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General Information About Scenery and Terrain

CBris

CBris

Messages
104
Right,I am slowly, oh so slowly, getting to grips with this scenery design thing.

If I am getting it right, there IS a structured way to get all the odds and sods to fall together in a sensible way. I am finding tools like ADE very interesting, especially because they cause me to ask silly questions. Well, questions that are caused by a little bit of (dangerous) knowledge.

I was really really pleased to discover that you can great sloping ground "flatten" polys for sloping runways. Then I tried to make an "amphitheatre" type of flatten, i.e. all the inner, lower and straight edge points at the same height (in a D within a larger D form) rising to a hundred feet or so higher at the rear.

Basically I was trying to make a smoother edged flatten that FSX gives you.

A straight forward sloped rectangle works easily, so do relatively simple gradients, but three dimensional curved slopes are still beyond what I can see.

UNLESS.

Unless, perhaps, I could create my own mesh by drwaing my own countours - like on an ordnance survey map or even a PlanG image. Can I do that? Easily?

OR

is there a limit to the number of "wedge-shaped" slope flattens I can make?

(that I can try now...)

Just writing these questions sometimes helps... But if anyone knows, then also great.
Is it
 
There's a couple approaches that might be worth playing around with. I have a commercial GIS program that lets me import DEM elevation data and I can create contours from that. I can export the contours as shapefile which SBuilderX can import.

Another possibility is to create a gray scale image and use gray levels to represent elevation. Converting the gray scale into mesh would take a little work. There used to be a program around named grises50 that let you set the base elevation and scale factor for the gray scale image (otherwise a gray scale would only allow elevations of 0-255 meters).

Or in freeware google sketchup there are tools (you might need to load a plugin) that can tessellate DEM data. I'm not exactly sure how best to use the resulting model, but I would think it could be used in some way.

scott s.
.
 
Tesselate - now there's a fine word with a Greek history... Tessera = four.

I digress... I am also discovering that making an "Ampitheater" out of flatten wedges and rectangles is working after a fashion. At least the sudden "cliffs" caused by a straight flatten are being reduced.

My experience is telling me now that the less individually height edited vertices I use, the better - although I have created a sloping runwaywith a parallel ramp down to a level area (for hangars and parking etc.) with another ramp down to sea level has worked reasonable well in reasonably even terrain. It's just the flatten into the high ground that gives me cause for triangles and polys.

It's all filigree work and I will add to my experience by doing...
 
I've got it!

You know those nasty cliffs you get, when you put a flatten into rising ground - a bit like this



(it's a clickable thumbnail to open the large image)

Well, I have been thinking long and hard about how annoying that is so I have tried editable vertices on triangle and rectangle polys. I first obtained the reall terrain heights by slewing the trike to numerous points on the scenery, placing markers on its position in ADE and recording the aircraft altitude from FSX.

Then I discovered that aircraft altitude is at the mdl's datum and not ground level. The bulging bit of flatten on the right is set at 40' by a flatten. in FSX I am recording 46.2 feet - so all the markers at the tops of the polys in this picture:



...are edited to FSX altitude minus 6.2' If you look closely, you will see that I have added 15 markers well outside of the 40' flatten. All the "inner" vertices are set by manual edit to 40' and the outer vertices are set at the results of slewing the trike to eack point in the sim world and recording altitude minus difference to aircraft.

It's laborious, but the finished results can be seen:



On the terrain!

I am not referring to my lousy poygons here. I am working on these... The runway is sloping (sea level to 120 feet over 2300). As you come down the right hand portion of the field, the slope stops and levels off at 40' for the apron and hangar areas plus that cut-back into the hillside. Then the right hand side slopes down to sea level to meet the runway. Of course that creates a "stepped" wall segment to the runway, which I want to prevent pilots crashing into. Hence the line of rocks (which also have to centred left of this "wall" or else they float...

All good fun.
 
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Hi Chris:

A suggestion to reduce steps in the current procedure: :idea:

If one does not plan to use AI traffic at a custom airport, one needn't create a uniformly flat area beneath a runway ("RWY").

In that scenario, rather than manually slewing, one can enter each existing ADE / SBuilderX airport background and/or RWY polygon vertex coordinates into FS' Map view, and 'jump' around to get the elevation 'as rendered' in FS with Rhumbaflappy's TCalcX_003 to read ground altitude data from the underlying terrain mesh... as Scott suggested.


TCalcX_003:

http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/downloads.php?do=file&id=79


One might then more readily make a "sloped flatten" or other vector objects requiring local ground elevation data by using either the default or 3rd party (ex: Holger's) add-on terrain mesh.


FYI: One could also, perhaps more easily, utilize an existing ADE feature "Set Altitude to FSX" when making sloped flattens (as described on Page 189/192 in the ADE Manual).

This could be done by using a aircraft (ex: Finney Crosshairs Plus aka "CH+") which has a MDL datum that is already at "ground level"... as discussed here:

http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/showpost.php?p=150331&postcount=15


NOTE: See my post later in that thread for the "missing" texture folder required to use this CH+ aircraft installation in FSX:

http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/showpost.php?p=150485&postcount=27



BTW: When the finished airport is distributed, one should, IMHO, document in a ReadMe file that one's airport package version(s) are intended for use with 'either':

1.) Default terrain mesh files loaded only for that FS world location

...or:

2.) 3rd party terrain mesh [filename.BGL] loaded for that FS world location


...thereby pre-empting FS 'default' mesh display:

a.) when installed / set active at a specified Area layer position in FS scenery library (and)

b.) at specified FSX terrain mesh complexity / resolution slider settings

...since sloped flattens can vary in 'shape' and 'fit' with one's underlying FS terrain depending on what mesh BGL is loaded, and as a function of what mesh slider settings are being used on an end user's FS installation / configuration.


Hope this helps ! :)

GaryGB
 
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That all helps, thanks.

The sceneries I am working on are all under the aegis of Misty Moorings, and MM make no bones about it: all MM sceneries are designed to be place over OrbX' Pacific Fjords.

From what I can see, ADE allows indivual editing of poly vertices, but you have to keep each poly balanced. The sloped runway in the above piece was really interesting to create. And then the parallel terrain with the flattened apron area still had to merge with the runway at both ends. I used some EZ Sceneries boulders to "cover" the gaps.

It's only a spot of fun, I haven't yet learned how to make my own scenery tiles with edge blending - time will tell. Then I will need to learn 3D objects (which still cause me grief because of the (to me) illogical coordinates methods.

Still, if there's nothing left to learn, then there's nothing left to live for... I like learning.
 
Fsx_kml

FSX_KML allows you to create a rectangle with a "flatten" tag and allows you to edit the points such that you have two adjoining points at one altitude and the other two adjoining points at another altitude. You can create them on a backdrop of Google Earth.


Another way to "see" your DEM file altitudes is to drop your DEM file bgl onto TMFVer from the FSX SDK. You can then change the color codes to display four or five different altitudes, and get the exact lat/longs/altitudes anywhere at the same time.

:teacher:
 
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