[FS2004] KMYL - McCall, Idaho

[JRobinson]

I landed at the default McCall, Idaho airport one day last fall and decided MS' hideous rendition of KMYL would stand no more. I started out with a few "afcad" mods with ADE9X and one thing led to another. By now I guess I'm far enough into this to say "I'm making a scenery for McCall, Idaho" so here goes.

McCall sits at 5024' MSL on the north end of "Long Valley" which is due north of Boise about 80 nm. The real world area is stunningly beautiful, a peaceful grassy valley that sits on the western edge of the Frank Church "River Of No Return Wilderness Area". The McCall airport serves as a sort of re-supply hub for backcountry air excursions to airstrips inside the wilderness area which are only accessible by air. KMYL also sees a fair amount of corporate traffic, I'm guessing because it's a lot cheaper for a corporate aircraft owner to operate out of McCall than Boise. The city of McCall surrounds the airport on the North & East sides, extending northward to the nearby southern shore of the lower Payette lake.


First here are some overview shots of the airport.






Here's a couple of the McCall Aviation FBO hangar, I've still got a lot of work to do here but the front entrance/yard is starting to look pretty good.




I tried about a half dozen different approaches to making trees, but finally settled on these simple "rotate to user" versions which look the best of all of them. Just remembered I need to put an entryway door on the building texture, the porch goes straight into the wall!




The photoscenery, it looks like Brundage Mtn. Ski resort is just getting it's first dusting of snow.




Here's the latest addition, most of a row of hangars and the high-detail polys under them. So far just afcad taxiways showing through the base poly with the help of an alpha fill. Soon to be replaced with some taxiway polygons that overlap onto the grass with a ragged edge to break up that hard line.




All I know about these hangars in the real world is that they appear to be mostly an off-white with green roofs of varying shades. I just made some generic hangars matching that description, approximating their sizes as best I could from google earth and a couple "on approach" shots I found on the net. These are my first Sketchup buildings, everything has been gmax prior. Sketchup's way cool, thanks to Arno and MCX for making it useful for our purposes.




Here's one more shot of the back sides




One might assume a scenery designer would make something like this only if they were tired of boring old hangar textures and needed an "eye-candy fix", but I assure you that's not the case with me, this monument actually exists at KMYL in the real world. The CD is 9 ft in diameter. Honest...





Thanks for looking

Jim

[mdm248111]

Wow!! Superb texturing and ground work!! Would love to see more!

PS. I noticed ONE little itty bitty thing: there isn't a door on the fbo

[n4gix]

Originally Posted by mdm248111

PS. I noticed ONE little itty bitty thing: there isn't a door on the fbo

I do believe he already mentioned that...

That is extremely nice work!

[JRobinson]

Thank you both .

Jim

[khaos_56k]

WOW! Fantastic work!

[jtanabodee]

It is really good looking texture and models.
I have the same problem with trees in my Samui Airport. When I make trees with cross planes and normalized those vertexes, the trees became dull and lost the detail. Rotating tree looks the best.

I'd like to ask about the faint shadows of the trees. Do you paint them on the ground texture or you attach some plane with shadow together with the tree?

[JRobinson]

Thank you all for the positive feedback, it helps out a lot in the motivation department .

jtanabodee, all my shadows are just painted onto the ground textures except for the one on the software box is part of the model (which looks bad because I only spent about 5 minutes getting the alpha fill right).

I struggle with shadows a bit, I'm not sure whether it is best to shadow everything directionally, or to try making some kind of omni-directional shadow that looks 'just OK' in any light. Ideally we need about 3 different shadow sets on their own groundpoly layer for different times of day, each in their own conditionally visible .bgl so the shadows would change as the light changes. Maybe this could be done with .asm tweaks? Forget it, I won't live long enough to get this project done as it is .

Jim

[GaryGB]

Hi Jim:

Your project is already looking GREAT... can't wait to see more pix !


BTW: Congratulations on successfully implementing Sketchup for work in FS !


Is this going to be released for both FS9 and FSX (and which FS version is in the Pix) ?


PS: I usually download my FS add-ons, but seeing your "product packaging artwork", I just gotta' have the "boxed" version now !


Regards,

GaryGB

[JRobinson]

Thank you Gary, this is FS9 and I think it'll be freeware if it ever gets released at all. I don't know if I've got what it takes to finish this project, let alone tackle another version of it for FSX, but we'll see.

Your "boxed version" will be hidden in the scenery somewhere, so you can download it and get the boxed version at the same time .

Jim

[PakMac]

Hi Jim,

Looks good with nice crisp textures.

I do hope you'll put a door in for McCall Aviation (picture 4), otherwise they could go bust from lack of customers.

David.

[n4gix]

Originally Posted by PakMac

I do hope you'll put a door in for McCall Aviation (picture 4), otherwise they could go bust from lack of customers.

David.

From the OP's comments in post #1:

Just remembered I need to put an entryway door on the building texture, the porch goes straight into the wall!

[arno]

Nice work!

And I like the easter egg with boxed product

[masondom]

<< I think it'll be freeware if it ever gets released at all.>>

LOL, this equals last OrbX sceneries and you wonder if you can finish the work ?

I love that !


If you need a job...

[JRobinson]

Thanks again for all the nice comments everyone. Since posting the screenshots I've added a few more hangars and laid down some of the taxiways around them. Also some of the awesome screenshots of runway/taxiway texturing posted here recently have prompted me to revisit my runway texture. I think I may have improved it somewhat but it still doesn't compare.

I'll get some screenshots together soon for an update...

If you need a job...

I don't really need one as I'm fortunate (in our local economy) to have one, but I've been doing basically the same thing for almost 30 yrs and I'm tired of it. I am on a mission to get out of there sometime within the next couple years. We'll see.

Jim

[xbuddy]

in the fourth picture you create your own fence or taking of another texture?

beautiful.

[LCSims]

Simply put, that's some quality work.

[JRobinson]

Thank you for the nice comments people . Yes xbuddy I made the fence too, it's just flat planes with alpha transparency. A single 12' section, multiple copies placed with FenceBuilder. I need to build an animated keypad entry style security gate to place across the entrance road there. My fence still needs a lot of work .

Update soon, I'm working on "Idaho Bob's" airport grounds maintenance shop (fictitious) right now, which is a greasy, filthy, eyesore among all the pristine hangars in the south hangar area. McCall's upper crust have been trying to get Bob to clean up his act for years, but Bob understands crankshafts and pistons and things like that, "curb appeal" is foreign to him

All I know is grungy textures are a lot more fun than clean ones, stay tuned...

Jim

[masondom]

Anything new about this wonderful project ?

[JRobinson]

Been holding off on an update until I get something finished, but at the moment I'm off on a tangent attempting to learn poly modeling because I need some vehicles and some other stuff for my scenery that can't be made from the usual box and cylinder "primitives" that I've always used as a basis for objects in the past. I dove into "Idaho Bob's grounds equipment maintenance shop" but got to the point where I wanted some old car bodies or something laying around but couldn't figure out how to model them. I started reading some car building tutorials and have been cussing gmax for 3 weeks instead of working on the scenery directly. I think it's finally starting to pay off though, I need a bunch of vehicles, some good junk for Bob's shop, some snow removal equipment, a DC3 with the wings chopped off (for the USFS Fire Training center located on the field, they use it to train smoke jumpers), and some other things. I may as well concentrate on that stuff while it's fresh in my mind, so I guess I'll take some time off from the actual scenery and build these objects.

Not a lot has happened since I last posted screenshots, but here's a quick rundown:


This is Idaho Bob's shop so far. Needs a little more junk laying around I think, that's coming.





A shot of early development of the taxiway network in the south hangar area. Also an attempt at some grass along the taxiways.





I revisited my runway texture and got a little more detail out of it just by re-working the texture.





Okay, here's the pimple on the a$$ of progress. This is "version 1" of my poly modeling fiascio. The hood lines aren't right so v2.0 is in the making but not textured yet (this one isn't completely textured either obviously). This one's done as far as it's going, V2 will be much better and hopefully I can adapt what I've learned to other vehicles, reduce the polycounts a little, and produce a small library sometime this millennium.





In Idaho you ain't nuthin' 'less ya got a Chivy pickup with a Duramax in it. This 'un here'll pull a house over the top o' Whitebird hill at 60 miles an hour!




Jim

[n4gix]

Dang, Jim! That half-assed pick-em-up truck looks pretty darned good my tired old eyes!

Seriously, that's some high powered texturing...