The first thing to do is to decide on what graphic you want to turn into an object for the game. You can use things already in the zoo tycoon game and modify them, or you may have another game that you can use the objects in. For example most of my objects are from the Sims game. The principle is the same as long as you can get screenshots of the objects for all the rotatations the Zoo Tycoon game uses.
(Bear in mind copyright may apply- as a rule original objects in a game are ok to copy but user created content is not. If unsure just email the creator for permission to use the graphics.)
Keep in mind that objects in Zoo tycoon need 4 rotations or views. SE NE NW & SW
In some cases the view is the same in all rotations, others in 2 and some all 4 views are required.
For this tutorial we will use the polar bear as our example as everyone should have that in their game
Of course you can use any animal or object you wish.
The first thing to do is to load up Zoo Tycoon and make 4 screenshots of the polar bear from the 4 angles SE NE NW & SW.
To do this make a polar bear exhibit. Wait until the polar bear is in the pose you want for the statue and then pause the game.
As the polar bear is already on snow this helps as we are going to need to remove the background from the screenshots- and having a pure white background works best.
Try to make sure that all the background in your screenshot is the snow and there is nothing else in the way either.