Importing building models from non-MSFS web sites

I have just spent the better part of a week on a project to replace some landmark buildings in San Francisco; the Asobo stock scenery had modeled all of these structures as apartment blocks or towers, and I strongly dislike the Bing photogrammetry, as it makes everything at ground level look like half-melted wax. I much prefer vector graphics. I targeted the following structures for upgrades: Coit Tower, the Mt. Sutro TV antenna tower, the Ferry Building, the De Young Museum, the California Academy of Sciences Museum, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, and the Palace of Fine Arts. I started this project knowing absolutely nothing about importing building models that aren't already in the Asobo Object Libraries; I had assistance from several sources to learn the workflow, and it's not as difficult as you might think, if you have already found a source for pre-made models.

But sadly, I found out that most of the building models I was trying to use were no good. They were all accurate as to size and shape, but they were useless for my purpose because they are modeled in solid colors and don't come with photo-realistic texture files. This is a critical flaw; one of the buildings imports into MSFS as solid black, and even after tinkering with the color palette in ModelConverter-X, I couldn't fix it, and had to delete it from the project (this was the Palace of the Legion of Honor building). The De Young Museum and Academy of Sciences came in as solid brown and featureless. Only Coit Tower and the Palace of Fine Arts were 'useable' - Coit Tower because the color palette is a close match for the real thing, and the Palace of Fine Arts came with over 130 PNG texture files that make it look really nice. I wish I could tell you how to paste photogrammetry images on top of a vector model, but that's not in my skill set, yet. I do know from the file description, that the model of the Palace of Fine Arts that I downloaded from the Trimble 3D-Warehouse, was made with photogrammetry from Google Earth, so I know it's possible, I just done know how (yet).

So the main lesson I want to convey is: don't bother importing architectural assets into an MSFS Scenery Design project unless they come with photo-realistic texture files. Buildings modeled with solid colors might be okay if you never overfly them below 2,000 feet AGL, but if your goal is to import a 'landmark' building that you can 'visit' at ground level and walk around, or overfly at very low altitude, you are wasting your time unless it comes with texture files. It's always irritated me that Asobo never included Coit Tower, the Ferry Building, the TransAmerica Pyramid, the Palace of Fine Arts, and the Sutro TV Tower as realistic models. Those are arguably the most famous landmarks in San Francisco, and in the stock scenery, they're modeled as apartment buildings.