Howto:Make nice screenshots

In this howto I will explain how to make nice screenshots in FlightGear. This is helpfull for those who want to advertise FGFS on other sim-related forums or on booths around the world.

Basics to know

Good pictures has to appeal us in some way: like telling a story, an unexpected subject of the photo, interesting point of view.... Good pictures let us look more than 1 second on it, let us search for more details, let us think about how the photographer made it, maybe inspires us to make it ourself.... Good pictures are done technically mostly correct, when the qualitity is correct, the colors are right, the composition is good....

The part of to composite a picture is difficult to explain- so I suggest you to read instead tutorials and explanations given on many thousands sites on the web like this Composition_(visual_arts.

Qualitity

A good virtual picture needs a good quality. That means:

-use of AntiAliasing

-appealing/ true colors

-size of the picture- not too small, not to big

-no Gui/Menu/ FrameRateCounter etc. visible

-full effects

This means you need a decent computer with middle - good specs. At least you should able to run FGFS with fluent fps with high AA-settings. Some people don't have this, so there is another solution proposed by Melchior Franz:[1]

How to get some unusual/ interesting views

To get some ideas, I suggest to look on the many Aircraft Image Pages around the web like Airliners.net etc. It will give you some ideas.

Air to Air

-Helicopter View: This assumes that you are in a virtual, not visible helicopter beside the aircraft. You are alway flying level. With the mouse you can choose the position of the "helicopter"

-Chase View: This assumes you are chasing the aircraft. It is very similar to the first one.

-Chase View with jaw: also chasing the aircraft, but the virtual camera doesn't turn with the aircraft. Try and switch between them to see what you more like. (I prefer Chase view). Play with position of the camera. As an example if the aircraft is turning and banking make shot from the wing to the aircraft to the ground. Or while approaching the rwy from behind the aircraft.

Ground to Air

For this we use the Tower view and Tower View look from. This assumes that the virtual camera is on the Airport Tower, ca. 30ft above the airport level. You can choose via the Menu which airport is used. That's nice, but limited.

Anders Gidenstam made a nice little helping nasalscript, with you can choose the tower position on the ground via mouse-click. You can grab it here. Copy the code between the <property-list>-tags and put in somewhere of your preferences.xml. Now with Ctr + LMB-Click somewhere on the scenery you can set the Tower-view position. It is still ca. 30ft above the airport level- assuming you are virtual walking in the scenery, you can change the line

setprop(tower ~ "/altitude-ft", 30 + MtoFT * click_pos.alt());                

to

setprop(tower ~ "/altitude-ft", 6.5 + MtoFT * click_pos.alt());

Factor of View (FoV)

You can change this by pressing X/x-key or using the Mouse-wheel in View-mode. The FoV is per default set to 55 (degrees).

Increasing the Factor you get wide angle up to 120 degrees. That's interesting as it covers a whole part of the scenery but also seems to make Objects appear far away. So use it for showing large parts of sceneries, or long Aircrafts etc...

Decreasing the Factor you get a narrow angle and a Zoom-Effect. This means you can take fa away objects close to you. An interesting effect is, that it also makes the background more "dense".