Hey folks, until now, I've only been programming c++ and went into some OpenGL. But due to some work circumstances I have to deal with some visual "arts" as well. What I wanna do: I want high detail aircraft gauges. E.g. the ones you can find in a flight sim, only with a lot more detail. First I tried to take pictures but somehow the light effects didn't match and also the scaling was out of sink. Therefore I thought: Hey lets open up good old Paint and try painting those gauges yourself. Don't worry it didnt take me long to realize that this was the wrong approach. Now I am here. What tool do you recommend me to use for this kind of purpose? I am also thinking maybe going into 3D, so that I have moving switches, buttons etc. My main problem is however, I have never done anythink like that before. Thank you in advance for your help cherio Woltan

for 2d graphics you could use vector drawing application like Inkscape, for 3d you could use Blender3d. both are free.

The key difficulty, i think, will be attaining the level of detail you want. You can make a very high res image with the perfect shape, but without the proper level of texture detail it wouldnt quite work. Perhaps if you tried to combine the material imagery of whatever you photographed with the image you come up with. That might help.