Scenery Terrain and non-flat runways

  • Hello,

    I have a couple of questions.

    ** How does one apply a airport mesh structure to an area that is in slanted and almost hilly terrain?

    ** Also, how does one do a runway that corresponds to the terrain? My thoughts are, you just adjust, export, test, repeat, until its proper. That might be time consuming. What if we could export a tile of land from the sim? Then narrow into the exact polygons location and cut that part out (in Max) and work on it in there. (Just thinking out loud).

    I am looking to do the Wickenburg airport in Arizona, NW of Phoenix. The runway goes downhill. Can one cut out the scenery and import it into Max to work on it? Then export?

    ** Also, when you export a scenery, do you have it slightly higher then the grid lines in 3DS Max so that it does not have bleed-through from the terrain polygons under it?

    From the SDK:

    Does this mean that the mesh is conformed by the Converter to fit perfectly over the existing terrain mesh in the sim? (If so, that is very impressive...! )

  • There are two ways to model the airport:
    a) real 3D mesh
    you will need the accurate height data for the ground (trial and error if you don't have any). Only Zurich and few other locations have been built this way.

    b) flat airport with 3D transformation using the Aerofly engine
    If you build your airport flat the Aerofly FS 2 engine will transform the aircraft ground mesh using a polynomial fitting curve of the ground mesh. This means runways and taxiways, etc. are all bend so that they fit the overall curvature of the terrain. Buildings are moved as a whole up/down. 99.5% of the airports in the Aerofly FS 2 are done this way.

    Regards,

    Jan