This is my first attempt at creating scenery of any kind: buildings or terrain.  This document is provided for those interested in learning more about scenery building.

Thanks to Google, Google Earth,a growing public database of public buildings, I was able to find detailed photographs and building specifications for most Calgary downtown buildings.  I did not go to City Hall and get access to building specifications.  I suggest that if you are considering scenery design, that you search for your city and such terms as "aerial photographs", or "building specifications".


What's Important About Each Building (my order of preference):
==============================================================
- exterior texture (window and panel features)
- height
- number of floors
- length
- width
- particular architectural features that make the building distinct
- exterior colour of building

One web site in particular, gave the number of floors, building height and photographs from various perspectives.  What a bonus!  My plan was to walk through the downtown core and take digital photographs of each building, and make notes on each one, such as the number of floors.  Thanks to www.emporis.com, this information is readily available for many cities around the world.

The other two dimensions, building length and width, were approximated, based on how much of a city block a specific building took. Using a downtown city map and aerial photographs and Google Earth, I was able to work out building footprints.  I overlayed Flight Simulator with the "Canada Road System V2".  This gave me the digital city block which I used as a basis for my building footprint.  It took more than a few attempts to match the dimensioning tools in the scenery design software to the digital city block in FS.  Naturally, not all city blocks are the exact same dimension but once you have established the relationship between FS dimensions and scenery software dimensions, the rest is just simple proportions.


Building Design Concepts:
=========================
I was very concerned with frame rates, as well as personal time required in creating the look of a building.  Fortunately, the graphics available in FS are quite extensive.  At first, I went through the thumbnails and then more detailed looks at individual thumbs in graphic editors.  I suggest that you stick with what is available from within Microsoft Flight Simiulator.  Try using a little square of a roofing graphic as a wall texture, or just select the column section between windows and use that as a wall or roof texture.  Think outside the box.

It took me a while to figure out a good building block unit. This became the critical step in building design: determining the unit of building construction for that particular building.  This is why at the top of my list is "exterior texture".  You have to forget about standard construction and think about the "skin" that you are applying to your building block.  Think more in terms of a lego-type exterior with photographs on the outside face of each block.  Now stretch that block based on the number of windows (both horizontally and vertically).  A 24 floor building 80 meters by 80 meters may consist of 8 blocks.  It may consist of 1200. It changes with each building and correlates directly to the graphic used for the exterior.  I usually did three floors at a time, so I chose graphics with three floors of windows in it.  In some cases, I even counted the number of windows on a particular floor and matched the number of windows.  Sometimes it took 5 or more construction blocks to make a floor.



Scenery Design Help:
====================
Again, Internet search engines are your friend.  Here's a list of URLs that I used to research.  I make no claims that any of these are the best, only what I found.

www.scenery.org/design.htm
www.freeflightdesign.com
www.flightsimnetwork.com/webads/design.htm



Tools of the Trade:
===================
What's available next week, next year and compatiblity with future versions of FS are topics totally beyond the scope of this document. Different types of scenery software, especially the shareware versions, have different levels of maturity.  When I attempted to use newer tools such as GMAX, there was little documentation available.  I'm sure that I would be able to find more useful help files, now.  As such, I stuck to older scenery software, called NOVASIM, which had an excellent tutorial.  Unfortunately, the developer is no longer supporting this software.  Such is the nature of shareware.  Below is a general list of software types, you may need.


Scenery Software:
=================
Most of the URLs listed above, have links to available software.  There are always new tools and new ways of doing design.  Here's a general list, based on types:

Scenery Creation:
  - both shareware and commercial are available

Scenery Conversion Software:
  - some sort of compiler or utility that converts scenery files to FS compatible BGL files.

Graphic Programs:
  - creating/editing bit maps

Conversion Programs:
  - converting BMP and other graphic format files to FS compatible.


Changing the Landscape -- Terrain Editing:
==========================================
It just seems a natural progression to make the lakes and rivers around any building scenery more realistic.  In the case of Calgary, the original Bow River in FS9 looked more like a lake.  I couldn't even place the buildings in their proper location.  I relied a lot on Google Earth which allowed me to save an area to a JPG file.  Setting the altitude to 15 miles (24 km) and then capturing a large area of terrain is about the upper limit, depending on the quality of the image provided by Google.  It takes a graphics editor or a graphic conversion program to turn the JPG into a BMP file (a requirement of the terrain editing software that I used). I also needed the NW and SW coordinates of the image which Google Earth also provides.  I used Ground2K4 which is not the easiest program to understand but after some experimentation gave me the results I was looking for.  I probably spent about 6 hours figuring out how to make it compile without error and exclude any original rivers and shorelines.  It all seems so easy now.

