I’ve spent the past few weeks learning how to build scenery for the neXt simulator. If you haven’t tried neXt I highly recommend giving it a shot. It is, without a doubt, the most realistic RC heli simulator I’ve ever used (and I’ve used all of the top applications). It is so good that I decided it was worth my time to try to recreate our local flying field in the simulator. The developer provided some basic documentation for the process, but there were a lot of gaps to fill (due to my inexperience with Blender, mostly). I had never taken proper panoramic photos. I didn’t even know what a panoramic tripod head was. Cut to today… I built my own panoramic head (I’ll blog about this soon), I’ve gotten good at creating panoramic photos, and I can work my way around blender pretty well (at least for the purposes of creating a proper 3D scene).