• Which the release of FS2020 we see an explosition of activity on the forun and of course we are very happy to see this. But having all questions about FS2020 in one forum becomes a bit messy. So therefore we would like to ask you all to use the following guidelines when posting your questions:

    • Tag FS2020 specific questions with the MSFS2020 tag.
    • Questions about making 3D assets can be posted in the 3D asset design forum. Either post them in the subforum of the modelling tool you use or in the general forum if they are general.
    • Questions about aircraft design can be posted in the Aircraft design forum
    • Questions about airport design can be posted in the FS2020 airport design forum. Once airport development tools have been updated for FS2020 you can post tool speciifc questions in the subforums of those tools as well of course.
    • Questions about terrain design can be posted in the FS2020 terrain design forum.
    • Questions about SimConnect can be posted in the SimConnect forum.

    Any other question that is not specific to an aspect of development or tool can be posted in the General chat forum.

    By following these guidelines we make sure that the forums remain easy to read for everybody and also that the right people can find your post to answer it.

Airport Only Mesh... Is it possible?

Messages
8
Hi Guys,

I have tried using flatten tools to make a slope right before the runway to add a checker board there, similar to that of Hong Kong's old airport, only that it's right on the end of the RWY on a slope.

I've gotten all sorts of weird results but none to my satisfaction, a smooth straight, not aligator teeth like, slope.

Since I won't be able to do it with flattens (FS2002 flattens seemed to be much easier to ajust) my guess is to use mesh for this. Is it possible to create a mesh file just for the airport area with having to use a whole LOD square? If I need to use a whole lod square then that is fine. I'm used to converting NASA's 76m data into BGLs without a problem, but editing that is a problem for me as I neved edited the mesh and also how do I know which square will represent that part of the airport without trial an error? Is there any program that will interact with fS2004/fsuipc so you can slew and the program will tell you "YOU ARE HERE" lol?

Maybe my text is a little confused, probably due to a hangover from last night. Could have saved the cash for a new add-on (hello DF727) and saved my headache too :-)

Sincerelly,

Marcus
 
You can use for example LWM flattens to correct the altitude at certain locations, but a nice steep slope is impossible. Due to the resolution of the mesh (which is maximum 20 meters) you will always get such a teeth like slope. The mesh techniques are just not suitable for such small altitude corrections.
 
arno said:
You can use for example LWM flattens to correct the altitude at certain locations, but a nice steep slope is impossible. Due to the resolution of the mesh (which is maximum 20 meters) you will always get such a teeth like slope. The mesh techniques are just not suitable for such small altitude corrections.

Thanks Arno :-) But what about the Madeira Islands scenery. The guys did a great job on that. There is also a SABA Island scenery where it also looks very smooth. Is this actually a 3d macro?
 
No, I think that is still mesh. A 20 meter (or maybe 40 meter) resolution gives very good results when displaying hills and mountains.

But when you want to make small or steep canyons then you hit the limitations of the mesh techniques. These kind of details require a much higher resolution to look good.
 
arno said:
No, I think that is still mesh. A 20 meter (or maybe 40 meter) resolution gives very good results when displaying hills and mountains.

But when you want to make small or steep canyons then you hit the limitations of the mesh techniques. These kind of details require a much higher resolution to look good.

Get it:-) So a 100ft difference won't look good since it's like 5 x 20m blocks high. Oh well. If only I could get a landable gmax surface to work :-(
 
I have an idea for you... I know that Bryce 3D you can create 3D meshes for landscapes, and then export them to another format that you'd be able to import into GMAX or FSDS...

If you created the mound in a program like that you'd be able to place it as an object in FS, like you would a building or something else. If you're talking about higher res than the GIS based terrain mesh you can work around it like this...

Does the old 'mountain crash' variable still exist in FS???

BTW you can use Bryce to fiddle with GIS terrain data too... But the best res you'll get is 19m because of FS's design limits... But if you have the time and patience to work in Bryce I know you could pull it off ;)
 
Last edited:
That variable still exists, but there are a few problems with making terrain like this.

  1. You can not land or ride on it. This could be solved with platforms in GMax, but using more then about 300 of them gives trouble. So that is not adviced (and for a simple mesh you will reach that number very fast).
  2. It is fixed, so if somebody uses a different mesh scenery around it, you will very likely get gaps between the mesh and the object
 
Back
Top