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scenery design tools suggestions????

T

ticosimmer

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7
Country
costarica
Hi,
I'm planning to redesign the MROC airport in Costa Rica.
I used Gmax and Airport for Windows, also CAT ( which is great)
I would like to know wich tools can I use to design this scenery, as long as I am not satisfy with the ground textures, approns etc generated by Gmaz and Airport for Windows.
Wich tool should I use to do taxiways, runways and aprons (not Gmax please)
Wich tool should I use to modify the mesh? (altitude, and generate some hills for instance)
Wich tool should I use to create road traffic?? I was really limited by Gmax in this issue I remember only being able to animate in one direction without being able to make turns.
Lights...well It was a headache trying to iluminate the apron areas with landing lights....eventually I gave up.
And any other suggestion will be greatly appreciated.
Any tutorials also please..
Thanks a lot
Cheers
Rodrigo from Costa Rica
 
ticosimmer said:
1. Wich tool should I use to do taxiways, runways and aprons (not Gmax please)
2. Wich tool should I use to modify the mesh? (altitude, and generate some hills for instance)
3. Wich tool should I use to create road traffic?? I was really limited by Gmax in this issue I remember only being able to animate in one direction without being able to make turns.
4. Lights...well It was a headache trying to iluminate the apron areas with landing lights....eventually I gave up.
Click to expand...

For question no. 1, I really have no idea, airport for windows and FS Scenery Creator (http://fssc.avsim.net ) should have that option.
2. terrabuilder, or something like terrain sdk from Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com/games/flightsimulator/fs2004_downloads_sdk.asp ), but I should also mention that this is hell of a task, if this is your first scenery, don't even think about this as it will take most of your time. It's not as easy as you think... Or for some basics, you could fire-up gmax and make a trivial hills...
3. My personal opinion is that road traffic is not that needed because it will surely put your fps to crawl, except if you mean making various airport busses , service vehicles etc. You can animate it, as you've already said in gmax (and they can turn too), but gmax has its own limitations in working with fs2004.
4. as for number 2, this is extremely difficult, and proven inefficient, because it works at someone's fs, and doesn't at others. As I recollect, no solution for this problem yet, simply because lights for fs are made to be horizontal (landing etc), and not for pointing to ground. Someone had success with changing lots of effect files, combining them with their own lights, thus gaining some level of reality (you can find bunch of poles and lights on avsim, and I think, there's also thread here about it). Main problem is, when you put aircraft below light, there is no shadow beneath, nor light spot on plane.

My best hint is, go one step at a time, create airport, see how it looks, then go over to finesses like roads, hills etc.
 
Hello Rodrigo,

ticosimmer said:
Wich tool should I use to do taxiways, runways and aprons (not Gmax please)
Click to expand...
Why not? It's still the easiest way to produce realistic groundpolys. If you want to blend the polys, try FSGround2k4.
Wich tool should I use to modify the mesh? (altitude, and generate some hills for instance)
Click to expand...
I'd also suggest Ground2k4
Wich tool should I use to create road traffic?? I was really limited by Gmax in this issue I remember only being able to animate in one direction without being able to make turns.
Click to expand...
You can do all sorts of animation in GMax, for example give an object a path on which it should drive on. ;)
Lights...well It was a headache trying to iluminate the apron areas with landing lights....eventually I gave up.
Click to expand...
You may take a look at my website, where I show some pictures, in which I created apronlights via FX. I found it rather convincing.

edit: woops, not fast enough... :D
 
Last edited:
thanks Thorsten and pixel for your replies.
1 I don´t know FSGround2k4 is it ok? where can I find it? I did my scenery with Gmax polygons so I could stick to it if it is the best way for polys. In that case do you know of a tutorial to incorporate landing tire marks on the RWY?

2 Also regarding the Gmax animations is there any tutorial on how to animate a car in order for it to move straight, turn and follow a path?? In my scenery I included Gmax animations of an airport car but could only on a straigh direction. Also I used the great CAT tool and tutorial to animate the gates.

3 I checked your web site Thorsten..it looks great for me...I'll check your website for some tricks... thanks

Thanks again...any ideas or suggestions are very welcome....thanks again guys
Cheers
Rodrigo..
By the way if you ever come to Costa Rica...let me know so I'll invite u a coffee or a beer your choice...
 
Don't think I'll get to CR in the next 2 weeks. :D ;) Thanks anyway. :)

Sorry, the name was ground2k4.

For the touchdown-stripes you could simply use a poly with alphachannel. I used it for the markings and it works pretty well.

I found a small tutorial for animating a car driving along a defined path - but can't remember where - sorry :o (It was in german anyway...)
 
Hi Rodrigo,

Another option to make runways, taxiways, etc is to do them with the XML code. This is how MS did it in the default scenery. Your options for texturing are a bit more limited though. If you want more options I would suggest to use GMax indeed (I prefer GMax above Airport for Windows in that case).

For the animated vehciles on roads, you might want to take a look at AutoASM as well. There has been an dicussion on the AvSim scenery design forums lately about a new feature to create dynamic scenery with it as well.

Else you just need to animate your car in GMax along the path you want. This should not be too hard to do either. But you are limited to 1024 frames (circa 55 seconds).

To place cities, roads, etc I would indeed also suggest mesh design tools. You can either use Ground2k4 or SBuilder. Personally I prefer the interface of SBuilder, but both offer the same features.
 
Can you tell something about AutoASM, Arno? I can't find information about that (even in the AVSIM-thread). Where can I download it and is there a small tutorial?
 
Hi Thorsten,

I must say that I never used the tool. I only know it from discussions at AvSim. I think you can download it from www.scenery.org. For the rest I don't know too much about it (could also be that the dynamic scenery is not yet in the released version).
 
Once again thanks to everyone.
I have done RWY markings via the Airport for Windows, but I was wondering on how to create the aircraft tire markings on the RWY, as for the textures are concerned would it be the same as the RWY sign markings?
Any tutorials on that?thanks guys
 
So you didn't paint the markings, did you? (I'm not working with afw, so I'm not sure what you mean). I think it's most realistic to paint your own (tire-) markings in Photoshop. But it's of course the more difficult way. I don't think there's a tutorial on this, but if you've managed to create groundpolys in GMax before it won't be too big of a problem. We've had another thread about this at the end of this topic and here. ;)
 
Well I just created a RWY via AfW with no texture, so I could make the RWY via Gmax with the appropiate texture, then I placed the Afw RWY with no textures but with all markings /created by AfW) over the Gmax RWY poly..and set the corresponding priority for it not to be blurring.
But for the tire marks..I guess you mean I have to create a poly, assign the tire mark texture and then overlay it in the RWY...is this the way?
By the way, your website is in German, wich I do´n't speak..is the any chance to know the way you managed the aprons lighting in English?
thanks again
 
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