You already have an F/A-18A made, why not translate it into FSX?
heh, funny question... the quick answer: something you model for rendering an animation, Computer Graphics (cg) movie, or a detailed still shot is very different than something you'd use in a game, due to, making it simple, the number of polygons.
ROUGHLY speaking, and i just cant be precise on any of the informations im gonna say, a game airplane model might have around 10.000 to 100.000 polygons. my f-18 already have around 2.500.000 polygons, without meshsmooth. an average/good computer would handle it, without textures, shading effects, nothing, just the plane model, less than 30fps, inside the 3d application's viewport. if i apply 3 levels of meshsmooth into it (standard to rendering) well, you do the math, for each smooth level, every polygon gets divided in 4. if im not wrong, that would result 160 million polygons. no game, no matter the computer, could handle it. even without all the smoothing, just the 2 million polygons plus high res uncompressed textures, plus the game graphics shading effects, im sure it wouldnt get any faster than about half a frame per second.
this is all rough information, my plane is far from done, i dont have landing gears, wells detailing, cockpit, weapons, etc. the tiny details are yet to come, so im pretty sure the model can, and will pass 10 million polygons unsmoothed.
the long answer: even the way you model those two is different. for example, when modeling a game model, you'll make everything as you gonna see in action, while when you model for rendering, you have to make everything thinking of the way the smooth modifier will make it look. that means lots of extra subdivisions , even on flat surfaces, where you'd need only one polygon for a game obj.
thats the difference between them. (thats only the polycount difference) and thats why games graphics differ from cg movies. a game can render a complex scene in a fraction of second, well, at least 30 renders (frames) per second, while rendering a single frame of a whole scene from a movie can take hours, even days (probably if you were going to render a frame from Avatar on a home gaming computer, it would take a week, thats why they have render farms with hundreds of computers working together), but in that case, many other variables count, like raytracing, global illumination, anti aliasing (that goes way beyond games 2x 4x 8x AA) etc.
to sum it up, when you make something for a cg animation, you want to make it look as closer to reality as possible, (trust me, in some cases, you cant tell if its real or cg) while when making something for a game, you have to deal with limitations, and make it not kill your frame rate.
hope that im clear enough, and that i didnt miss the point, though its kinda hard, since this is a very abrangent subject, and also im about to fall asleep in this chair
ps.: check this pic
http://www.lucbegin.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Luc_Begin_The_portrait-cgs2.jpgthis is CG, thats the level or reality cg artists want to achieve, and thats what i want for my hornet lol
cheers mate
