Scenery Design

[Guest mothergoose]

My New Friends, I am working on a detailed scenery project for 3GM. The Default scenery has this particular airfield layed out all wrong!.. Question: Without spending a ton of cash on this thing, Which is the better program to use. Question: How detailed should my scenery update be?I have began to collect GPS co-ordinates for various areas of the airfield. BUT - my gps gives me info in this format: 49-01.522N086-09.634W My particular problem with this is - FSSC and a couple of others will not allow me to enter the co-ordinates in this detailed fashion. This can in some cases skew my positions of buildings, etc. Do I need 4 corner GPS co-ordinates for objects?Thanks, I know this is long, But I wanna do this right, and have been given complete access to the field to gather information.Mark+

[bob.bernstein 0]

Mark, there are many ways to do work on scenery. It sounds like you've already got FSSC, which is a great tool...as long as you have it, certainly use it. Its as good or better than the other options and its free.Coordinate conversions are very easy...your gps gives you degrees-minutes. The relationships are 60 minutes makes a degree. 60 seconds makes a minute. you can take the minutes, eg 01.522, and divide it by 60, and take that result and add it to the degrees and you'll have a decimal degree only conversion. ( in this example 49 degrees and 1.522minutes is converted into degrees by deviding the 1.522 by 60 which gives you .025, adding that to 49 gives you the result of 49.025 degrees. or if you want seconds from what you showed, take the decimal portion of the minutes, eg .522, and multiply it by 60, and thats your seconds. (.522*60=31.32..so expressing your reading in degrees:minutes:seconds equals 49:01:31.32)FS uses geographic, latitude-longitude projection with the wgs84 datum. The gps I've used did not syncronize at all with that projection, so I'd be VERY careful trying to use that data. Perhaps a better source of information might be aerial photography, you can download free aerial photos at 1m/pixel resolution (sometimes 10 years old) that will show the building locations. You can use this photo as a backdrop in fssc and get pretty good placement for buildings. Another free program some folks like is ground2k. Its primary value is in changing the ground as its name implies. With it you can draw new rivers, or lakes, or shorelines, or roads...and also you can place patches of new landuse imagry (called landclass). Other folks like to totally replace the ground with your own covering, using photographs. That's done with the MS sdk tools (free).The cool thing about scenery design is you don't have to get it right the first time. Everything is adjustable, even after the fact. I'd focus on making changes that you enjoy, and using the fewest new tools as possible for you to make progress. Learning the design techniques and learning the tools is sometimes two different challenges, and learning more than one tool can make that even more difficult. The process is a lot of fun if you let it be, and I've seen some people get pretty stressed over it...don't be one of them.Making your own objects is one of the things people like to do, and the free tools most used are GMAX and EOD. There is payware avaiable too for this, fsdsv2 and NOVA....but I use free whenever it works well. GMAX may be the hardest to use, but once you get the hand of it its a ton of fun to operate. My 9 year old is making cool houses with GMAX, but he's not picked up texturing yet and he's been playing with it for a bit, but it shows what can be done if you look at it without feeling stressed...like a kid looks at these things...he sees it as a cool toy, and therefore he learns at a magnificent rate. Making textures will be something you'll want to do if you make your own buildings, and a graphics program along with a digital camera come in handy there.Its wasn't clear to me where you're at with FSSC, and whether you are ready to go "whole hog" or whether you'd be best to make a nice FSSC layout and leave it at that for now...you make that call. If its the latter, you'll still be able to correct the errors of runway and tarmac, and fssc includes a lot of premade objects you can place to make a very nice airport.Best of luck!Bob Bernstein

[Guest mothergoose]

Bob, Thanks for the assist. I look forward to digging in my heels and seeing what I can accomplish. I'll keep you posted and also probably look for more answers.Thanks,Mark+