to take the pic and that they would need ATC permission in order to get three aeroplanes that close together and preferably some pilots with experience of formation flying. They didn't want to spend the money on that, so they asked me to create the shot digitally, so, I got a flight simulator model of a 757, downloaded some repaints of the two airlines (from this site) flew them both out over the Med in Flight Simulator, took some screenshots from the required viewpoints and combined them in Photoshop. You couldn't tell it was a flight sim creation by the time I had tarted up the pictures in Photoshop.

But, as noted in the previous answer, you need to know what you are doing with Photoshop in order to get a convincing result. Luckily for you however, I happen to be an Adobe Certified Instructor on Photoshop and probably one of the most experienced digital image editors in the world, and a flight simmer too. So if you'd like me to help you, let me know.

It might be necessary to combine real photographs with shots from a simulator to pull it off, or create some repainted textures for the simulator models in your aircraft's liveries, but all that is possible and equally fortunately for you, I've done that in the past too.

[Woozie 732]

damn, didnt even think about stacking in photoshop :) Guess thats the best way to achieve this, so forget my advice about using multiplayer networks or WAMA. 

[Chock 17,769]

Here is one I just knocked up a minute ago to show you the kind of thing you can get. Obviously I did this one very quickly, so it's a bit rough, but you get the idea. Notice that the inset pic of the plane matted into the real photograph of a runway has had to be tweaked a bit, with painted shadows, repainted spinning props etc and matched to the light levels in the photograph, because Flight Simulator does not do ground shadows, nor lighting in a particularly sophisticated way, so I've had to put some of that back in (and very roughly on this example, since I did it quickly).

But as you can see, it is definitely possible to achieve what you want, i.e. putting aeroplanes viewed from specific angles into shots with other stuff, including with other aeroplanes or real world photographs of your base, it's simply a case of getting the angles right and the light levels to look convincing. Obviously, some FS aeroplane models are better than others when it comes to details, and the better the model, the easier it is to do all this stuff, but even that can be tweaked up in Photoshop if necessary to add things such as missing avionics antennas, more realistic tires etc, so that they look exactly like your fleet.

Let me know if you want me to help you.