I'm building an airport, and need to find a scenery creator that fits my needs. FSSC might work, but I'm not sure.I am going to be using some aerial photo's, custom buildings and textures, a new apron, etc. Can FSSC use aerial photo's as a background? Also, anyone ever make a tumbleweed macro!? ;)

If you're going to be using an aerial photograph, I wou ld recommend getting Photo Scenery Maker. It has pretty good capabilities and I have had no bad luck with this program at all.Bitmap calibration is easy too. Unlike most which require only the NW and SE bounding coord. numbers, Photo Scenery Maker can use a "two-point" calibration feature when the bounding coordinates are unknown. By this, all you need to do is get the coordinates of two given location on the bitmap in a NW/SE fashion, and input them as directed in the readme.As for aprons, I would recommend AFCAD 2.21. It has a very well detailed Readme/help file to assist you with whatever you plan on doing.Custom buildings? gmax. It is often overlooked because of its very steep learning curve, but once you finally master it, you'll be wanting to do the entire world with it (I speak from experience. I struggled for virtually a year with gMax... Couldn't master it at all, until I read the gamepacks SDK tutorials that came with the SDK downloads. Ever since I've been able to do almost everything in terms of building design.)You'll also need BGLCOMP from the FS2004 SDK.

I agree with the suggestions above. If you are starting scenery design for Fs2004, I would not advice you to start using the old Fs2000/Fs2002 tools (unless there are no better tools of course).So using the mesh scenery techniques to place the photo is probably the best choice. Besides Photo Scenery Maker, I would also suggest SBuilder here, especially if you want to add roads, lakes, etc later on.For extending airports AFCAD is indeed a good suggestion. For placing object I would suggest an object placer like Rwy12 or ObPlacer XML. And for custom objects GMax is indeed the best choice (only tool (at the moment) that can produce the Fs2004 MDL format).