MSFS20 Project YBAF - Archerfield Airport, Brisbane Australia

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After 35 years of dreaming for YBAF in MSFS, waiting for FS to finally have YBAF (I think it finally arrived in FS2002/2004 but it was bad), and FSX was a bit better and MSFS, plausible but just not accurate enough.

If anyone knows or has flown out of YBAF or learned to fly knows there are a gazillion cone and gable markers. It was easy enough to call some of the MSFS ones for the white gables, but the yellow gable markers with text needed to be built manually.

After doing up the texture work in Photoshop and afterwards using the help of claude.ai to generate all the variations of the .gltf and .xml files and new GUID's I was able to complete all of the custom airport runup bays, turbine only areas and reserved parking gable markers within 48 hours.

Since Just Flight released the Piper Tomahawk suddenly I'm working on airports we operated at while learning to fly, AI traffic doing circuits and now generating custom "on field" gables and cones and parking spaces and making sure runway operations are correct, I've had several moments that have left me floored.

The first was testing out SayIntentions.ai for ATC, finally I could use ATC as per real world procedures and quickly and easily tune frequencies in VR. I landed and shut down and literally just sat inside the aircraft in VR with my mouth open in awe.

The second was last night doing a test flight of a build. I was using the secondary runway whilst AI was using the primary and a few tomahawks were doing circuits. As I was on short final VH-TLA was just touching down so I flew over to fly formation during the circuit. Again another experience that left me flawed.

With the airfield looking as close to reality as possible aside from 3D buildings (I'm not a modeler - only basic edit work or basic objects), YBAF is now very immersive for this real world pilot. Next I need to add in taxiway signs in their real locations and my dreams are to have the main terminal building, and also get the taxiway edge lights looking as real as possible too.

My specs are i9 12900K, RTX 2080ti, 32GB of 3200 RAM in XMP, and 5GB/s SSD's.

 

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Okay so I wasn't happy with hacking together something from inside MSFS, plus as a pilot I'm a stickler for real world accuracy, I want it to be a digital twin of real life...

So two days ago I got up close and personal with brand new gable markers at YSPT and got some measurements and reference photos and after many hours hobbling around in Blender, made my first ever official 3D model and I even successfully UV unwrapped it!

I even have the lower LOD from the early part of the modeling so I'm pretty stoked.

I mean the last time I was trying to learn 3D design as in FS Design Studio for FS98 or was it 2000, and then Lightwave3D which was more powerful but intuitive. Yet I never completed any actual models. I've dabbled in Blender and 3DS/Max over the years, tweaking models etc but this is my very first offical completed model.

Those bevels were quite the challenge and not perfect at the bottom but good enough...

 

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Yesterday and today built entirely new gable markers from scratch. My first ever 3D modeling project by hand from scratch. Everything to real world dimension and as close to real life curves as possible.

Next stage Substance Painter to apply materials, occlusion, roughness, metal, normal, emissive etc.

 

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I've done a lot more work on YBAF the last couple of days. I received an invite to get airside with operations and was able to document a ton of stuff I needed.

As a real world pilot, near enough isn't good enough for me so I started taking measurements, and reference photos and then I dove into Blender to reproduce the cones and gable markers to within at lease +/-1cm RMSE.

Touring airside outside of an aircraft was truly awesome, I took over 700 reference photos within a couple of hours, details I couldn't see from satellite and aerial imagery.

Today I was able to look up the Australian Standards and get RGB values for all the airport CASA spec cone and gable markers (as new would look, unlike some of the old sun faded ones) and redid all of the textures as well as built custom gable and cone markers that were missing.

Thankfully MSFS makes it really easy to swap out the models directly and still keep placement information. What's more, the cones and gables now fit exactly over the aerial/sat imagery cones and gables due to the extruded sections of the real life cone and gable markers.

I've also started using stock MSFS hangars and assets to build out the airport design to look closer to the real thing in terms of profiles, and will be able to swap them out with custom models later. I'm really wanting to have a custom model for the main terminal building which is the most important part of this airport aside from the cone and gable markers.

So this the latest results, still a ton of work to do such as building PBR textures with Normals, ORM etc. I need to investigate the mesh for the cone markers as there seems to be an anomaly with one part of the model that's not visible but messes up something when trying to apply a bevel to the base. Will see if I can figure that out.

Also yesterday I cataloged every single parking position on the airport so I can apply PSXT's learning on real world parking data with Real Traffic.

I've also been able to do up sample code to be able to create an HTML lookup database for each aircraft that visits and parks at the airport with a link to an aircraft photo website so repainters can easily find the real world aircraft in case they want to do repaints.

On the ProjectAI side work is ongoing with building databases and placeholder models to be able to power the backend of both live and AI based aircraft flying as per real world with real registrations, flight numbers and city pairs. But that's all for another thread...

 

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Mapped out all the runway, taxiway edge and runway lights (missed a loop at the end of 10L that I will snag tomorrow) all colored blue until I can manually place the runway light models to mimic real life.

I've decided to go ahead and start remodelling all the aprons, paintlines and taxiways by hand as YBAF has had an extensive amount of upgrades and work done over the last few years. I've decided to make this project as creative commons to be of benefit to real world pilots in their flying training.

I've found the best method for me for development of the airport using external geospatial tools which have up to date high resolution imagery and can then port the data to MSFS SDK XML format.

My technique now involves working with the best in class aerial imagery of the airport natively in an external app and even though the RMSE is different from the MSFS Bing Imagery, I can port it in and then realign the whole lot to the bing imagery placement. Should hopefully work in practice...

I'll also release the tools for conversion once I build them for the FS community to use as the process is a lot easier than what has gone before both 3rd party airport building and the official SDK's, all the compile code will be SDK specific, just developing the maps in a much more direct and easy way moving forward.

EDIT: oh one more thing. The cone and gable markers are all colored to Australian Standard AS2700-2011 as per CASA guidelines however in the Aussie sun this fades the paint/plastic. So with the help of AI I’m going to build a sun fade RGB calculator to be able to run the calculations on the brand new color then output the faded rgb color based on years and sun intensity. Here’s some of the advance work (not tested yet but will implement and bug check soon)

ChatGPT

A conversational AI system that listens, learns, and challenges

chatgpt.com

 

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The great news is I have been able to obtain 3 week old aerial imagery of the airport that has the most recent changes and should be more recent than MSFS 2024 will have.

I need to go through and color balance, image clean, remove aircraft from the imagery and due to recent upgrades of YBAF in the last 2 years, I've decided to go ahead and manually create a digital twin.

Today's work, hand texturing runway threshold and touchdown markers, placed REIL lights (I may have to build custom runway lights to be 100% accurate), placed a ton of new cone markers, manually created new paint lines for the upgraded main apron, placed most of 10L/28R's taxiway signs. New placeholder hangars to approximate what is there in real life. Added moved run up bays for 28L and a bunch more I have already forgotten about. The good news is the runway lights are almost perfectly matching real life.

One pilot from YBAF asked if I could ensure the blinding football field lights beyond the airfield on a heading of 010 could be added, so threw them in tonight.

I also need to go through the ERSA and Aerodrome Diagrams for YBAF and verify if there's any centreline runway lights.

Tomorrow, bringing in the encoded taxiway and hold lights and parking spaces.

 

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Another week gone by.

• I have most of the new apron paintlines laid down
• I have been adding more recent cone markers and realigning previous cone and gables
• Apron is just dev mode to see what the placements look like
• Still need to develop custom colors that conform to Australian Standards AS2700-2011 color values
• No text on tarmac as yet and the dot parking lines I need to generate a custom texture map for, which shouldn't be too hard
• I've hand mapped out the threshold markers, touchdown markers and centerlines as the default weren't accurate enough for 10L/28R & 10R/28L
• I need to hand generate the runway numbers so they match real life
• Placed field lights at football club off the east end of 10L/28R
• Need to prune some oversized trees at both ends of the runways
• Placed all taxiway signs for 10L/28R
• Worked on some taxiway markings
• Had success with runway lights matching real life positions, needs refining
• Reworked both sealed runways to new specifications
• Removed old windsock at 10L end, added new apron and representative hangar that just opened as well as similar hangars at that side of the airport
• Finished updating the cone markers so they now show as small as 1 pixel on screen as well as fixed beveling, still need to re-UV map it for normals and occlusion maps to make them look better
• Airfield taxiway lights all mapped, just need to plug back in and assign light colors
• All real and plausible parking spaces geolocated, just need to plug in
  
  
  
  

 

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Main Terminal Building almost done

 

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Digital Twin YBAF Update:

• Custom taxiway marking colors halfway complete with colors matching CASA Australian Standards AS2700-2011 Yellow and Red, with a custom yellow/red edge line
• Still need to create yellow green paint lines, dotted paint lines, black bordered paint lines
• Placeholder aprons for alpha build complete
• Alex has sent over an updated terminal with railings, just needing to prep for alpha build and plug it in
• Alex has sent over Movement Area Signs & Ground Vehicle Signs that I just need to polish textures (maybe get new reference photos) and bring them into the airport

We are going to add in Park Ridge Water Tower, will get out there once this heatwave is over to get some super detailed reference shots, generate a target logo for springwood, and Alex is planning the TV towers (although these will be optional as Orbx Brisbane City has them). Now when I was flying the old Goodna inbound reporting point was the Swanbank Power Station which has been torn down, if anyone is an aviator at YBAF here is there something specific used as a visual reference for the Goodna western inbound reporting track?