Hi Doug,
Just saw your PM, I was flying in FSX
I started FSX again to build a little example, to show you what is, in my opinion, one of the only points left that can still be improved in your screenshot above: the angle of view.
Your screenshot, in its actual form, is really great and I like it a lot:
- the choice of aircraft is cool, this plane is well detailled and has nice textures. The yellow is a bit classic, perhaps you should give a try to the cream/red variant too!
- the sky/meteo is outstanding.
- the sun "glare" is just cool. The ligthing in this shot almost makes it look like a real picture.
- the scenery, only water here, is very good too: the water color is realistic, the waves look fantastic, and you won't get problems like blurries or poor scenery objects/autogen in such a case.
- the quality of the graphics could be improved, since we can see a bit of aliasing (visible pixels on the edge of the plane), but it's ok.
So in the end, the angle of view in this shot is very good, because it shows so much stuff, it creates a good composition. The only problem is that the plane is in the perfect center of the picture, which is too much classic, kind of boring. This is, I think, the only thing that makes you unhappy about this shot.
Now, I will show you a concrete example of what we've been discussing in our previous message: the "off-centered" aircraft
Take a look at my shot, I did it quite quickly, and made a very poor attempt at creating the same screenshot as you did, but I was completely unable to get a sunglare as impressive as yours, and my water was not so good-looking either (I guess I was too high
)...
Can you see the difference ? It looks much more like a picture taken by somebody, not just an external view classic screenshot. What I did is:
- switch to the "special" view, with the S key. I went to the view that show the plane from aside
- switch to "Tail" view mode, by pressing A a couple of times
- moved the view point on the right, by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER for quite a long time, until I got more or less a similar angle as you had.
- moved the view direction to place the plane in an interesting part of the picture (typically off center, at 1/3 of the picture width)
- adjusted the zoom level to get more interesting proportions and adjsusted the view position again accordingly, to find a good general balance
And that's the result.
Tell me what you think about that ?
