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Suggestion

=Hollywood=

=Hollywood=

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Hi Arno,

I'm not so sure Model Converter X would be the right tool to suggest for this but I've had an idea for a long time for a tool that could build 3D buildings from SHP building footprints.

A lot of building footprint data is available with building altitude and # of floors. I've been wishing FSX had such a SHP2MDL tool for quickly building generic buildings in FSX.

What it could do is read the building footprint geolocations, the height (either AGL or AMSL) and number of stories (for mapping textures)...

Whole cities could quickly be built like this very rapidly and could also in future replace autogen quickly and easily if it was able to be integrated into an autogen annotator tool...

Just a concept, not sure how worthwhile anyone would think such a tool would be but you could quickly end up with cities like these:

N26.jpg

N27.jpg

N21.jpg

vieWTerra_5.jpg
 
Hi Dean,

I like that idea. You might have seen that ModelConverterX already has some side functionality (hidden in menu's etc) to do tasks that are not directly related with object conversion. I think this one could be an interesting one to experiment with as well.

The tool already has the functionality to export objects and I have a basic extrude function as well. So I would only need to add importing of shapefiles, which is something I have done before already.

My first idea when you mention this functionality is that it would be better to do it as autogen, for the performance. But it could be a nice test to see how it performs when you use simple MDL objects, optimized for drawcall batching.

My biggest concern would be the textures. I am not so artistic to make good textures for such buildings. So either we would have to reuse MS textures or somebody must have some nice ones :).

So interetsing idea, let's discuss this further and do some testing with it.
 
Hi Arno,

Was thinking the same thing both regarding autogen and also the MDL side.

I agree that assigning default textures would be the way to go.

I can send over some SHP files if you want to have a play, got two cities, one with building height AGL the other building height AMSL.

Dean.
 
What type of source data would this be produced from.

I.e. is it something that is widely available for all?

Tom
 
From building footprint shapefiles, depends on the city or government but this type of data is pretty readily available...
 
Hi Dean,

Sounds like a good experiment. I am not sure if I will have time to start with it before my vacation, that is in two weeks already.
 
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