Great X Plane 11 Scenery – Make Your World AMAZING in JUST a Few Minutes.
X Plane 11 Scenery Addons.
X Plane 11 Scenery has always been good until Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 was released and it made everything else a but lacking in the scenery department. At least this is the opinion of many!
You can gave some pretty amazing scenery in X Plane 11 even now! You can choose from a lot of amazingly good freeware software packages that update both airports and towns as well as surrounding countryside. There are some great scenery artists like MRX6 and many others and its general all available on X Plane.org. Their passion means we get near professional packages at the cost of a few minutes searching.
Payware X Plane 11 Scenery
Payware scenery is pretty amazing with thousands of square miles or kilometers faithfully created with new meshes giving the topography an accuracy and realism generally not found in freeware packages.
These packages from big companies like ORBX and small ones like Prop Strike Studios to name a couple off the cuff create amazingly realistic Airports, matching towns and landscapes. Flying over the Orbx True Earth Washington or Florida scenery is amazing as I have these. They are not cheap but they are fantastic. I would say get a big hard drive and wait for the sales when you can get packages cheaper.
Download Freeware X Plane 11 Scenery.
Install X Plane 11 Freeware Scenery Add ons.
X Plane 11 has a number of fantastic scenery creators giving us amazing FREEWARE airports as well as surrounding countryside plus towns and cities. There are some really talented people out there. We can get a lot of our scenery requirements from X Plane.org which is a great X Plane 11 Resource. THere are also other things like aircraft, scenery object libraries and plugins to help improve our flight simulator.
Lets find some X Plane 11 Freeware Scenery!
Scenery is quite easy to download and install. There are a few steps so lets go through these together so you can install your own scenery easily with this scenery tutorial. Head over to XPLANE.org and search the Scenery Menu.
Vancouver City 1.0.0 By CanadaforXplane
I have chosen Vancouver which is a City scape update for the base X Plane 11. This also has an additional Airport download in the description you can also add if you wish. We will concentrate on just installing the City update so you can see the process. There are some Scenery add ons that require more work with orth scenery but not this one so lets do an easy one first. You can hit the download button now if you wish! DOWNLOAD HERE!
Additional Requirements Libraries.
In the graphic below which is the bottom of the download page you can see some additional information for your scenery download.
There are some Libraries to download to ensure your scenery looks correctly. I will Link to the scenery libraries and you can download them along with the City scenery. These just need to be extracted and we will put them into the correct scenery folder soon. Download the MRX Library here
You can click the DOWNLOAD button and then select the second file which will then download to your downloads folder on your computer. If you haven’t already done it also download the MRX scenery Library HERE which will also go to your downloads folder. We will install them together. If you want to you can also download the OPTIONAL Payware Vancouver Airport HERE.
This is PAYWARE so it will cost you $24. You DO NOT need to download this if you don’t want to. If you do it will be downloaded to the Downloads folder. We can install all three files together. The Vancouver Will download, and you can watch its progress here in the task bar at the bottom left hand of our screen. When its Complete we will Open it.
Unzip and Install Scenery.
Now its Time to firstly Unzip your files then place them in your X Plane 11 Custom Scenery folder. You can get Z-ZIP Here to unzip your compressed files for free! You can see the Zipped File as well as the Extracted files for Vancouver below. Copy this file and if you needed the MrX Scenery file repeat the sequence extracting it as well. I already have it so I have not downloaded it.
Place Files into: X Plane 11 Custom Scenery Folder
Here we are pasting the scenery from the Downloads Folder into our X Plane 11/Scenery/Custom scenery folder. Once in position the main install is complete.
Start X Plane then EXIT.
This step is not always needed if your just installing an airport for example of an aircraft. Here its important is when there are also libraries needing to be installed and ortho tiles. Ortho tiles are photo scenery that sits under the buildings in order.
X Plane 11 Scenery Structure – Scenery.INI file
The Scenery.ini file is a configuration file that is in your C:\X Plane 11Scenerycustom scenery folder.
It determines what is on top of another. You should have Airports on the top of the INI list then Scenery Libraries then Ortho tiles them Meshes. Meshes are the bone structure of the landscape giving us hills and mountains.
The Fruits of your Work!
The new scenery files can be both amazing or subtle improvements on the default X Plane 11 scenery. In this case the scenery is improved with a bridge being added and more buildings through the city. Not seen are a number of Orthophoto scenery tiles added in the mountains giving snow peaks and more detail.
It’s pretty easy to see the improvements when the pictures are side by side. It’s a marked improvement in the city with much more buildings and the addition of the bridge.
I hope you have found this tutorial helpful. The steps are generally pretty easy. Additional steps are adding Libraries which I will cover in an upcoming post as well as Aircraft Download and installing. Gunnie. – LetsFlyVFR YouTube Channel
Author.
Brendon McAliece is a multi lingual-expat who brings over three decades of flight simulator/PC building experience as well as over two decades of real world jet fighter experience as a weapons/egress technician.
He holds a sport pilot certificate giving him real world flying experience. Hi travels have taken him from Europe to the Middle East, Asia and his home of Australia.
He has a passion for travel, languages, flight simulation as well as guitaring and coffee. You can read more in his blogs below.
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