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P3D v4 How to create different layers for ground polygons.

C

Colin Gray

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ca-britishcolumbia
Good morning.

I've been trying to figure out how to make polygons of runway/taxiway/apron surfaces. I've been watching videos from both Bill Womack and Soarfly Concepts and have a very basic understanding. I've used both FS Earth Tiles and Sim Builder X to get an image of the airport I want to make. Not sure which is better. FSET seems a little more stable on my system so I've gone with that. I've been playing around a little bit with SketchUp and Blender and this is where I'm lost. I put the ground image for the airport in SketchUp and started outlining all the hard surfaces to make the initial asphaly layer. And that's where a few problems arose.

First, am I right in assuming that you want to raise each layer up a little using the push/pull finction? I've found that if there isn't enough space between two texture layers, it results in flickering. So I have my base image being the google earth image of the airport. I traced out the runways, taxiways, etc. Next step was making a box around one of the runways, raised it up 5cm, and made it a group. I then assigned an asphalt texture and used the paint bucket on the runway. Next step was to do the centre line and threshold markings. I traced the outline of the runway markings, raised it another 5cm, and again made it a group. Found a texture to use and applied it. Two issues here. First is that I am now looking at something 10cm off the ground level which is pretty significant I think. Second was that none of my textures appear to have transparent sections. I'll need to figure out how to make a texture, but I'll save that for another day.

Am I doing this correctly, or is there a more efficient way to do this? Probably not the best quality picture, but here is what I have so far:

AiFyV4M.jpg


The threshold markings should be lines instead of two white boxes. I'm guessing that is where I need to figure out the whole transparency issue. The number 13 has a dark box around it that isn't the same shade as the runway - same issue as before. It also tends to fade from view depending on the way I'm looking. I've read a little about z-bias, but don't quite undertand what it is for. I thought I saw that I don't actually need to make different layers, but I can assign different values for z-bias within MCX. Am I correct? I know the values are supposed to be negative, but does it matter what number I chose? Would a base level (asphalt) be a -1 and then runway markings be a -2?

I am slowly trying to figure out Blender, but no where near as functional as I'd like to be yet. Not sure which one is better to use or if there is a third option to look at.

Thanks in advance.

Colin
 
Z-bias gives you control over the draw order, or layering, so all your layers can be on the ground, you just use the z-bias to separate them. Yes, values are negative, and multiples of 4. From memory, I use -4 for the bottom layer, then just add -4 for each stacked layer.
 
Not sure of the limit, but normally I'd have a base layer, texture layer, 2x markings and dirt, so that's 5. I would imagine that you could use a lot more if needed.
From a quick check of my projects, though, the more recent ones just increment the z-bias by one (still negative), and I seem to recall that Prepar3d's support for this did change at some point -- maybe from 4.3 to 4.4? So if you are using 4.3 them you may need to experiment a bit.
It's been a long time since I worked on P3D scenery, as I'm now retired, it used to be a lot clearer:)
 
@toprob thanks for your help on this. Not many people working on P3D these days. I have v4.5 and trying to convert a freeware FS9 airport to P3D.

I’ve got the layers playing nicely now, thank you. I seem to be getting a little bleed over between my base layer and the default sim. I think I read somewhere that I should be putting a small gap between the base layer when I use the Ground Poly Wizard.

Thank you!
 
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