Im afraid you're out of luck if you expect imediate great results. Its taken me over three years to get to the point where I am just happy with what I'm producing. Although the move from Eod is largely responsible for this.
There are two schools of thought regarding beginners & Gmax. One is that you learn Eod and build up experience on that before moving to Gmax. The other that you dive straight into gmax.
I would go for the Gmax route, you have had a go at aircraft design so you must have at least a small amount of 3d design experience. If you go for the EoD route to be honest you're on a dead end route. IMHO the experience gained with EoD is of no use when moving to Gmax, its a different kettle of fish. You will certainly get frustrated with the limitations EoD (Ie no animations [which I believe you like] to name just one) & if that wasn't enough the scenery made with EoD will not be compatible with FS10 - which believe me will be apon us before you are even thinking of releasing the scenery.
Ideally I'd like to be able to make visually stunning replacement airports, but I need to get past the first few stumbling blocks.
lol! touche :) But with a low FPS impact ;)
-> Gmax with FS2004 Gmax GamepackSDK - & add MDLcommander to add options for tweaking etc. Export objects produced as FS9 scenery MDL.
-> Place MDL with ObplacerXML for testing. For release compile your objects into an XML library & swap the obplacer entries to call from this.
-> Lay taxiways etc with AFCAD2, Excludebuilder2 for exluding default buildings, Ground2k4 to lay underlay polygons, creatsign to lay airport signage, EZ-landclass for landclass, Treeplanter to plant trees.
But above all & perhaps the first thing to do is to get hold of some pictures of the buildings to make textures. Otherwise you're stuffed!!! If possible get hold of some sort of photoscenery package for the area - makes it a lot easier to scale & place things accurately.
Birdy
