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Okay, I will take a shot at explaining how I went about constructing CYQR. Believe it or not, still lots of work to do but this is more or less how I worked through the project. No doubt there are better ways of doing things. Hopefully you are able to understand my rambling explanation below.
1. A large reference photo library airport buildings and infrastructure was collected. It included close-ups of building windows, doors, siding etc. to create a materials collection for creation of textures (point 15 explains how the close-up images were used).
2. Acquisition of aerial imagery. For this project I purchased an aerial image of the airport and a fairly large amount of surrounding area, particularly approaches to runways (still not sure I will use all of this in the project).
3. Aerial imagery is .6m resolution, 1200 dpi bmp and came to me in a file that was over a half gig in size.
4. Total Image Slicer software was purchased to cut the aerial image into 1024 X 1024 sized tiles.
5. A sub sectioned plane was created in gmax with the appropriate number of segments, and each of the segments was textured with the aerial imagery tiles.
6. Coordinates for placement of the tiles was determined and test fitted in FS9 to match UT Canada (highly recommended because the default Regina city area bears absolutely no resemblance to the real world). The gmax aerial imagery was placed in FS9 using the FS2002 SDK tweak method.
7. A suitably sized flatten and exclusion files were created for the scenery area using FSTflatten and Execbuilder.
8. Sessional texture sets were created and applied by tweaking the imagery asm file.
9. “Noise” texturing was added to the tiles to improve aerial imagery appearance at ground level
10. Runways, taxiways and ramps built up and layered over the aerial imagery using higher resolution original textures. Edging applied to these followed by higher resolution texturing of ground features along the hard surfaces.
11. Hard surface features such as cracks, skid marks etc. layers added
12. Runway lines and markings, taxiway lines, ramp and gate markings were layered in using loft method.
13. Building dimensions taken from Google Earth and models built up beginning with the terminal.
14. Early on I decided that I wanted reasonably good detail and texture resolution for the air side of buildings. For instance, I did not want the brick work of the terminal looking blurred when parked at the gate. The work around to the FS9 texture size limit of 1024 was to use multiple texture sets for buildings. Once a model of a building was constructed in gmax I worked out the texture sets to achieve the target detail. I did this keeping in mind that too many draw calls hinder performance.
15. In order to get more bang for my buck with the textures sheets, and to keep down the number down as much a possible, I created high resolution swatches of building materials (such as siding) on the texture sheets and applied these to the whole building by tiling that portion of the texture. The same texture sheet also included close-up imagery of doors, windows and details, which were applied to properly sized rectangle shapes. Copies of these window and door shapes are made and used as Boolean operands to make cut outs in the building. The original window and door shapes are then inserted into the openings. In most cases I could make reasonably high resolution hangars from a single texture sheet. By the way, all textures are mipped. This method was used on all the general aviation hangars.
16. The cutouts are necessary to avoid texture flashing. If the window and door shapes were simply placed and merged into the building they would be fine close up but you’d get texture flashing at distance.
17. Using this modelling method does increase the complexity of the model and could adversely affect performance. To mitigate this I keep a copy to the building model before making the cut outs. This simple model is displayed at longer distances while the detailed model is seen only when close-up. The textures for the simple distance model is derived from an in-sim screen shot of the four sides of the detailed building.
18. Once I all the buildings are constructed I added fencing to the airport. My fences are double-sided planes with alpha channel transparencies. Where fences are close to ramps I give the fences some depth by including fence posts, which display only when close-up.
19. Taxiway signs are also distance conditioned. Rather than manually tweaking the models I use Arno’s MDL-tweaker tool.
20. My runway and taxiway edge lights are simple textured planes conditioned to rotate to user. They are bgl type lights.
21. My parking lot cars are all rough low-poly models. The textures are mostly from pictures of vehicles I shot in mall parking lots or from car sales sites on-line. I am still pondering whether to do animated traffic.
22. Currently I am working on more detailed vehicle models including ground service equipment representative of what is at the actual airport.
23. Most of my models are put into libraries and placed into the scenery using Abacus EZ-Scenery.
24. Summary of tools: Gmax for all modeling, Photoshop Elements 9, Paint shop Pro X (for night lighting), TextureManager, Total Image Slicer, Excbuilder, Tcalc2004, FSTflatten, MDL-Tweaker, Library Creator, Model Converter,BGlt2XML,Ground2K4 and I’ve probably missed some.
Again, I want to point out that I am no expert at scenery design. My aim is to achieve a reasonably detailed model of my home airport that performs well. So far so good, notwithstanding my 3D grass experiment that needs work. Once I get this thing done and out there you can judge for yourself how well I did!
Greg
