New to Scenery Design

[FlightPilot]

Hello everyone ,

Im completely new to fsx scenery design and i know this topic is posted many times. I look forward to creating payware high definition airports.I would like to start with this little airport in south India known as Trivandrum!Its not a big airport and i plan to do it as freeware since i have never created any airports till now and im new to this.Before posting this i have gone through your wiki and i am aware of the softwares and tools required to create an airport for fsx.I would like to add real grass , custom taxiway , polygons and prefer gmax to design the airport buildings . What i wanted to ask was how do i create real looking airport terminals (photo-real) just as orbx or fly tampa does.I have photoshop and was wondering where i could get started with.

Custom taxiways and runways is not a problem , i started learning with a tutorial i found on YouTube. All i want is some help with gmax and photo real scenery.
_____________
Regards,
Raul (FlightPolit)
Sent via my HTC Sensation

 

[Tejal Bernardo]

Well that is the problem of all of us, where to start, anyway the people use sbuilderx for photorreal sceneries, but the sceneries can't be deliver because images are from google earth. ragarding to gmax, a lot of tutorials and patience, maybe the most important for you is to learn to make ground polys, where you design the runways and terrain, there are many tutorials and post about the matter.good luck

 

[FlightPilot]

Thanks for you'r reply . any idea where i can find tutorials for gmax object building .. ? and yes i do understand it takes lot of time and patience

 

[hcornea]

There are some basic Gmax tutorials around, such as Robin's excellent tutorials on windowlight.co.nz

Most learning comes from trial (and hopefully not so much error!)

There's patience and there's patience

One of the clues is your description of Trivandrum as a small airport.

Well, I guess it's not a large airport, but (as any Max / Gmax user knows) it is not a small one either!

The major frustration you may encounter is the quality of the aerial imagery (unless you have another source)

Enjoy the journey.

 

[FlightPilot]

thanks ! yeah i do understand what your saying
im learning through these tutorials now .. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3mVwffpmzU&feature=related

Here are some Pictures of the Real Trivandrum Airport , the new terminal 3 looks hard to build in gmax but let's see

Ariel view and new terminal (International)

Three Aerobridges in the New terminal + 2 in old (now domestic)

Control Tower

A little about the Airport -

Trivandrum International Airport (Malayalam: തിരുവനന്തപുരം അന്താരാഷ്ട്ര വിമാനത്താവളം (IATA: TRV, ICAO: VOTV) is located in Thiruvananthapuram and is the first airport in the state of Kerala, India.It is the first International airport in a non-metro city in India. TIA is considered as an "all weather" airport in the country and is ISO 9001-2000 certified.Owing to this many flights from Cochin and Calicut are diverted here when ever weather hinders visibility in the respective airports. It is the 8th busiest airport in the country in terms of international passenger traffic and 10th busiest in terms of overall passenger traffic.

Airlines Operating In and Out -

Air Arabia
Air India
Air India Express
Emirates
Etihad Airways
IndiGo
Jet Airways
Jet Airways
Kingfisher Airlines
Kingfisher Airlines
Kuwait Airways
Maldivian
Oman Air
Qatar Airways
SilkAir Singapore
Spicejet
SriLankan Airlines
Tiger Airways
Cargo
Airlines
Qatar Airways Cargo
Saudi Arabian Airlines
Air India Cargo

Crash History - No crashed so far

 

[robystar]

Hi,

I would suggest you forget about Gmax to make your Thiruvananthapuram airport (I copied and pasted that name) and use Google Sketchup to make them.
It is far more easier and as there are no animations in buildings (unless you want to have them move during an earthquake) GSU is the ideal tool.
It takes some doing in learning GSU as well but it is easier by far when compared to Gmax.
Arno's ModelconverterX will do the necessary format and texture conversions.
Even without knowing Gmax at all, I managed to make some very nice scenery using those tools.
For your info and when it concerns an entire airport photoreal project , I use:
- FSEarth Tiles program for the photoreal;
- GSU for the buildings;
- Annotator for the autogen;
- MCX for the conversion of the GSU dae files to FSX bgl's
- GIMP, DXTBMP and Imagetool for the texture conversions
- Library Creator for repeating more or less standard objects and converting them to Library Objects;
- AIFP for the AI;
- ground poly I make with GSU as well and convert with Ground Poly creator built into MCX.
- ADE for making the airport changes and adding all the aforegoing.
- AIBTC for adding freeway traffic
- Google Earth in combi with AIBTC to add boat and vehicle traffic.

(Might be I forgot something)

Enjoy yourself

Roby

 

[hcornea]

the new terminal 3 looks hard to build in gmax but let's see .....)

should read:

the new terminal 3 looks FUN to build in gmax.

I would suggest you forget about Gmax ....

I would respectfully disagree ... and here's why:

This is a medium to large airport (sorry, it's not small!) so you need to have strict control over material usage and batching.

FSX has a number of material settings which offer great flexibility ... you can access these via Arno's tool .. but you can't save them ... and certainly can't re-use them in other models.

Gmax gives tight control over Polygon count / geometry and triangulation.

Gmax uses (almost) the same interface as Autodesk's other more expensive professional sibling 3DsMax ... so you are developing a skillset you can use.

Gmax is not (contrary to what some say) hard to learn.

It is absolutely CRAZY to think they "gave away" a tool this fully fledged ... even with its' lovable (or not so lovable) quirks.

Sketchup is very useful for scaling footprints, but you are always one step removed from the core of what you are creating in the sim, so for final work 3DSMax or Gmax are superior (IMHO, of course)

 

[FlightPilot]

It should be really fun to Build and quite a challenge !! .. well robystar i don't like sketch up for some reason , not high definition ..

 

[gayanll]

so did you complete?