Progress so far with Jersey..what have I learned?

Here's just a summary of what I've gained from looking at Jersey so far..

1. There are loads of tools out there to help make making scenery relatively easy!
• Google Earth
• FSX_KML
• SBuilderX
• FSEarthTiles
2. Once you know the right 'flow' using these tools to produce some of your own scenery is very straightforward.
3. Water masks, blend masks and transparency are easy to do, even for a beginner.
4. Terrain is slightly more difficult, but for most areas you can easily buy a ready to use off the shelf mesh.  For those where it isn't available, people will get it for you, but at a cost.
• I did look briefly on the net for the possibility of extracting Google Earth's elevation data and using it in FSX.  From my brief look it seems that it is possible but may require a bit of scripting ability in order to get the data efficiently.  That is unfortunately far beyond the scope of what I was intending to do here, so I'm not actively looking at that, but it might be an avenue to look at later. If anyone already knows how to do this I'd appreciate an email please!

With this scenery I've completed the following..

• excluded and recreated accurate water masks, over several QMID 11 areas.
• used an already available DEM file to create more accurate terrain levels.
• created detailed photoscenery to sit on top of that accurate terrain.
• included water transparency effects which are blended out into the normal FSX ocean.

I've also learned some things by making mistakes!

I tried to make the new terrain bgl active before changing the water masks and it seems that terrain is squashed by existing default water masks.  Now I've figured it out it seems obvious but I wondered why it didn't work at the time.

Also, when I was adding the new water masks, I managed to make the areas overlap in some way, which suppressed terrain across two whole QMID areas.  Eliminating them one by one from my scenery config showed which was at fault and after a minor bit of tweaking and recompiling the file in SBuilderX the terrain came back.

Up to now these stages were just proof of concept really.  To be acceptable as scenery there are a number of other things that need to be done. 

1. There are some areas where clearly the underlying terrain is inaccurate, and I shall need to alter these by using sloped flattened areas.  This could be fairly time-consuming depending on how much change is necessary.
2. There are various inland water features which need a water mask and transparency as well.
3. Around the coast there are numerous rock formations and little islands which currently look underwater, because the proof of concept water masks and transparency effects were only applied to the main coastline.  There are a good number of these so I'll need to go back and amend the water masks etc to include these accurately.

All in all, to now this has taken approximately 5/6 hours because I'm learning as I go.  With a bit of practice and knowing already what mistakes can be made, it should be possible for anyone to knock out half decent and pretty accurate ground scenery without too much trouble.

NOTE: With some of the data that can be used it is really only acceptable to use it to create scenery for personal or freeware use only.  It's not a prohibitive problem, but just make sure that you don't distribute something publicly which could bring down the legal people on you.  Usually it doesn't take much research to discover the limits to how you can use a tool or some data. :)  Whatever you do is obviously at your own risk!