Parking area detail

1st Official Post

    Randy,

    it depends of your expectations:

    Defining the parking areas as __runway, you can place a texture onto it.

    Defining the parking areas as __outside, the aerofly ground texture is being used.

    Since I'm generally lazy I would do it as a large slab.

    Btw, I will shortly show you more textures for our runways, taxiways and ramps.

    Rodeo

    • Official Post

    Just do a large slap that goes underneath the terminals. You should probably avoid these sharp edged triangles as well. Just imagine one triangle vertex being raised by only a couple centimeters. you'll have a very very short and noticable bump right on the taxiway. You may want to consider flipping lines for a few of these rectangular areas, so that the angles in the triangles are wider, not as sharp.

    If I would be building airports I would add a strip of polygons where there are drain pipes in the real world airports. Usually the apron has a slight incline towards the terminal buildings, water will then flow away from the terminals towards the taxiway and from the slightly sloped taxiway towards the terminal and meet in that drainage. If you ever fly in a real aircraft, try to notice how bumpy the taxi from taxiway over to the stand is. You roll down from the taxiway *bump* up the incline.

    I'd put a vertex line right on top of that water drain. (I hope that is the right word for it).

    Here is how I would do it.

    blue dotted lines: large area underneath the terminals

    red lines new triangle edges

    yellow arrows: this is something you should probably avoid, that can create trouble later on if we want to support sloped aprons for example

    Regards,

    Jan

    Thanks for the advice, Jan.

    So the blue slab seems to cover both the apron and the parking lots. I was hoping to separate the two so I could apply a concrete texture to the apron and blacktop to the parking lot. If they are the same object, wouldn't I have to combine the two in the same texture. I'm not sure how to do that with AC3D and get it to line up correctly even using the TCE. I'd have to have surfaces that only cover the apron and surfaces that cover the parking lot and move these around in the TCE.

    I'm not sure what you mean by flipping the lines in the rectangular areas and how that affects the wideness of the triangles. You are correct, however, I do have some very thin and sharp triangles. The result of letting AC3D auto triangulate the surfaces.

    Currently, the way I've been modeling the areas is to use the polygon tool and place veritces around the outline with more verts in curved areas. I then go in closer to adjust the curved areas adding more verts if needed. Finally, I select the surface and triangulate. Is there a better way to go about this? So much to learn about airport modeling.