The screen capture above, titled “Icefield in sight”, represents a virtual flight using the FSX platform. A combination of FSGRW and REX has been used to improve the cloud effects.
As the basic FSX program does not offer a very realistic representation of clouds, it is necessary to get better cloud sets from a third party provider. In the present screen capture, the clouds are a creation of REX, through their Texture Direct and Soft Clouds used in combination.
It is one thing to have access to realistic clouds but you also need a good weather engine. This engine will download real-weather data and, if you wish, will update it every few minutes when you fly.
Many weather engines are available. In the above picture, I used FSGRW (PILOT’S version 1.7, build 29).
To represent the mountains and the icefield, ORBX creations like SAK, Vector and Open LC Canada-Alaska were used. The DC-3 livery is available as a free download from major sites like FlightSim.com or AVSIM .
Last point: when you take a screen capture, it is possible to use a photo editing software (there are many good ones on the market) to slightly improve a particular aspect of the picture. It takes very little effort to learn how to use few basic functions that will enhance your captures.
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