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Broken resizing of square aprons - any workarounds?

Messages
59
Country
switzerland
I used to use square aprons quite a lot: For custom runway markings or markings (concrete tiles) on grass runways etc.
The process to accurately size them was never straight forward - using snaps and resizing before rotating. Since a few releases back this seems to have been broken to the point where it's totally unusable.
Am I missing something? Has anybody found a good process for this?
 
Messages
503
Country
australia
Not really answering your question but what size do you make the actual “sign” as in half the area of say 512 x 512 for example, or fill that background size completely? My efforts make the sign the complete size of 512 x 512 but when transferred, the apron simply ignores the background and resizes “around/over it”. Make sense?
 
Messages
420
Country
unitedkingdom
I thought it might be me missing something obvious. But yes, they're toast. And I don't know how to make them work again either.

All you can do is click on one click placing and set the scale before placing, or with the gizmo tool afterwards. Still no use if you want to make them rectangles instead though.
 
Messages
59
Country
switzerland
Not really answering your question but what size do you make the actual “sign” as in half the area of say 512 x 512 for example, or fill that background size completely? My efforts make the sign the complete size of 512 x 512 but when transferred, the apron simply ignores the background and resizes “around/over it”. Make sense?
Hi. Not really sure what you are describing.
In general (for fs2020 aprons) when creating square textures for non square images, the image should be aligned at the botttom or the left of the texture - and mirrored horiziontally.
Also:
- Color transparent pixels and make sure your program saves them like that (it's a checkbox in the gimp save-dialog). For many decals the color channels can just be a uniform color and only the alpha channel contains the shape/mask. This is to prevent color bleed problems in the generation of the lower mip-levels.
- Leave a transparent border (maybe around 8px) around your image. This avoids problems with color bleed from the texture repeat (also at lower mip levels).
 
Messages
18
Country
netherlands
I think he's talking about actually resizing the pre-shaped square aprons in the editor. The green dragable points can't be selected and dragging one of the two that can be selected only scales the square along one axis (and makes it smaller). As far as I can tell the issue has nothing to do with textures.
 
Messages
503
Country
australia
@mrbump in explanation of what I said previously:
I'm trying to create taxiway signs like this one. (Forget it's not reversed) as per BennyBoy444 video Custom Textures
This one below is 512 x 512 and fills the whole image size but when transferred to MSFS doesn't resize, everything just crops to fit the apron. Am I missing something? Do I need to make the image smaller inside the 512x512?
In addition, I need Taxiway parking such as "G41" as there are 3 of them on the taxiway in reverse colours (yellow on black). Do I create this in the same way? Does that then mean if I have 50 gates for example, I need 50 images?
MaxSpan36M.png
 
Messages
111
Country
france
At scale 1.0, a square apron is 30m x 30m. Any texture will fill the whole apron object, so you have to scale first you apron object to your need. For a ground sign that is 7 meter wide I would first design my required texture (make it square), then place a square apron at scale 7/30 = 0.233, then apply my texture in it.

And yes, you'll end up with a shitload of custom textures and square aprons in a large airport, for example on my biggest projects I have 314 materials in my OIIE library and 476 in my ZSHC library.
 
Messages
503
Country
australia
Thanks for that. That’s the information I was looking for. Doesn’t particularly make me happy! Wish the gate numbering offered more than one placement and alternate background/foreground colours.
Maybe we all should pool our textures. God knows how many people have created the same things
 
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