This is Muskegon County Airport (KMKG) located near the coast of Lake Michigan in Muskegon Michigan. Back in my early college days, I took PPL lessons here, so I've always considered it my "home base" when using FSX and P3d. Anyways, I started messing with afcads and one thing led to another and I'm building custom building models in google sketchup, adding photo scenery from google earth, modifying autogen placement, adding night textures, and adding road traffic on photo scenery. Pretty crazy what a person can learn by taking your time and not giving up. I've only done several aircraft repaints in the past - so this was a big step for me.

Let me know what you think - I uploaded this a few months back to avsim, but just fixed a few bugs and uploaded the latest version. You can download it here: http://library.avsim.net/esearch.php?CatID=fsxscen&DLID=185791


You can see the cloud shadows from P3d at work in the first shoot - pretty cool!








Google sketchup is pretty awesome! There is a small learning curve - but it's much easier than gmax! I spent a ton of time looking at this screen

Wow!

That looks great!

Amazing work mate, inspirational

Very nice! Thanks for sharing it.

Wow is right. Looking awesome!

Looks really good!

Thanks for the comments, guys - I also hope to add some grass around the taxi and runway edges - that should give it more "life"

Yeah amazing!

Good work.

Looks fantastic! Great job.

Rob

Awesome Matt, may I ask what you are using to get these into P3D? I have several airports and other models I've done for X-Plane and they have freeware software for placement of the objects. I, for the life of me, can't figure out what P3D uses to do this..

any assistance here is greatly appreciated...

Keep it up guy.

Pivot

Wow that's looking great Matt!

I'm kind of toying with the idea of making some POIs for my local area that Orbx left out. Nothing spectacular, just a big water tower, a clock tower, a pier, a windmill and some old WW2 sea forts, some medieval ruins, that kind of stuff... How long does it take to get to grips with Sketchup?

Cracking job and amazing for first time out!

cheers,
Lewis

Pivot - for the majority of the building placement I used Airport Design Editor (freeware) to place the buildings. This was a long and tedious task. Place the building within ADE and then check placement within P3d. Nudge building over 3 feet, check again, rinse and repeat. Over and over and over. Eventually I broke down and purchased Instant scenery 3. It supports p3d (they are expecting to release a patch for 2.3 in the next week). Much easier and you place objects "live" while in the game.




Sketchup is quite easy once you spend a little time with it. The real time sucker is creating realistic looking textures files. Sketchup makes placing them on the object very simple.
After your done with sketchup you run the object through modelconverterX (freeware) and create a mdl. and then place the mdl into a bgl.

I need your opinions. I've starting playing around with placing 3d grass objects around the edges of the taxiways. I think it looks cool, but here is my concern. KMKG has some pretty hard winters. I'm afraid this grass will look out of place during the winter months. As far as I know, there is no way to have a 3d object only show up during certain seasons within fsx/p3d. Below are two photos showing summer and then winter. I'd like to know what you think... I think it looks pretty out of place with the snow...
One "solution" I was thinking about was making the grass more yellow so that i simply looks dead in the winter and dry in the summer.

Outstanding stuff! If you need help with the textures don't hesitate to ask.

Matt, I think your brown/yellow grass is a good solution for getting around the seasonal problem.

Keep it up guy.

Pivot[/quote]
Pivot - for the majority of the building placement I used Airport Design Editor (freeware) to place the buildings. This was a long and tedious task. Place the building within ADE and then check placement within P3d. Nudge building over 3 feet, check again, rinse and repeat. Over and over and over. Eventually I broke down and purchased Instant scenery 3. It supports p3d (they are expecting to release a patch for 2.3 in the next week). Much easier and you place objects "live" while in the game.


Thanks Matt, I appreciate the reply.. I used to use Instant Scenery 2 for FSX, glad to know they have got it going on P3D now.. Will have to invest in it again.. See you on the Tarmac...



Pivot

Great work Matt. I have visited Muskegon Michigan several times during family visits to Grand Rapids. You rendition of KMKG is stunningly realistic. I can't wait to see what further improvements that you are going to make to an already perfect package.