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Airport apron surface

C

Chris Hewitt

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94
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unitedkingdom
Is there any way in ADE to achieve this kind of surface for the airport apron I.e. the large concrete squares?
 

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Looks like this may not be possible with ADE.

Currently, my apron is asphalt but it needs to be concrete and correct me if I'm wrong, concrete has a lower layer number than asphalt In ADE.

I imagine that the only way around this problem is to delete the apron as it is but thought I would check here first.

Once I do manage to produce a concrete apron, that leaves the final task of dividing it up into square slabs as in the picture.

I did try using the GP polygons with a thin dark edge, but after layering two hundred of these (and that only covered a quarter of the area!!) over the asphalt, FSX crashed after only a minute repeatedly. I figured that must be the wrong approach.

So....if anyone has any idea how to achieve this, please jump in. I have seen quite a few FSX videos where the apron is made of concrete slabs.
 
I don't know if I'm wrong but the way I see it is that when you make an apron in ADE you have the options to select the surface as concrete but the texture of that surface is apart from ADE. Check your textures folder of your flight sim and you should be able to find 1 or more concrete texture files, those files will surely represent the texture of concrete surface areas used around airports in the sim. Also when you download and install an airport, sometimes there are custom textures of various surfaces used for their projects. I personally never use any custom textures, I leave it as they are and only change the surface in ADE.
 
FS9ER.....thanks for your reply. After weeks of this and other issues, I managed to get a result today. Knowing that asphalt is a top layered texture, I made a 4096x4096 square in Photoshop and spent some time, a few hours, creating a 2x2 concrete slab.
I then named it the same as the asphalt texture in FSX and replaced it with mine. I then compiled the airport for the millionth time.....
I only use the one airport and this did the trick and it looks great, exactly what I wanted. I know this might well be frowned upon but this solved the immediate issue. I may have still been trying to solve this for another year but horses for courses.
My ADE Project file probably looks like a dog's dinner to an expert but after nearly two years, I've completed my airport and the surrounding countryside with a completely remodelled coastline and it all looks better than I ever thought it would. Never thought I'd see this day so a big thank you to everyone who helped along the way...now I can fly again.
This airport is OLBA (Beirut) as it was in the 1960s, a totally different environment to what currently exists there. I'm committed to FSX because of the aircraft from that decade that are unavailable in MSFS .
 
You can create this in Sketchup in Windows 10 to the proper size that you have determined from Google Earth of your airport. Use the ruler in Google Earth for dimensions. Take a screenshot of your apron and save it as a jpg. Sketchup now only offers their last two versions to download. You will have 30 days to learn to use it and create your apron. I was fortunate to download it in 2017 when you could still get it free. But they are a business not a hobby as we are. You can ACTUALLY use a jpg as a texture in Sketchup. Then you export it as a 3D Collada File (apron.dae). Open it up in Model Converter X and you can either export it as an FSX bgl OR FSX mdl file. Now open up ADEx and with the Library Object Manager in ADEx you can add the bgl. OR you can add the mdl in the Model List and place it exactly to size where you want your apron. You can put apron links and parking on it with practice. If you want to send me a private message I will be happy to help you to accomplish this. I have gotten Sooooooo much help here at FSDevelopers that I am glad to be able to pay some of that back helping someone else. This will give you exactly what you want.
 
The way you accomplished this is great. I am glad that you were able to get what you wanted. Your reply came while I was typing above. I just started using Prepar3D V4.5. Like you, I don't want MSFS or Version 5.x because of the hours and hours I have spent on scenery that is unusable in those sims as well as the aircraft I have payware and freeware again not compatible with them. Unfortunately some of them are NOT usuable in V4.5 either. Have fun flying. Keep the blue side up.
 
Thank you so much for your kind offer of help. Amazing!!
Yes, I've been checking everything today and it's all good.
It's quite incredible that after over a year of trying to sort this all out that your offer was timed to the minute but it really was for the best because I learned how to use ADE when just a short while ago, it totally baffled me no matter how hard I tried and then one day, the light bulb came on. I was ready to give up. Had you helped me earlier, I'd still be a total novice.
Many thanks again.
 
The Ground Poly Editor allows you to use your own textures, and the method of importing them is covered in the manual. This means that you don't have to replace the default textures and you can orientate the concrete tiles whichever way you want. Using this method allows complex aprons to be constructed relatively easily. However, if you take the time to learn SketchUp (Make 2017, the last downloadable free version, is still available online though no longer from Trimble) or Blender, you can create your aprons (and many other things) with much more detail and import them through MCX.
 
Tim, all done, but I'll dig into the GP Editor again which I may be able to use for some of the additional taxi ways and runways. Thank you for taking the time to help me.
 
You were working on OLBA? Nice to know, I'm originally from Lebanon and happy you got it sorted out. And yeah I can definitely say during the 1960's it really was different than today. I'm building OMDW and have a topic of it here, got a few things fixed but my timing is off course these days to continue the project but one day it will be done :) sorry for late reply.
www.fsdeveloper.com

FS2004 - OMDW - Dubai World Central build - world's biggest

I've been building this airport since summer 2020, progress is a bit slow due to my free time, I want to finish it anyway. Just have a problem with the northern runway, on the first image satellite view it's covered in terrain textures a little and on the second image runway looks distorted with...
www.fsdeveloper.com www.fsdeveloper.com
 
Good luck with your Dubai project. Yes, the old Beirut airport seems to have been forgotten to history but it was a fantastic airport and looks so much nicer than the one currently there. I grew up in Beirut until the war came.
My work on this OLBA project is of a video nature using FSX to convey every airline and aircraft type that used that airport between 1960 to 1970 before it's lost to time.
OLBA was a crossroads for airliners in that decade that didn’t have the range of modern jets so you would see everything that flew there on any given day.
It's taken me three years so far and I'm just starting the video 4K captures now after creating the various aircraft and landscape.
 
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