Align background image in 3D editor
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This tutorial describes how you can get a background image properly aligned in your 3D editor, like GMax. By having it aligned properly you can use it to trace aprons and taxiways or to position your objects correctly. So let's get started!
Getting the image
The first step obviously is to get your background image. I can not tell you where to get them for your airport or country, there are just too many differences per county. But I can tell you what kind of background image you need.
Most import is that you get an image in geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude WGS84). This is the same requirement as for images used in resample to make photorealistic terrain scenery. So if you image is in another projection, you first need to reproject it. Most GIS applications can do this for you. Look at this tutorial if you want to use FWTools for it.
Another constraint is that you don't want a very high resolution image. If you have a 10000x10000 pixel image your 3D editor will most like not be able to work efficiently with it. So a slightly lower resolution is not that bad.
The image on the right shows an example background image for the airport Drachten in the Netherlands. You can see there are some back edges on the image, that is because I had to reproject it from the local Dutch projection to WGS84. I will use this image in the rest of the tutorial.
