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MSFS [Released] Twentyfive Mile & Limber Lake Airstrip

Rotornut44

Rotornut44

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With Fort Crosby now released, it's time to venture on to a new location.


Welcome to Twentyfive Mile Lake!
Twentyfive-Mile-Lake_WIP_MSFS.jpg



But we cant talk about Twentyfive Mile Lake without talking about...


Limber-Lake_WIP_MSFS.jpg



Limber Lake
These two backcountry airstrips are just 1 mi (1.6 km) apart and 10.5 mi (16.9 km) from my recently released payware: Fort Crosby.
The total coverage area is going to be right around 5.6 sq mi (9 sq km).

It currently features 30cm/px aerial imagery, extensive hand-terraforming at both airstrips, as well as the normal suite of vegetation and objects in Emerald Object Library.


Twentyfive-Mile_Limber-Lake_Coverage.jpg



This scenery is still in the very early stages. My entire goal here is to see just how quickly I can turn out these airstrips since I did most of the required R&D during the development of Fort Crosby.
I'm currently shooting for a month and it's currently day 4. So, even though I still have some R&D to do, I'm feeling pretty ambitious. We'll see how it goes...

Next step is starting on modeling for the cabins at both airstrips. I do have real estate photos of the property at Limber Lake, so that one will be the most true to life. I am still searching for any available references for Twentyfive Mile Lake. And then of course I will probably find an excuse to implement some other new stuff...

I was thinking about additional animated wildlife a lot while working on Fort Crosby. Maybe I can squeeze that into this release..

Until then, you can catch a preview of the Twentyfive Mile Lake Airstrip here:

More updates coming soon!

RN44
 
Short update tonight. Day 9. I'm 2 days behind where I was hoping to be, but things are still moving smoothly!

I have both the Cabin and Shed at Limber Lake fully modeled, painted, optimized and placed in the sim as of today. I haven't taken any in-sim shots of them yet as I want to get a few more models done before that, but here are a few shots of the painted buildings in Substance!

ESD_Limber_Lake_Alaska_Shed.jpg

ESD_Limber_Lake_Alaska_Cabin.jpg


Ok. Maybe one in-sim shot..
But just to showcase the glass grunge detail texture.

ESD_Limber_Lake_Alaska_Window_Grunge.jpg



I still have a few smaller models to do here at Limber Lake, but I'm hoping to get those modeled and textured in the next day or so.
 
Modeling, once again is proving to be the slowest task for me, but I have made some good progress since my last post. All core structures have been modeled, textured, optimized, and placed at Limber Lake. I am now moving on to the final buildings on my list, as well as some other stuff that I need to create for fillers.

I have also acquired a pack of Animals that I will soon begin adapting and writing worldscripts for, but more on that in the near future!

Besides the modeling, I have been doing some cleanup work on the aerial imagery as well as terraforming, and tidying up some vegetation placements. This is a long process that is usually ongoing throughout the entire project, but it comes together more and more every few days!

Here's a screenshot dump of all Limber Lake models currently placed in the sim (The Bulldozer is a purchased model)!

RNLL_WIP3_1.jpg
RNLL_WIP3_2.jpg
RNLL_WIP3_3.jpg
RNLL_WIP3_4.jpg
RNLL_WIP3_5.jpg
 
It's been a little while since my last dev update for this project.

What was supposed to be a speed-run project has had it's priorities changed. This will become apparent as to why likely within the next few months. I have been mostly working on R&D for Emerald Object Library over the last several weeks. I have been creating several new models for the project, have new animals integrated and walking around on worldscript paths, and have begun modeling several more cabins for the scenery. This will likely take me a few weeks as it did last time. So, we are in that part of the project where there isn't a ton to share visually at the moment.

However, I did publish a 46 minute video yesterday exploring the WIP scenery and it's current features in the CowanSim 500E. You can check that video out below (timestamps in the description). I'll be back with another dev update once I have some more progress to share on the modeling-front!

 
Modeling continues.

I was planning on mostly reusing the cabins I made for Fort Crosby around the coverage area, however the more I placed, the more repetitive things looked. So, I have opted to do another batch of cabins to break things up a bit. I'm up to 6 now, which I have been working on amongst other things. Some more detailed than others, but a good balance of detail to low poly throughout.

All cabins are based on real local cabins. 3 of which are actually on Safari Lake, included in the coverage area. I'm planning to do a few more, but really need to sit down and decide on which ones to go for. I have an assortment of photos I've dug up from around Safari Lake, that should allow me to model at least a few more pretty close to how they are in real life.

I really would like to get this project wrapped up this month, so we'll see what I can get done in the next few weeks!

allcabins4.PNG

allcabins3.PNG

allcabins2.PNG

allcabins1.PNG
 
I just finished up painting the final Cabin model out of the batch yesterday. I think I'm going to have a few more simple models to create, but for the most part, I believe the majority of the modeling for this project is now done!
After this stretch, I'm definitely ready to get back into the sim and do some more designing. Need some visual progress to make me feel like I'm actually making some real progress (even though I know I still am).

Hopefully I'll have something to show in-sim this week! Until then, here's how all the models turned out!

cabins_render.jpg
 
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Since the last update, I've been working hard to put the finishing touches on this scenery and get it ready for testing. And I'm excited to announce that as of two days ago, my beta team received their first copy of the scenery!

I have once again reached that stage of the project where I am just taking care of little items. Focusing on final optimization, and anything else I want to get out in the next Emerald Object Library update.

At this point the scenery is pretty much feature complete. All cabins, clutter, vegetation, dynamic objects and VFX have been placed. I have also taken the time to redo my legacy dock models (which were brought over from FSX and "converted" to PBR with Materialize). They now look a lot better and some of the pieces are actually much lighter on performance that the old models. I also played around with instancing mesh for the tires on a few of the dock models as I had never done if before, always being under the impression that is didn't work in Blender with the MSFS exporter, but that seems to be false knowledge now, because it definitely does! Maybe something I can use some more in the future once I figure my way more around the when and when not to use it part.

esd_new_docks.jpg


While I was thinking about redoing the docks, I also started thinking of a way to add a bit more to the water part of the scene. I got the idea to do some Lilly Pads, but wasn't sure how they would turn out. I opted to do them as 2D planes over an area of about 10 meters in each group. Then just raised them a little to prevent clipping with the water up close. I was concerned that they may flicker at a distance as 2D planes have done in the past, but It seems that the z-sorting over water must be either different or it's just better in general than it was last time I tried it, because I havent ran into any clipping or flickering except for when the 3D waves start to kick in, which was expected anyways. Though, being closer to the shoreline, they still are not effected too bad.

I do wish I could hide that spacing above the water a little more. I have shadows completely disabled for them, both on the material and in-sim, but I think it's the screen space reflections doing the effect more than anything (Unless the no shadow option just doesn't work).

RN25_RNLL_3.jpg


As I did in the Fort Crosby scenery, I also brought back 3D snow on airstrip building roofs. Though, I have set up the material a little differently now. I use the same base layer of snow that I used before, however I have also now added a detail layer on top to get much higher resolution snow. This allowed me to lower the resolution of the base layer of snow, so that even with the new detail texture, it's using less texture memory overall. I will likely rework Fort Crosby's material in the next update as well to take advantage of this.

I opted not to do icicles this time around as they are pretty heavy geometry. If I do them again in the future, I think I want to try a new approach. I also just didn't really want them on the buildings this time around.

RN25_RNLL_4.jpg


Anyways, that pretty much wraps it up for this project. While testing is ongoing, I'll be tying things up on my end and starting on the walkthough and trailer videos likely next week. I'm really hoping to have this one released to PC and Xbox by the end of the month, as long as testing goes smoothly.

Until then, here are a few more shots focused around Safari Lake (Only the first one, plus the Beaver shot above) and the Twentyfive Mile Lake airstrip!

RN25_RNLL_1.jpg
RN25_RNLL_2.jpg
RN25_RNLL_5.jpg
RN25_RNLL_6.jpg
RN25_RNLL_7.jpg
 
The trailer has arrived! This one was a fun one to make. Short and to the point as it debuted during National eSTOL yesterday!

 
Heermeyer said:
Awesome Scenery!
Is that emissive texture on 0:58 with glow effect? But how?
Click to expand...
Thanks!
You just need to bump up Emissive Scale in the material settings (I believe I used around 30 - bloom also needs to be on in your sim settings). The latest official Blender exporter will do it, prior it had to be done manually in the gltf. The light itself is using an emissive color instead of a texture - just for optimization purposes. Same goes for Windows, but with no emissive scale.
 
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