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P3D v4 How to get started, but not really...

  • Thread starter Thread starter slavik35ua
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slavik35ua

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Hello there fellow developers, I'm a developer myself, too, just for a little bit different sim, which is X-Plane 11.

I've already made 4 scenery projects for XP11 which have been quite successful, and you might wonder why am I telling all of this to you, well, just to clarify that I do have experience in scenery building, 3d model creation, texturing and stuff, but don't have a single clue how to move all of this into P3D v4.

So, recently I've made a scenery for XP11, now I want it in P3Dv4, the reason I'm seeking your help here is that I wasn't able to find sufficient material on creating scenery exactly for P3Dv4, older sims are currently out of question. I did surf the wiki, watched countless videos on YouTube, but it's all... obsolete, also most of the links are just dead. I was very happy when I found this, but as I've mentioned before, the links are dead. (https://www.fsdeveloper.com/wiki/index.php?title=How_to_make_airport_building_on_ground_poly).

I'm currently aware that there's a thing such as ADE, SBuilderX, MCX, but don't really understand what those are for.

So, to make things clear of what I want to achieve here:

I have all my 3D objects ready, except for the ground polygon, I also want to include my OrthoImagery. I operate in 3DS Max, also Photoshop and Substance Painter. Now where do I start to move all of that into P3Dv4?
Thanks in advance and sorry if that has already been asked a thousand times.
 
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You would use the MCX Ground Polygon Wizard to create the ground polygon. I don't know what OrthoImagery is, but if it is photoscenery then you would use SBuilderX for that. For your 3D objects you could download and install the P3Dv4.4 SDK, and then use that within 3DS Max to create a P3D MDL file of each 3D object. The other way to get it out of 3DS Max is to find a format it can export without the SDK that MCX can import. Then you have many options to get your objects into the sim.

1. Use the Convert and Place wizard in MCX.
2. Instead, export the object from MCX as a P3D MDL file.
3. Use ADE (if you are creating an airport) and add the MDL files as 3D Objects and place them there.
4. Use a program like Library Creator X to create a library BGL of your objects and then use a program like Instant Scenery or even ADE to place them. This is handy for objects that you will use at multiple airports, since they are present only once in FS and new instances of them are created where needed.

Hope this helps,
 
You are right, there's plenty of older tools, some obsolete, some still useful, and most developers use whatever they are comfortable with. It would be quite rare for anyone to cover all the aspects of scenery development just using Prepar3d v4 tools. For one thing, P3Dv4-compiled scenery is not very backward-compatible, and most developers like to support a broader base. In my experience, most developers stick with older tools they know and deal with any resulting issues, rather than shift to the new methods/tools.
I'd recommend that you just start with one goal, and go from there. You mentioned orthoimagery, so that might be a good place to start. If you already have some sort of 'raw' imagery for Xplane, then you could start with that. However, even then, you'd need to be a bit clearer about what you have already -- plenty of Xplane users use automatic tools which grab online aerials and turn then into orthoscenery, but some developers need to source their own (distributable) imagery, and that's the way I do it for Prepar3d. So if you already have georeferenced images which you've used for Xplane, you might just need to run them through the SDK tool Resample to get Prepar3d photoscenery.
Tom mentioned SbuilderX, which I think can 'scrape' online images into photoscenery, but I've never used that, as it doesn't give me any control over what I get, and who it belongs to. But if you do this sort of thing for Xplane already, then you might want to start there.
Starting with smaller goals, you can ask more specific questions here, making sure people understand that you are specifically looking for P3Dv4-specific tools and methods.
There are a few tools which give P3Dv4 output (provided you have the SDK installed) and I'll list a few here, based on my experience and the techniques I prefer:

For photoscenery, I just use Resample, which is one of the SDK tools. It processes WGS84 images into a photoscenery file which you can just activate in the sim. I only ever use GeoTIFF images, which make it a lot easier:) You can use any images, provided they are WGS84, but you'd need to be able to tell Resample the coverage area if they are not georeferenced.
3DS Max is a great choice for modelling, as it is supported by the SDK. I don't use it myself, but if I was starting over, I'd start with that.
ModelConverterX (available here on FSDeveloper) is a very useful tool, as it does a lot of things to tweak, fix, convert and enhance 3D models. It supports P3Dv4 output.
Airport Design Editor (ADE) is first and foremost for airport facilities -- runways, taxiways, parking etc. It does a lot more these days, so it is a must-have. It too supports P3Dv4.
SbuilderX is another very useful tool, it can handle anything to do with vectors, landclass etc. It too does too much to get your head around in a short time!
Photoshop is all you'd need to create and process images/textures etc.
You've said you have your models already, you'd just need to install the SDK, which will give you the export tools, and export your models from 3DS Max. Then compile them into a Library, I use Arno's Library Creator. Placing them into the sim is one area which gets a bit awkward -- P3Dv4 has SimDirector, which is a flight/scenario builder, but you can use it just to place models, as it gives a real-time view as you work. However I find it really difficult to use, so I stick with the obsolete Whisplacer, which I think doesn't work in P3Dv4, so I keep v3 installed just for Whisplacer:)
You can use ADE to place models, but no interactively, and ModelConverterX can do this as well. We really need a proper placement tool, I'm still hoping that someone will take the open-source Whisplacer and get it working for v4!
 
Thanks to all of you guys for helping me out! (Don’t mind the name it’s just me who switched accounts). So I’ve figured out also a bit different way of doing things, specifically speaking, importing an image from SBX into 3Ds and then working with all of this stuff right there, and afterwards all what’s left to do is to simply export all the stuff with one pivot center, so that all of them have the same center of coordinates, this method also lets you bake in shadows for the ground poly which Willi make it Look even better!

I’ve been watching a guy also on youtube revrevgary something like that and that’s what he’s showing there.

Thank you guys once again.
 
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