From a post (4/2/03: Background Image Scaling Instructions) on the forum that might be useful for many people:
Here's a quick and dirty way to get the
correct scaling.
In FS, locate the area that you want to take a snapshot of. Go to mapview and
view at the desired altitude so that the screen contains all that you want to
capture. Note down the latitude and longitude of the airplane. Maximize the
mapview by pressing "W". Take a snapshot of the screen by pressing Alt+PrtScr
In FSSC, create a new scenery with the latitude and longitude as the scenery
center. Create a new runway with a 90deg geographic rotation at X=Y=0. For
"Placement", select "Runway center". Export the scenery.
Go back to FS, restart FS or refresh the FS scenery by opening the Scenery
Library window and pressing OK. Go to the exact same place as you were before
(if you restarted FS, it would be a good idea to load the "Previous Flight"
scenario. Take another snapshot (this time with the runway).
In a graphics program (such as paint), open the image with the runway and
determine the length of the runway in pixels. In paint, one of the status panels
at the bottom of the window has the current mouse position. Since your runway is
horizontal, you want to take the first of the two numbers.
Now, the scaling factor of the image is: length of runway in meters (from FSSC)
divided by the number of pixels as determined above. Use this as the Zoom factor
in the Background image box with as many decimal places as possible. For the
background image, select the first file you created (without the runway).
Derek
FSSC Help Desk
Alternatively:
Firstly I set up a new scenery project in FSSC with it's centre co-ordinates roughly where I want to build the scenery. I then place two reference macro objects in the scenery (I use a cooling tower macro I've developed) compile it and install it in FS. Then when I slew to the location in FS the two reference macros are present. Therefore when I take the top down screen shot it also includes the reference objects. All I do then is import the image into FSSC and fiddle about until the macro place holders line up with the reference objects in the image! I can place scenery pretty accurately.
Regards,
Paul Derbyshire
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