Tools are better than thumbs.
I'm probably coming late to the party here, but there's some really cool stuff over at SceneryDesign.org, a nice little site put together by 3rd party scenery gurus Arno and Nick. It's got tools, documented formats and a wiki for all of your Flight Simulator scenery creation needs.
In some ways, seeing these sites really depresses me. I think it's an amazing thing for Flight Simulator and the community, but I just wish we had all those tools in house. I'll be honest, for a very long time, the ACES group was lousy with tools. And I mean ABSOLUTELY LOUSY!!! When given the choice between creating a tool to make people's lives easier and implementing a feature, we always chose the feature. This led to a rather nonrobust toolset, and anyone who creates add-on scenery can attest to that. However, there's just no way to create a game or simulator to today's standards without a really robust toolset. And I think we're finally starting to get it here. We now have a dedicated tools group within ACES that are making some really cool things happen for us. I'm hoping that this gets carried over into any SDK releases we do in the future.
There's a neat link to Jim Keir's LWMViewer2 on Scenery Design. A great concept, being able to open a scenery file from FS2004 and view it easily and edit it no less. I must admit, our very own model viewer is a bit clumsy and not at all optimized for quickly and easily viewing models. It's called Flight Simulator. Hey Jim, we do have a tools position open on the Flight Simulator team. [;)]
