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Editing Existing Shorelines

scubakobe

scubakobe

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305
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us-california
I'm in the process of learning scenery design techniques for FS-X and right now I am trying to modify existing shoreline at an island.

I'm thinking about using FS-X KML. From what I have read so far I believe that I should first examine the default hyrdro polys in TMF Viewer to see how big of an area I will have to exclude.

First problem is that I can't find the correct hyrdro BGL with the way they name them in FS-X now.

Second, do I exclude the whole area, then trace the island in google earth and make a poly?

I don't want the mesh to disappear, of course, so I am not sure if that would work.

Could someone send me in the right direction for this one?

Thanks,

Kobbe
 
Try this,

1) Draw a polygon around the island (make a little bit larger than the island) and mark it as Exclude__WaterPolys. This will "erase" the existing water and hence erase the existing island.

2) Copy that polygon and mark it as Hydro_Polygons_Generic_Ocean_Perennial. Now you have a new patch of water.

3) Trace the new island shoreline and mark it as PolygonHole. This will make the island.

Build and have a look in FSX. You should see your new island. You will also see where the exclude in step 1 above has excluded LOD9 area. So you will need to redo the water for the LOD9 that was excluded.

You don't need to worry about the exclusions affecting any mesh. It wont.
 
Exclude WaterPolys Problems

I have a problem using the Polygonhole tag

Firstly, what I'm doing might be just a little ambitious, but I wanted to remodel an island (in this case Heron Island) to add a reef, boating channel, island and vegetation!

I tried the Exclude_WaterPolys tag as discussed, but get a block of terrain superimposed on my ocean. I reversed the vertices using FSX_KML v1.06, but to no avail.

I had thought that by nesting/ordering each polygon and tag I would be able to add each element

ie
Reef: Exclude WaterPolys
Reef: Landclass Reef
Channel: Polygonhole
Island: Polygonhole
Channel: Hydro Bay Texture
Island: LandclassTropical Rainforest

Clearly this does not work (probably because I don't understand what I'm doing). The channel does seem to display - although not exactly where I thought it would be!

I get better (but not entirely correct results) if I just skip the Exclude_Waterpoly tag

Suggestion: Is there some way that FSX_KML could warn if Polygon is in the reverse direction to that required - or is that not necessary?

ALSO: The order of my kml seems to change with saving (even though I don't re-open it in Google Earth) thus changing the structure of my Polygonholes etc and messing up any attempted nesting.

Any help / thoughts appreciated.

PS sorry if this is a basic / foolish problem.
 
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Slightly Better

OK - Part of the problem was that the Polygons in the kml kept changing order, thus losing their heirarchy.

If I check the order just before building and re-order them correctly things do better. If I save them, then reload, the order has changed.

Could this be a bug?

I still have a problem with the initial exclude which places a box of terrain around my scenery - but everything else is displaying more or less ok.

Does anyone know which landclass looks like a coral reef (because the Reef one doesn't)

Any suggestions still appreciated. More upto date kml posted here (heron.zip)
 
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hcornea said:
OK - Part of the problem was that the Polygons in the kml kept changing order, thus losing their heirarchy.

If I check the order just before building and re-order them correctly things do better. If I save them, then reload, the order has changed.

Could this be a bug?

I still have a problem with the initial exclude which places a box of terrain around my scenery - but everything else is displaying more or less ok.

Does anyone know which landclass looks like a coral reef (because the Reef one doesn't)

Any suggestions still appreciated. More upto date kml posted here (heron.zip)
Click to expand...

Could be bug... I'll have to check.

The exclude is working correctly. For performance reasons FSX excludes any QMID11 cell that is covered by your exclusion polygon. So you would need to add another water polygon that is larger than the exclude. If you run TMFViewer on your generated .BGL you will see the QMID11 cells that have been excluded.

The reef landclass is the correct one, but I think the default reef textures are not very good. You might have to use 3rd party replacement textures (are any available for FSX yet?). Try searching AVSIM, maybe there are some freeware textures up there.

BTW, Heron Island looks good! Are you doing this as freeware? If so have you heard of the VistaOZ project? Im working on revamped coastal NSW. Maybe you want to join VistaOZ with your Qld islands project? Heres the link http://vistaoz.org/
 
Thanks Matthew,

Sure had to create a large polygon, and skirt it around the reef edge - and several touchups later it seems to work.

For those who are interested --- here is the island through the window of a Bell Jetranger.

There are some library objects added to place the jetty, and a helipad placed using an AFCAD file.

The scenery is certainly open to VOZ. I must say I chose this as a project because I've been there once, and I didn't want to wreck any of my favourite airports while I learnt how to edit/make scenery

Oh - any idea why coral and Sand beach Tags don't work, but desert Sand does for the beach surround (I would have liked a whiter beach)?
 
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hcornea said:
Oh - any idea why coral and Sand beach Tags don't work, but desert Sand does for the beach surround (I would have liked a whiter beach)?
Click to expand...

Looks great!

I've noticed that FSX seems to assign some sort of priority to certain landclass polys over others. So that no matter how you order them in the KML some always show on top of others.

But I don't know what the priority, or exactly what is happening... Maybe something else?
 
MatthewS said:
Could be bug... I'll have to check.

The exclude is working correctly. For performance reasons FSX excludes any QMID11 cell that is covered by your exclusion polygon. So you would need to add another water polygon that is larger than the exclude. If you run TMFViewer on your generated .BGL you will see the QMID11 cells that have been excluded.
Click to expand...

FSX vector exclusion behavior wrt QMID11 cells depends on the command line parameters passed to Shp2Vec.

If the ADDTOCELLS parameter is used the exclusion affects any QMID11 cells intersected by the exclusion's bounding box. The add-on author is responsible to entirely replace the excluded vectors (or not).

If the ADDTOCELLS parameter is omitted, the exclusion affects any target geometry whose bounding box is intersected by the exclusion's bounding box, without regard to QMID11 boundaries. Here, the add-on author can exclude individual vector scenery objects while leaving the rest of the QMID11 unharmed.

What does FSX KML do regarding this parameter?

-Doug
 
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MatthewS said:
Looks great!

I've noticed that FSX seems to assign some sort of priority to certain landclass polys over others. So that no matter how you order them in the KML some always show on top of others.

But I don't know what the priority, or exactly what is happening... Maybe something else?
Click to expand...

The terrain.cfg RenderPriority determines this.

-Doug
 
MatthewS said:
It uses ADDTOCELLS (Shp2Vec is called via the generated RUN_SDK_TOOLS.BAT file)
Click to expand...

So QMID11 boundaries should not matter, just the bounding box to bounding box overlap between the exclude and vector scenery of the target type(s).

I realize that in some cases (i.e. water, parks) the vectors are clipped such that in some cases one polygon IS the entire QMID11.

-Doug
 
DougMatthews said:
... If the ADDTOCELLS parameter is omitted, the exclusion affects any target geometry whose bounding box is intersected by the exclusion's bounding box, without regard to QMID11 boundaries. Here, the add-on author can exclude individual vector scenery objects while leaving the rest of the QMID11 unharmed. ...
Click to expand...

So would it be better to have the ADDTOCells parameter omitted by FSX_KML, or would this cause problems?

Should there be a check-box or similar for each Poly?
 
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