How would you guys recommend texturing this runway?

  • Hi guys,

    I am figuring things out surely but slowly, now I am looking at this satellite imagery and wondering how in the world someone would texture this:

    I don't want to just use the imagery as a texture as it is extremely low resolution, I would like to create my own tiled textures by going to the airport as it is in my hometown, but even then I would not know how exactly to do it.

    When I make a 10x10 tiled texture map I cant add any other details besides my asphalt, is there a way to get all of the varying textures in?

  • I guess I did not really specify...I know tire markings and lines need to be decals but I am focused more on the extreme wear and tear of the runway, are those decals too?

    If I get my base asphalt texture down, and then the outskirts of the runway being concrete, how would you add those little cracks and everything, even the texture changes like toward the bottom of the screenshot around the runway crossing where it is heavily worn?

    I assume this would be done in Photoshop but do not know how.

    This is an Orbx airport:

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    no matter how many times I watch this video I do not know how I would recreate this process...I know he creates the airport in Max, then he moves the airport to Photoshop to texture, from what I have seen in all of the Aerofly tutorials and videos they just use ACD3, just the modeling software to add textures. It looks like he has his UV grid setup and he is able to just paint and add his textures the way he wants, if I go into 3ds Max then the furthest I would get is adding decals.

  • a decal doesn't need to be just a white line...its a polygon with a texture on it, what ever texture you want...

    How to do all the edges, cracks etc gets a little more of a problem because fs2 forces you to use a runway object for runway, aprons etc. You have to cheat and copy which bit of the runway meshes you want to add extra detail, UV map them individually then apply them as a decal, time consuming but do-able. Decals can be stacked so in theory you could apply 10. If you get a very detailed sat image it could be broken down into smaller 4K textures and applied to these meshes.

    Something to also remember, FS2 is very VR friendly so adding lots of textures and objects will start to impact on this eventually.

    Forget any realistic night lighting FS2 is very poor in this department, we don't even have aircraft landing lights

    P3D/FSX are far more user friendly when it comes to making addons of every sort

    Steve

  • I was thinking about that video a lot today, and I think, or at least what it looks like is that he created the airport in sections. It looks as if he took that section of the airport and unwrapped that separately from the rest, then exported that out to Photoshop to texture, then after creating the other parts of the airport and got finished texturing them I would assume he snapped them back together as more of a building blocks of sort. At least that is my only conclusion to that...

    If this were the case then I think I could model the runway in chunks of 100 meters or so until I hit a part that needs special textures then change it up again, for example the runway markings (but I could actually just add that in Max I believe) then snap the pieces together. This way I would not have to use many decals (I would still have to use a lot) and I could get max texel density for the textures. The only problem I see with this is making the runway or any other connecting parts seamless.

  • I am not sure if this is the best way to go about it, I have seen a lot of videos of where people make roads in Photoshop and they do it in a section so the entire road is tiled. I think a road would be the same as a runway but I would just go over the rest of the model in Max with a lot of custom decals and add it to the mesh so that it blends in and looks like a believable runway.

    What do you guys think about an approach like this?