Well Birdy, scenery design is an individual thing but here's what I do.
I've made the whole of my Kai Tak using FSSC and EOD. The only alternative for EOD that I would have looked at would have been GMax but I I played with the tutorials, made a pretty bl**dy useless mace and then decided I wanted to get on with the scenery and the rest of my life. I was creating custom objects like the clappers in EOD in half the time it would have taken me to find out how to change the scale and colour of that beedin' mace
I admire anyone who has stuck with GMax and is creating stuff - really. I know quite a few have
I have used published photos only - no scale drawings, no maps, no plans. Then I've created objects solely by eye - estimating the proportions and using a variable scale makes it easy to slot them into the scenery pretty accurately. Remember, NO-ONE will view them as critically as you do - if you think they look right, they ARE right. (Let em go and do their own scenery if they're not happy
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I've used a few textures taken from photos but remember that you have to correct for parallax - often it's easier and more effective to create textures from scratch by hand.
To do that, progs like PaintShop Pro and PhotoShop aren't suitable - you need something like CorelDraw which is what I use. I create a 256x256 or more likely a 512x512 texture layout as a 24bit bmp in CorelDraw, export it to PaintShop Pro and then adjust it by adding weathering, night and seasonal effects where necessary.
I keep the 24 bit bmp as a master (I add the subscript N to the name eg objectN.bmp), make an alpha if it's to be an extended bmp (called objectA.bmp) and convert it to its final format either as an 8 bit palletted or an extended bmp (called object.bmp). Then of course you have the night time series (objectN_lm etc) and seasonals (object_fa.bmp, object_sp.bmp etc). But using my system it's all organised and you know exactly where you are ???
I find FSSC a great piece of software. I started with Airport but had more problems which I easily solved when I switched. BUT this is a personal thing. In any event, until I decide to do many more projects, I see no need to move away from this excellent Freeware software.
Then of course there's AFCAD. You can't design for FS2002 and expect your scenery to work immediately in 2004 - unless you're lucky. And vice-versa in my experience. And AFCAD2 is going to make things even more tricky with it's ability to modify aprons and taxiways. Integrating a prog like FSSC with AFCAD is currently tricky - Lee Swordy says so and I believe him
Personally I think the way to go will be for the full design progs like FSSC to incorporate the taxiway/apron mod features that AFCAD has and to stick with AFCAD solely for the AFD file changes. Maybe that is what Lee has in mind for AFCAD - to become a super FSSC with full design capabilities. Personally I like a proper graphical interface and I don't like Lee's idea of using flatten and exclusion switches. I like to SEE what I'm doing in front of me.
Anyway, there ya go. Like I said, it's an individual thing - that's why sceneries are so diverse and fascinating.
But remember one thing (this'll get the aircraft designers' backs up!). There is no shortage of excellent aircraft out there (I'm glad to say 8) ) but there is still a dearth of fine scenery and probably always will be. And it's the scenery that mainly makes the sim - after all, most of the time you're flying a panel and looking out over the top of it at scenery
Roger
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