After spending two weeks and about 14 hours with GMAX I have to say we need two types of tools. One set for those who either work full time in the 3D design industry or have the time to get to that level of skill and another set of tools for the rest. People in this forum are very helpful. But there is a missing bunch of "links" that would put the whole design process together in a logical step by step way. There is a "hidden art" element to this that is very frustrating. Microsoft seems to have justed dumped Gmax on us. Thankfully some understand what to do and we are getting more and more Gmax aircraft. I bet Gmax could be the subject of a year long college course in 3D design. But Gmax and the lack of information puts aircraft design out of the reach of so many willing people who may otherwise be able to contribute. The Gmax tutorials are not as good as folks say they are. On the outside looking in ... Kevin

You can do things in gmax that you can't in FSDS, and the converse is true.The ONLY program that you can use to make FS98/ CFS1/ FS2000/ CFS2/ and FS2002 aircraft is AD2000, and it has its limitations.You can't do conditional animations/displays with gmax/makemdl, you can with FSDS/SDLEdit/AA ... You can't do reflective textures with FSDS ... Granted, the included gmax tutorials and MS documentation included in FS2002 Professional are not quite enough for one person to actually create a flyable airplane in FS2002. That's where the user community quickly came to fill that information void.Both programs have a learning curve, and 14 hours may not be enough for either. HAving a 3d modeling background helps with gmax, but more and more, I've seen that modelling with gmax is NOT the problem, but rather, making sure that the parts are correctly tagged/named so that makemdl can recognize them, plus just getting the makemdl interface properly set up can be a chore.Keep at it....