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Runway and Apron Textures

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Hello,

I´m a total newbie conerning Scenery Design, and I have worked my self through creating AFCADS excluding Objects, flattening Terrain, creating Basic 3D Objects in GMAX an placing them into my Airport Scenery. I started creating an Airport in Germany and my question is as follows:

How can I replace the default Textures of FS2004 for the Runways and the Apron ? Well not to relpace the files acutually, rather to create a new set of textures, an place them over the default Textures. To put it another way, I want to have my Ground textures looking something like these from the simflyer Airports.

Is there a Freeware texture set, available on the net or have I to create these textures myself ?

Please help!
 

arno

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Hi,

When designing with the Fs2004 techniques you can not select the texture used yourself anymore. So when you give it asphalt in AFCAD, the apron will use the default asphalt texture. The only way to change this is to replace this texture (which would affect the entire world of course).

Many (most?) of the current sceneries are still made using the old techniques of Fs2002 and before, where we could assign a custom texture to our apron. Like you do when adding a texture to your GMax building.
 
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Thanks for the answer, I assumed this already.

How do I have to create Apron and Rwy Textures in FS2004 ? Do I have to create a gmax Polygon where I add the texture und put it over the AFCAD rwy/apron ? Will the shadow from the A/C still be visible ?
 

arno

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If you really really want custom textures for your runway and apron I think it is better to use the Fs2002 techniques, as the Fs2004 techniques are not really suitable for that.

You could make ground polygons in GMax (see the thread in the GMax forum about that), but this technique is not really suitable for big aprons and runways. I think it is only useful for smaller details you want to place with more detail.
 
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Okay one last question:

What software or tools you would recommend to me that I must have to create a state of the art Airport

So far I have:
Gmax, The MS SDK and SCASM. Anything else what is mandatory ? I´ll work myself through the tutorials, and maybe in a year I´ll be ready to make my airport...
 

arno

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Hi,

For scenery using the new standards you could use SBuilder or Ground2k for the mesh scenery (landclass, VTP and LWM polygons). For the airports and placement of objects you use the XML format as described in the BGLComp SDK. Tools like AFCAD2, SceneGenX, Rwy12 and ObPlacerXML give you GUIs to make part of this code. And for the objects you have GMax with the lastest gamepack of course.

But I wouldn't spend a year on learning this all :), you start with a small project and have fun while you learn more and more. If you wait that long the next version of FS might already be there and who knows what will have changed by then :D.
 
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Hello Folks!

As I could see, SceneGenX is already "complete" because I´ve tried to make an airport with XML manually but there is not much more you can do manually which you couldn´t make with SceneGenX!(?) Concering Ground Textures: There is a "ground-type element" called UNKNOWN. Does anyone of you guys know what the UNKNOWN-Texture looks like? Because if the UNKNOWN-Texture isn´t used that much in the FS2004 World, maybe we could take our own textures we need/want as ground and rename it to the UNKNOWN-Texture!(?) Any ideas or hints?

Greetings, Rob!
 

Horst18519

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Just the question I was looking for... :D

Is there really no easy possibility in FS9 to simply create a groundpoly with my own texture?
It's quite simple by using an fx which draws a bmp to the ground, but I don't want to create a new fx for ev'ry poly I'm placing on my airport.
How are the photoreal-scenery-designers doing it? They don't use 2D-GMax-objects, do they?

And one more question: Is there no possibility to change the priority, in which the different types of apron/taxiway are shown in FS (asphalt always on top of all)? :confused: :(
 

arno

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Hi Thorsten,

Horst18519 said:
Is there really no easy possibility in FS9 to simply create a groundpoly with my own texture?
It's quite simple by using an fx which draws a bmp to the ground, but I don't want to create a new fx for ev'ry poly I'm placing on my airport.
How are the photoreal-scenery-designers doing it? They don't use 2D-GMax-objects, do they?

I think drawing it in GMax with the Fs2002 gamepack is still the easiest way to make ground polygons. The Fs2004 gamepack just has too many problems with ground polygons.

For the airport I am working on I have placed the ground polygons with photos in a similar way. The only difference is that I did not use GMax, but that my own converter tool wrote the source.

Horst18519 said:
And one more question: Is there no possibility to change the priority, in which the different types of apron/taxiway are shown in FS (asphalt always on top of all)? :confused: :(

Humm, I wouldn't know that. Have you tried to change the order in which you enter them? Maybe that has an influence.
 

Horst18519

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OK, I'll try it with the 2002-gamepack.

The priority of the materials seems to be hard-coded. I found that in AFCAD2 before, when I recognized, that the drawing order is exactly the order in the dropdown-menu of the apron-material. In SGX it seems to be the same. How do you do different apron-materials without having the asphalt on top?
 

arno

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Horst18519 said:
The priority of the materials seems to be hard-coded. I found that in AFCAD2 before, when I recognized, that the drawing order is exactly the order in the dropdown-menu of the apron-material. In SGX it seems to be the same. How do you do different apron-materials without having the asphalt on top?

How about only drawing the material you want and not multiple polygons on top of each other?
 

Horst18519

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Well, it would have been so obvious... :eek: :eek:
This afternoon I had the same idea, to not draw several aprons above each other. But it took me some time to come to this conclusion. :eek:

Anyway, I find it rather confusing that it doesn't seem to be possible to change the priority. Anyway: Thanks. ;)
 

arno

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Horst18519 said:
Anyway, I find it rather confusing that it doesn't seem to be possible to change the priority.

Yes, the XML code is a bit limited at the moment. I hope the next version of FS will give us scenery designers a little bit more flexibility to design airports that do not all look like the default ones :).
 
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