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Scenery development - SBX, ARC and Shp2Vec

D

duckbilled

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53
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us-michigan
Hello all,

I'm very new to scenery development and I was wondering if someone could provide an short overview of how these applications works together. I have been using ARC professionally for a few years and simming for 10. I have also used AFCAD, ADE and AFX but mostly for modifying parking and other non-scenery elements. I have downloaded SBX and and purchased Instant Scenery 2. I have also downloaded a SBX tutorial for creating St. Barts from AVSIM - terrain_design_for_flight_simulator_x.zip. This tutorial seems to be a good roadmap for my project - Isla Mujeres, MX.

I have been playing with SBX for a few hours and it seems pretty straight forward. I think the thing that is annoying me the most is that the middle mouse button is zoom and move. It seems like when I am trying to move, I also end up zooming from time to time. I really prefer the tools in ARC.

So, since I have ARC on my home PC, I'd like to create the polygons in ARC and import them in to SBX (or something else) to define their attributes. Is this possible? Or, can that be done with Shp2Vec? I'm not sure what the best way to proceed is.

Also, when using the Google tiles, half of the island will not display at the optimum extent for drawing the island. I have to draw a little, move the map a little, draw a little more... That's where the zooming problem I mentioned above comes in to play.

Anyway, any advice would be appreciated.

Also, FYI, this may not be new info to many but within the last year or so, Esri released a home user license that is $100/year and includes a fair amount of extensions. I noticed this about 6 months ago and many of my planner colleagues were not aware that it existed. So, if you thought ARC was too expensive and you didn't know about this option, its a cheap way to get ARC on your desktop for non-commercial use.

Thanks for any advice.

-Jeff
 
Welcome Jeff,

I'll bring up a couple of items that may or may not influence your foray into scenery work.

First, the default area looks blah. There is help on the way for the area, in that an Ultimate Terrain X package has been mentioned for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. Due to release later this summer?

Second, if you are still wanting to improve the area yourself I think you have to realize that there will be more than the island to work on, based upon FSX boundaries. If you go into SBX and get down to Cancun turn on the QMID grid found under the View menu and set it to level 11. That green dotted line surrounding most of the island and a good part of Cancun is what you will have to replace.

The normal steps for something like this goes like this; exclude the default water, which will be processed by FSX on that QMID 11 boundary and then add back new water polygon(s) drawn to your liking. So you can see that it won't just be the island where your attention will be needed.

SBX will import .SHP files and you can work with them as needed and it will also export a shapefile, in case you wanted to do further work with the Esri tools. Personal preference is up to you, if you can add the appropriate attributes to the shapefile with ARC, then there is no need for processing through SBX.

Shp2Vec functions solely as a compiler. It expects that data to be setup beforehand, it won't edit/tag/attribute anything.

The mouse-thingy with SBX is easily learned/habit broken and if you use a tablet that works with SBX also.
 
Thanks. I am getting the hang of the mouse thing. I set the mouse scroll sensitivity to 1 line rather than 3 so it is a little less sensitive.

I am realizing that more needs to be done that the island.

I created an exclude for just the island, a hydo polygon for a area around the exclude, the land areas as holes and a few other polygons for landclass and beaches. I wanted to see what it would look like but when I compiled it an loaded FSX, I ended up with a big blob of land.

I think I need to RTFM (imagine that) to get a hang of the grid system first. I'm sure my problem, like you explained, involves that.

Still, I am using the AMS Cancun for FSX and it has photoscenery for most of Cancun. It seems like if I layer my scenery for Isla and the AMS scenery, it should work as long as I don't exclude the AMS stuff.

Actually, AMS did do Isla but it is really poorly done. I'm not sure if it is an error wither their scenery or it is supposed to look like is does (trees, island and an airstrip). An email response from the developer was rather cryptic - probably due to a language barrier.

As far as ARC is concerned, I don't know a way to add attributes like landclass and excludes in ARC. I can make the polygon but I have to export it somewhere to add attributes. It only creates the vector data. To add attributes, I would need to merge/join it with some other data based on a field in the feature's attribute table. I can add fields but the only way I know to add data is to calculate the field.
 
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duckbilled said:
I created an exclude for just the island, a hydo polygon for a area around the exclude, the land areas as holes and a few other polygons for landclass and beaches. I wanted to see what it would look like but when I compiled it an loaded FSX, I ended up with a big blob of land.
Click to expand...

You're getting there... kind of.

Your polygon to exclude water doesn't need to be big, a little square somewhere inside the QMID 11 block will show the effects. The "blob of land" is to be expected, as it shows the water being removed, again to a QMID 11 boundary. That's when the fun begins, because you need to reintroduce all the water that's inside that QMID 11 area. BTW, the island is split between two QMID cells, so you will need to go down towards the SE end of the island, make a water exclusion for that QMID 11 cell and redraw the water to fill. That's why working inside SBX and having it's QMID grid turned on can be an advantage.

I've not dealt with ARC products, so can't assist there.
 
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With your help, I now have an island and water. For the most part, things are looking correct aside from a lot of details that are still needed and some coastline work. I do think I am getting there.

Next question, I have noticed that I can copy a polygon. I want to copy my holes so I can change LC, exclude trees, add coastlines... and have the new polygons align to the hole polygons. The copy option is always greyed out when I select any polygon. Even if I am in polygon mode and select a polygon, copy is not available in the edit menu. What am I missing?

I really don't want to recreate those land (hole) polygons again. I'll never get them to match and the land area is made up of 10 polygons with the largest consisting of 1500 points.
 
duckbilled said:
Next question, I have noticed that I can copy a polygon. I want to copy my holes so I can change LC, exclude trees, add coastlines... and have the new polygons align to the hole polygons. The copy option is always greyed out when I select any polygon. Even if I am in polygon mode and select a polygon, copy is not available in the edit menu. What am I missing?
Click to expand...

I dunno? I made a poly, made another inside and set it to a hole, made sure the hole was highlighted (green vertices) and used the menu to copy and paste a few extras. Note any of the copies of the holes are not set as holes and should remain that way.

You can try the Windows standard keystroke combos to copy and paste, Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V after you've highlighted the poly to be copied.

If you get the polys copied correctly, Jim... you can use one to serve as a coastline and another to serve for wave activity. SBX allows you to take a poly and convert it into a vector line. That line can then be used for other things, but you have to make sure the winding direction is set correctly for things like waves and off the top of my head I don't recall if wave activity goes clockwise or counter. I want to guess counter-clockwise, but I won't... If the line is winding the wrong way SBX allows you to reverse the order. A nice feature put in by the programmer and all around nice guy, Luis Sa.
 
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