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Concept: Airport Plateau Solution

=Hollywood=

=Hollywood=

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Been thinking hard over the months about how to solve the airports on plateaus problem when using 10m and higher resolution elevation data...

Between Justin finding a solution for FSG and also by having one of my customers approach me about plateaud airports I realized there had to be a solution that was simple to implement and would solve the problem effectively...

Within literally two minutes the answer came to me...

In either GIS data with airport polygons or by finding out airport flatten vertex lat/lon data it would be easy to cut a simple hole/flatten poly in the high res mesh and assign a value of say -30,000 to the flattened polygon...

When it comes to rendering this will leave a hole in the high res mesh where the airport is but will allow the default FSX mesh to show through underneath and the two meshes will blend together at the seams somewhat smoothly... (NB in the resample.inf file minvaliddata=-5000 which means that the value of -30,000 will be cut out of the final rendering leaving a hole in the high res mesh)...

While it may take away some of the realism around the airports this technique should go a long way to solving the airport plateau phenominon until such time as FS supports fully working sloping runways and airports...

Thoughts/Suggestions/Comments?
 
Hello Dean,

well, that is the exact same solution that Justin uses for his updated FSGenesis mesh files: http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=121&topic_id=432907&mesg_id=432907&page=

It's a bit of a cop-out because it relies on the FSX default mesh, which is interpolated around airports, to do the work for you. The proper solution would be to replicate the ACES approach by carving out an area around the airfield flatten and letting the GIS interpolate the missing data into smoother slopes.

Also, the only way the FSGenesis approach can work as desired is if the default and add-on mesh are made from the same or very similar sources; otherwise seams will remain, which can be just as annoying as the original cliffs. For the US, FSG and ACES source data are the same but that's not necessarily the case for other parts of the world; even if other areas are all based on Shuttle Radar data there are different versions in use and different pre-processing and compression methods will lead to local differences.

Cheers, Holger
 
True, wow interesting that Justin has thought of the same technique... I'll have a look at the avsim thread, that'll be interesting...

Interesting thoughts too on cutting a blank and then interpolating, I like the sound of that approach better actually. If only blackart would work under vista (it doesn't seem to like running on my machines)... Not sure how good a job Global Mapper would do...

I'll have a play around with Monument Valley airport and see how well the interpolation method works... Maybe it could be blended by creating some contour lines and then blending and creating the grid from there. According to Jon that's how it has been done somewhere else... ;-)

I like this, thinking outside of the box to find solutions, only thing is others have also come to the same conclusions lol...
 
If you use Dreamscapes Monument Valley demo try eliminating the MS synthetic airports and use the photo-real textures. The work you need to do is not to onerous. Using SBuilderX place a sloping flatten where the runway REALLY IS using a photo background (Yahoo best). You can add various elevation points along the length of the sloping flatten to get a reasonably contoured and flat runway. The reason you can't use the runway "as is" is that the mesh points are so far apart that it is too bumpy. The sloping flatten cures this. However, it is not a perfect cure. Some rough surface remains and that is up to your level of acceptance. The 1 meter photo scenery is about the minimum that is acceptable for a runway view from an aircraft on the runway. 30cm photos are quite good! Aprons and taxiways also benefit from this approach. It is not wholesale but now you have true sloping runways that are adapted to the real elevations.

Dick near 5G8
 
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