Autogen Exclusion?

[mdm248111]

Hello again;

After exporting my custom terrain to FSX, I have noticed that it seems to have removed autogen in the area within the blend outline. I have only used sculpt nodes and had AB_Flatten selected in the top bar when compiling. Am I doing something wrong or is this another issue?

Note: The autogen seen in this image has been specifically annotated to the resample image and has not been affected.

 

[gadgets]

No, you haven't done anything wrong. For some as yet unexplained reason, the blend polys were output with an exclude autogen terrain type. I'll investigate.

Don

 

[gadgets]

Michael, I have found the cause of your problem. Blend nodes, being simply "place-holders", do not have an assigned terrain type. They are intended to inherit the terrain type of the nodes to which they connect during triangulation. Unfortunately, this latter operation is not occurring. If you export as .sbx to FS9 or FSX and open the file with Notepad or another text editor, you'll see the guids are unassigned - hence the autogen suppression.

I get it fixed ASAP.

Don

 

[gadgets]

I'm happy to report that the cause for your difficulty was easily found. I simply neglected to copy the associated guid into the triangulated data. Beta Version 0.1.21, just uploaded to http://stuff4fs.com, fixes this.

It's unfortunate that you seem to bear the brunt of all these late issues. But, the application does not yet seem to have attracted a wide audience. Until a few users like you report creating fully satisfactory "sculptures", and I'm not satisfied we can call the beta complete.

Thanks for reporting and sticking with Terrain Sculptor.

Don

 

[mdm248111]

Thanks again for the great support! I am absolutely in love with this program and its ease of use. Make no worries about the minor issues, I'm very happy to help you out. Thanks again for the superb product.

 

[Henk Schuitemaker]

Don, thank you for beta 0.1.21, I used it to fix the cliffs at RAF Brawdy (EGDA) and I had no problems. I have a question which is related to the poly/exclude type of the blending polys: I want to use the TS flatten poly as airport background, so I used type = AB_Flatten_MaskClassMap_ExcludeAutoGen. But if I do that, the blend polys inherit this poly/exclude type and the slopes loose the land class textures and autogen. Is it possible to make the blend polys use a different type like AB_Flatten?
As an alternative, I now create the airport background in ADEX and use poly/exclude type = AB_Flatten in TS.

 

[gadgets]

Henk, blend nodes don't have an assigned terrain type. The blend polys (actually, triangles) use whatever terrain type is assigned to the other nodes (sculpt and/or flatten) to which the profile node connects. If you have no sculpt nodes, then presumably, you've excluded autogen within the flatten and, hence, autogen will be excluded within the entire blend area. If, however, you've added some sculpt nodes, then the blend polys that connect with those sculpt nodes will (are intended to) take on whatever terrain type has been assigned to those sculpt nodes. If different terrain types are assigned to two adjacent sculpt nodes, the last one processed (over which you have no control) gets used.

So, if you want part of the area to have autogen, then you should outline that area with sculpt nodes not having autogen suppressed. This should generate an irregular border. If you want a regular border, then you will need to have two closely-spaced outlines. If I could assume every flatten would have autogen suppressed, I could have done this much more simply. Unfortunately, that's not an assumption I can make given the general purpose nature of the tool.

While developing Release 21, I noted that the node editor does not show or allow changes to the assigned terrain type. I plan to fix this in the general release. My main interest in producing Release 21 was to get out a critical fix.

Hope this helps.

Don

 

[Henk Schuitemaker]

Thanks for your advice Don, I will try the sculpt nodes.

 

[gadgets]

Henk, et al, I explained it incorrectly before. Blend nodes are assigned a terrain type; sculpt nodes are not. Sculpt nodes inherit the type from whatever they are connected to. So, if you've assigned a non-autogen-suppressing type to your blend nodes, then you should have some area inside the blend nodes in which autogen is not suppressed.

That being said, I an now experimenting with TS for my own airports and I'm finding a few things I should have done differently. I've added a few convenience features like converting all selected nodes from blend or flatten to sculpts - useful when importing from sBuilder, and re-centering and re-zooming the display so all nodes are in view. I'm also revisiting the terrain type issue and will probably implement with a terrain type assigned to every node - in a way that preserves any work you've already done. I also plan to implement a global terrain type change.

Don