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FSX Building Scenery; Always flat on the ground; Terrain Mesh Differences

lionheart

lionheart

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Hey all,

Question...

When selling a 'scenery package' of say an airport.... How do you handle different land classes? If a person has installed a different land class and it raises the surrounding fields up 10 feet or 3 meters, etc, will the airport you have created be sitting on a hill in that simulator? Can one make the scenery objects to sit flat on the ground mesh, or would they need adapter downloads or modified files to sit the airports down on the ground?


Thanks,


Bill
LHC
 
a) Wrong forum, Bill.
http://fsdeveloper.com/forum/categories/scenery-design-terrain-design.28/

b) Land class doesn't determine terrain elevation. Mesh does.
Mesh information is overridden by the elevation of the airport base polygon, so if you're developing an airport in a hilly area for a high resolution mesh and it looks fine in your FSX, some customers, who are using a low-resolution mesh, will see the airport - or at least the runway ends - as a plateau that's visibly sticking out of the surrounding terrain.
Random example: http://fsfiles.org/flightsimshotsv2/images/2015/06/12/enb2015_6_7_17_40_7.png
 
Hi Bill:

As you may know, most airports use a central flattened polygon area so that AI traffic will be able to work unimpeded by "ground" obstacles.


FYI: Since you are a highly experienced 3D modeler, I should mention that one can 3D model both the central airport "flat" flatten, and a "sloped" flatten of the surface outside the perimeter of the "flat" flatten that 'blends' the airport terrain into the surrounding terrain mesh.

One can then convert that 3D surface model into a 1-piece BGL using Arno's ModelConverterX (aka "MCX")

Alternatively one may use Don Grovestine's Terrain Sculptor to make a blended airport flatten BGL.


Hope this helps as a general conceptual overview ! :)

GaryGB
 
But note those tools use a fixed elevation for those points, and thus will not help you with the problem of different users using different meshes...
 
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