Posts by randyh

Does the shader type for textures in 3ds matter or is it only what is assigned to diffuse/ambient color? I see in the kingman tutorial that some of the textures are Blinn and others are Phong.

Randy

Jeff,

I have the florida keys scenery, but I don't find any max files to examine in 3ds, just the final content converter files. These can't be loaded in 3ds. Unless you're talking about loading the scenery in FS2 and looking at it there.

Randy

I found a nifty 3ds MaxScript called Extend Borders that can be used to add a 1m border around an editable poly. I don't know the policy on posting links, so I won't. However, you can google it and find it easy enough.

Thanks Jeff,

Ah, my mistake was I converted the runway rectangle to an editable poly and tried to do the chamfer on that. Following the tutorial, you're suppose to attach the runway rectangle to the outside, quadify it, select the border, cap it, and then chamfer the border. This does produce a chamfer that goes outward from the rectangle, but it also pushes inward. I've attached images of a chamfer value of 1.0 and 6.0 to show this. You can see that the 6.0 value has a much smaller rectangle for the runway. I guess maybe the 1.0 value isn't much of a loss of real estate. Have I done something wrong to produce this result? Is it really suppose to only go outward? I guess when it comes down to it, all that is really needed is a small 1m boarder with which to blend. Whether it's done with chamfer or some other way doesn't really matter I guess.

Randy

In the 3ds airport tutorial on the wiki, it mentions creating a chamfer around the runways/taxiways/apron. As I understand this, it is to blend the runway, etc. textures into the outside aerial texture via the vertex color (red->black). When I create this chamfer, it is created inside my runway box taking up runway real estate. Basically my runway won't really be 46m across because a blend will start happening on the edges. Is this correct and accepted? Another thing I noticed is that my runway has white decal lines on the very edges. This decal will cover the blend. I've attached a picture. So even if the runway blends into __outside, it will be obscured by the decal which doesn't blend. How do we handle this? Do I move my decals inside the chamfer or just leave them where they are? Do we somehow blend the decal as well?

Randy

What is the "blend". Are you talking about the Blend material to combine two mats?

I ask because I cannot download 2017. My license is only valid for 2018.

I see that back in October, some forum posts asked about a plugin for 3ds Max 2018. I just installed 2018 and I cannot get the 2017 plugin to work. Is there any news for the 2018 plugin?

Randy

First, I'm new to 3ds having only used Maya and AC3D before. I was looking at the decals of Kingman airport in 3ds, for example the 3 on runway 21 (runway21_decal__priority1). I can see how the material and id are assigned, but I can't figure out how the UVs got assigned. When I click on the polygon for "3", I don't see any kind of UVW unwrap in the modifier list. If I add one, I can open the UV editor and see the poly and move it around to change the number, but if I delete the modifier the number pops back to the original "3". Makes sense. What I can't figure out is how the original UV values got burned into the polygon since there isn't a UVW unwrap modifier on it in the original 3ds file (at least one I can find).

Randy

In the 3ds Airport tutorial on the wiki, when creating the runway, they ask that you add a 1m chamfer to the runway. Looking at the kingman scenery design workshop file, I also see this 1m strip around all the runway geometry. What is this little strip for?

Randy

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.

Being my first airport, I'm thinking I may be making a rookie mistake being too anal about modeling the parking areas. Should I just make this one big slab and put the terminal on top of it? Advice from veterans welcome.

Working on my first airport. What is the exact purpose of the __outside object other than to make the runway show up? I'm sure the sim could have been coded to show the runways without the __outside object so there must be another purpose. Is it maybe an autogen exclusion zone? Should it be defined to just enclose the runway/taxi/apron or should it extend out beyond them? For objects we define, must they be placed on top of the __outside object or can they be placed beyond its range?

Randy

oh wow, that will be a lot of work once all runways, taxiways, etc are modeled. However, it will produce a better result than my way.

Thanks Rodeo. How did you cut those runways out of a mesh? Did you extrude and then Knife them out? I tried that, but it didn't produce a good result especially with the runway that was on an angle to the mesh. I ended up drawing a polyline around everything and then generating a 2D mesh. Wasn't pretty and produced a lot of surfaces I had to delete. I've looked for AC3D tutorials on youtube, but the ones I found didn't help much with what I was trying to do.

I saw mention of a __ground extension in the Scenery Tutorial Wiki. Is this specific to 3DS/Cinema4D?

Fun stuff.

Randy

I've gone through the awesome tutorial videos and started my first airport (ever) KERI. However, KERI is more complicated than the tutorials. It has two crossing runways which doesn't fit the single runway mesh modeling method of the tutorials. I'm assuming I can just model the runways anyway I can. There wasn't any info on how to do the taxiways or aprons in the videos. Can I model these using any method? As the final step, do I just merge all these objects into a single object and call it foo__airport__runway?

I'm not sure what the difference is between __ground and __outside. Right now my plan is to model the runways/taxiways/aprons and then to add the ground I'll create a polyline around the whole thing, select all verts, and perform Vertex->Create 2D mesh. Then remove the unneeded surfaces. Is there a better way?

Randy

I have to say that Aerofly FS2 is exciting. It's new and seems to be doing things right. Response is great. It has inspired me to try and design my hometown airport of KERI. It's been a few years since I used a 3D package (Maya), so I'm a bit rusty. I'll try with AC3D for now. I'll probably have a bunch more questions. Good job, keep going

Is there some free cam mode in FS2 that would allow us to inspect our scenery up close? (i.e. Bob from Orbx). I've looked under controls, but couldn't find anything and the view modes for the aircraft just let me spin around the aircraft. Yes, I know you can see it up close in AC3D/3DS, but it's not the same.