The idea of making a collection of sloped flattens from an SU model imported into MCX sounds cool. But it was not clear to me how it blends with the existing terrain mesh at the margins. How is that done? If it's not too hard < complicated ? >, perhaps a fairly large area could be reshaped.
If you have decided to use the surrounding/underlying FTX custom terrain mesh as the base onto which you will place your custom sloped terrain flatten, the altitudes for those terrain vertices will be your reference for where to set the elevation of the vertices in the outer perimeter of your custom sloped terrain flatten polygon (actually a Triangulated Irregular Network aka "
TIN").
After MCX outputs your custom sloped terrain flatten BGL, you can import that
BGL file into
Terrain Sculptor by Don Grovestine (aka "gadgets"), which will then internally be able to decompile that CVX vector BGL with the
CVX-Extractor utility by Patrick Germain, and instead perform a "
semi-automated" update of Altitude matching for those outer perimeter vertices (IIUC, by sampling slewed terrain mesh "ground" elevation at those quad mesh vertex aka "QMV" grid coordinate offsets from within a concurrent FS task session):
http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/threads/development-release-1-2-00-available.434575/
http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/forums/terrain-sculptor.146/
Alternatively, after MCX outputs your custom sloped terrain flatten BGL, you can manually decompile that CVX vector BGL with
CVX-Extractor utility by Patrick Germain:
http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/threads/cvxextractor-exporting-vector-data.432918/
CVX-Extractor can then output a ESRI-
SHP file for your custom sloped terrain flatten.
When that
SHP file is '
Appended' to a project in
SBuilderX, one can (manually) select each individual vertex to set the elevation of those vertices in the outer perimeter of your custom sloped terrain flatten polygon (IIUC, by sampling slewed terrain mesh "ground" elevation at those quad mesh vertex aka "QMV" grid coordinate offsets from within a concurrent FS task session), thus reading / writing the FS user aircraft position "ground" Altitude MSL from the surrounding/underlying FTX custom terrain mesh via FSUIPC, so that the assigned elevations match that of the FTX terrain mesh, and your final ground surface "blend" in FS / P3D at run time is visibly 'seamless'.
SBuilderX captures altitude data for a sloped terrain flatten polygon point from aircraft position via the "
Point From Aircraft" context menu option:
1.)
Select a vertex in the outer perimeter of your custom sloped terrain flatten polygon
2.) Right-click >
Fly aircraft here
3.) Right-click >
Point from aircraft
4.)
Repeat for each individual vertex to set the elevation of those vertices in the outer perimeter of your custom sloped terrain flatten polygon ...to match that of the surrounding/underlying FTX custom terrain mesh, so when the elevations of your polygon vertices match those of the mesh, your surface "blend" is seamless.
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EDITED]
FSUIPC is used by SBuilderX and most other FS utilities to read the FS internal value for
ground surface elevation directly below the user aircraft.
Rhumbaflappy's Terrain Calculator X (aka "TCalcX") version 3 is sometimes used to report on-screen the ground surface elevation and a few other values, and AFAIK is also used to insert those values into SBuilderX via "
Point from Aircraft".
http://www.ptsim.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=6226
http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/resources/tcalcx.93/
NOTE: The compiled executable
TCalcX_003.exe is in the un-ZIP-ped folder path:
[path]\81712-TCalcX_003_source\TCalcX_003_source\TCalcX_003\bin\x86\Release\
TCalcX_003.exe
IIRC, the method I recently described in another thread using SBuilderX for deriving elevation from the user aircraft coordinate Lat-Lon position actually inserts the
ground surface elevation into a terrain poly vertex point
rather than the aircraft flight Altitude AGL or MSL (...and AFAIK ADE9X does the same).
http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/th...ground-textures-to-a-3d-terrain-model.436776/
It has been a while since I used that feature in SBuilderX, so I don't recall if that process actually requires one to force and keep the FinneyGround CrossHairs Plus (aka "CH+")
on-ground first via the F1 key in FS slew mode, as I instead personally use that excellent "CH+" aircraft scenery tool all the time via a proprietary executable utility which manually or semi-automatically also derives and logs the aircraft flight and ground surface altitude, Geographic coordinates, True heading and Magnetic variation, as well as various other FS internal values from FSUIPC offsets, and converts them to 13 decimal place floating point numbers.
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END_EDIT]
I've been hardening the car deck and upper deck of my AI ferries so you can ride along with a SimObject like Orbx Bob for a while now.
What's funny is making a mistake controlling the P3D avatar and have him go over the side from the top deck of the ferry, flailing his arms until he makes a big splash.
I'd like to see a video of that (it might motivate me to not wait even longer for LM to get more fixes into P3Dv3x before I acquire that current working version) !
GaryGB
