I thought I understood the Fly!2 scenery system pretty well, but this really amazes me. It's wonderful of course, but how does that flat texture image work? Is it mapped to a transparent vertical flat surface, or what?I think we need another tutorial...

Frank,Thanks for sharing this with us. I can imagine how many hours you have spent to create this jewel ..Br's, Marc

Excellent, Remarkable, Outstanding, Awesome, Spectacular, Superb, Earth Shaking, Mind Blowing, Supreme, Breath Taking, Paramount, Astounding, Unparalleled, Flabbergasting.Truly, steroidal eye candy. Love it.blkwlsn

Ditto! to the above post`sBUT DOUBLE THAT, This scenery is a must have for the fly communityAs soon as it comes out I`ll be in the download line Awaiting my turn!!!! This is truley AWSESOMEJeff Akins:-eek :-beerchug

For Your information, a brief description how I proceed to design the scenery.In attachment screenshots of horizon textures designed this week.Best Regards,Frank* Collect information about the airport (E.g. Orthogonal aereal color photo, other color photo's, charts, ...)* The ground textures. In a 2D drawing program (E.g. Paint Shop Pro) I prepared texture tiles from the large orthogonal photograph of EBKT. I divided the lage photo in smaller tiles of 256x256 pixels. I saved all the textures as ".tiff" (256 colors) into the ART folder of Fly!2. In a scenery design program (Terramodels 2.2 from Allen Kriesmann) I start a new project (E.g. EBKT). I used the complete aereal photo of EBKT as background image. For each tile: Using the "Create an irregular ground poly" option, I defined a ground polygon (256x256 pix). I assigned the appropriate tile texture to it. I selected the "Non-Z buffered" option for those polygons to make them appear in Fly!2. (Fly!2 version 2.5.240 has the possibility to display polygons as Non-Z buffered) I saved the project, and the resulting files go into the DATA and MODEL folder of Fly!2.* The horizon textures. In a drawing program (E.g. Paint Shop Pro) I prepared textures from photographs. The area's I want to be transparant in Fly!2, need to be colored black (R=0, G=0 B=0) (E.g. for the sky). I saved the textures as ".bmp" 512 x 512 pixels and 256 colors. In a 3D design program (E.g. Zmodeler) I defined the rectangular 2D shapes for the horizon. I assigned the textures to the horizon 2D shape. 5UV mapping) I exported the result as ".smf" file. The resulting files go into the MODEL folder of Fly!2. In a graphis convertor (E.g. Fly graphics from Franck Racis): I converted the bmp. textures to RAW format. The resulting files go into the ART folder of Fly!2. In a text editor (E.g notepad) I make a ".mdl" file to allow the editor in Fly to represent the 3D objects. I save this file in the DATA folder of Fly!2.* Positioning of the textures in Fly!2. In Fly!2 I go into the editor: I add and place the objects into the scenery and save my work. The editor creates an appropriate scenery file in the DATA folder of Fly!2.* The taxiways. In the root directory of Fly!2 is a subdirectory "Taxiway", containing a magnificient taxiway editor. The resulting files go into the data folder.

Flat textures or no, these horizon shots are absolutely stunning!I hope that many others will use your technique!Thanks so much for documenting it here.

FrankYour results are truly outstanding.This reply should be saved as a tutorial somewhere before the images disappear ( 6 weeks?)Thanks again. Can't wait for you scenery upload :-)Ben