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Creating GA parking "rectangles"

Gheed

Gheed

Messages
19
Country
finland
Hello.

I've been doing some work on this finnish airport, but since it's my first addon creation I planned to just make a AFCAD for version 1.0 and afterwards upgrade it to 2.0 with a groundpoly once I have time to learn how to make a nice looking one.

I encountered couple of differences with the airport layout and ADE.. Mostly with GA. Here's a google maps aerial view of the apron (http://goo.gl/maps/YZ1cN), you can see that the General Aviation parking is on the corners of the apron, with a rectangular line marking the area. I can easily of course make the parking spots on the edges, but how can I make the lines to indicate that there are parking spots on the edges? So far my compromise was with the couple parkings in the middle of the taxi lines to just make a apron link connected to it and thats it. But that looks much worse trying to link all those parking spots on the edges to the taxi line.

So I'm wondering if there's a way to create something that would resemble what you can see in real life... I know I can make this layout with a ground poly ofcourse, but that would postpone the release quite a bit as I only have knowledge of how to create a basic, single layer runway groundpoly.

Here's the airport chart: https://ais.fi/ais/eaip/aipcharts/efma/EF_AD_2_EFMA_ADC.pdf


And I attached couple pics how i have it atm in FSX.



Thanks in advance. This scenery creation is really awesome and frustrating at the same time, but always worth it in the end :o
 

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Hi,

You could use a 1 or 2 ft wide taxiway of the "closed" kind without center lines or edge lines. If you want white lines, make the surface ice. It is not perfect, ground polys would be better.
 
The Ground Polygon function in the beta version of ADE 1.6 is working sufficiently to create white or yellow lines. Make sure you get the latest files from the "ADE-GP" threads.

The latest ADE version is 01.60.4854.22434 and the latest ADE-GP.bgl is 0.0.35.
 
Thanks for the idea, made some kind of progress..

Taxiway without any sort of lines didnt really show anything in sim, but apron links with center lines and width 2 meters created something that is of far resemblance with the layout.

edit: posted same time as you Golf-HotelDelta, i'll look into the ADE-GP.
 

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I am downloading some photo scenery for EFMA. When I have it I will try to show how the GP markings work.
 
Unfortunately I found an error in the GP editor. The project is on hold for the moment.
 
You are on the right track in your last image. This took me about 10 minutes in ADE but I have had several years experience in bending Apron links to my will when creating taxi lines and ground markings so can't say how long it'll take you to figure it out but it's possible.



I color the Apron links yellow so I don't confuse them with AI pathing (which I keep green). Switch on the center line and set the width to 1. You will get a very slight rounding at the corners. I just used the parking spaces for a quick measurement reference. You'll want to open up Google Earth and use the Ruler tool to get measurements of the markings and then use Guidelines in ADE to lay out everything. Then just trace over the Guidelines with Apron links. Make the taxi line running around the boxes larger than the 30ft I'm using in the image above and you'll get bigger corners more like what you see in the aerial photo - I think 60ft should give you suitable curves. Forgot to test that.

Hey robystar great tip about the Ice lines, I never thought of that. Most of my white line markings I take care of with narrow Vehicle paths sporting a solid line on one side. Tough when passing over changing surface types. An Ice texture line would be way easier, and easy to make with a helper shape. For straight lines, anyway
 
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Wow, that looks amazing! I was sure someone on here knew how to do it :) I'll try it later on today as it is morning here in Finland now and I have real life stuff to do first... :D
 
You can now do it with ADE 1.6 Beta which incorporates ground polygons:





 
Gheed since you're new to all this I would recommend just learning to do it George's way now that it's possible to do within ADE. My way was something I developed lacking the proper tools to do what George did. The only benefit it has is allowing you to distribute just an airport BGL with no textures required (unless you can use the FSX textures? I don't know). In the long run learning ground polys is the better way to go anyways.
 
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