Hammer and tong, bing bang bong – The tools you'll need

From FlightSim

The tools you'll use

Ok, so you've got your plans and materials, but how do you turn these into an aeroplane? You need some tools. Not the hard metal kind, the software kind. For each stage in the process you will need a different set of tools. For research, the first stage, you need nothing more than the internet, books, and perhaps a camera. For the next stages though, you need more than that...

Making the model

There are 3 main programs used to make the aircraft model.
3DSMax – Used by the pros, this program from Autodesk is the accepted industry standard for modeling. As you would expect, it is very complex, and takes months to master. Unfortunately, it costs XXXXXXXX. This means that you are unlikely to be using this program, and we won't be covering it further.

Gmax - This is also written by Autodesk, and is essentially a stripped down version of 3DSMax. It is however still very complex and powerful, and a read of the included tutorials is a must. It is free, and is also included in the FSX SDK. It is not however included in the SP1 and above SDK. This program will be covered in future tutorials here.

Flight Sim Design Studio(FSDS) – The only program built for flight simulator completely, this program was built by Louis Sinclair. It has a simplified, but still powerful, modeling capability, but it can also create animations and other flight-simulator related objects. It's main advantage over Gmax is that it can export directly to FS without any fiddling around. It costs $50, and is used by most freeware aircraft designers. We will be using it in these tutorials.