Airport Flattening?

[Felixthreeone]

Was curious....how do I correct the 'plateau' effect that makes some of my addon airports appear to be 'raised above' the surrounding terrain? I have a lot of FS Genesis mesh......and a significant number of my addon sceneries are elevated. Just curious. Bothers me a bit. Any help would be appreciated.

[Lionheart]

Easy.

Slew to the ground level that the 'normal' area elevation is at. Select shift/Z a coupel of times to get tech data at the top left, check the elevation.

Open the airport in AFCAD, select Elevation, enter new data from your 'slewwing' intel adventure.

Reboot, Voila...



Bill

[Felixthreeone]

Thanks, Bill. I will give it a try and see what happens.

[txnetcop]

Thanks Bill I was looking for that info once before and never got an answer. Very easy
Thanks again,
Ted

[Cees Donker]

Wait! You must also change the elevation of the runways!

:173go1:

Cees

[Felixthreeone]

Thanks, Cees! I will be messing with it a bit later this evening, and see how I do. Much appreciated.

[GypsyBaron]

Was curious....how do I correct the 'plateau' effect that makes some of my addon airports appear to be 'raised above' the surrounding terrain? I have a lot of FS Genesis mesh......and a significant number of my addon sceneries are elevated. Just curious. Bothers me a bit. Any help would be appreciated.

In FSX I use SBuilderX to create 'sloped flattens' to gradually
change the terrain around the airport from the runway
altitude to the terrain altitude a short distance out.

I'm not sure if the FS9 version of SBuilder supports this
but it's worth a try.

You create several 'flatten' polys and assign discrete altitudes to
the various nodes....the more nodes the easier it is to
'blend' the terrain altitudes in.

One of the reasons you are seeing these plateaus is that
having a greater mesh resolution will accentuate the
disparities in altitude. At 76m, the plateaus would most likely
'blend' by virtue of the coarse resolution.

Paul

[Motormouse]

there's another little utility for creating flatten areas 'FSTFlatten'
does what it says, you can find it for d/l at usual places

ttfn

Pete

[Desert Rat]

Easy.

Slew to the ground level that the 'normal' area elevation is at. Select shift/Z a coupel of times to get tech data at the top left, check the elevation.

Open the airport in AFCAD, select Elevation, enter new data from your 'slewwing' intel adventure.

Reboot, Voila...



Bill

Yup,

and if you want the true elevation without the CoG height of the aircraft added, there's this little helper,

http://64.34.169.161/cgi-bin/ifolio/imageFolio.cgi?direct=Development_-_Scenery_-_MSFS/Utilities_and_Tools

Jamie

[adhockey]

I have a question about non-flat runways...

Does anyone know how some scenery designers (James Belk comes to mind), create sloped runways, in the Cascade mountains for example, with dirt textures to define the strip amongst the autogen trees?

What tools or techniques are used to create these bush strips that work with the mesh and don't create the 'aircraft carrier' or plateau effect?

[GypsyBaron]

I have a question about non-flat runways...

Does anyone know how some scenery designers (James Belk comes to mind), create sloped runways, in the Cascade mountains for example, with dirt textures to define the strip amongst the autogen trees?

What tools or techniques are used to create these bush strips that work with the mesh and don't create the 'aircraft carrier' or plateau effect?

My guess would be that he uses sloped polygons with
some sort of dirt landclass defined. You can certainly do that
with SBuilderX. For autogen trees to surround such a
dirt strip, additional polys with a forrest landclass would
achieve that.

When I enhanced Tokol, LHTL, I used various landclass polys
to add autogen folliage around and throughout the airport.

Here are some examples of these techniques.

Tokol LandClass poly areas...approximate...

66911

Nellis AFB before applying sloped flattens...


66912


Nellis AFB after applying sloped flattens...

66913


Paul

[Felixthreeone]

My guess would be that he uses sloped polygons with
some sort of dirt landclass defined. You can certainly do that
with SBuilderX. For autogen trees to surround such a
dirt strip, additional polys with a forrest landclass would
achieve that.

When I enhanced Tokol, LHTL, I used various landclass polys
to add autogen folliage around and throughout the airport.

Here are some examples of these techniques.

Tokol LandClass poly areas...approximate...

66911

Nellis AFB before applying sloped flattens...


66912


Nellis AFB after applying sloped flattens...

66913


Paul


..........Exactly what I am looking for! Looks harder than I thought, though. :isadizzy:

[GypsyBaron]

..........Exactly what I am looking for! Looks harder than I thought, though. :isadizzy:

It's just a matter of getting used to the tools at hand.

In SBuilder you lay down a polygon with as many
vertices as you think will do the job, then assign an
altitude to each vertex. Finally you specify the LandClass
that you wish to use with that polygon.

As a note, those examples I posted were FSX enhancements.

EDIT: Here is a link to some tutorials on the FS9 version of SBuilder...

http://www.scruffyduckscenery.co.uk/tutorials.html

Paul