Hey all, I am still enamored of the X-plane helicopter experience, and as such I decided to make another playground for myself (last post was Chicago), so I converted the Aerosoft LA scenery.  The scenery comes over very nicely BUT all the beautuful buildings are completly "soft" meaning you can't land on them.  I did some digging and found out how to make them "hard" and landable in XPX, so I went back in and changed some of the downtown buildings.

 

LA has TOO MANY helipads, so I just picked a select group in downtown LA, Longbeach, and a few other places to make land-able(too many and they may affect performance).

 

Today I got to test my work with a little flight around the downtown:

 

We start off at Santa Monica KSMO, someone was nice enough to upgrade the airport for us:

 

Following the Santa Monica Freeway takes us right downtown, that's the Staples Center, that Big Blue Ritz Carlton is our first stop

 

Lining up and stabilizing the descent:

 

Bingo!

 

Next is this one on Figueroa, I picked it because it's smaller than the one around it and there are alot of obstacles

 

Next is the tallest building in Downtown LA, the US Bank Tower just for the view:

 

Came in a little fast here and smashed my skids out:

 

Reset that and try again, and we got it:

 

Next is a short hop over to the Bank of America Tower, I think this landing pad texture is misaligned by 90 degrees, it doesn't look this way on Google Maps.

 

Next we depart out east I wanted to get a landing in at the Hooper LAPD heliport, but I noticed the floating bridges and trains so I am going back to do some more scenery edits, maybe next post.

 

This is the most fun I have had simming and creating in a while, and X-planes rock-steady stability has been such a welcome change.  I do want to do some heli-flying in p3d2.0 with the dodosim and and I will probably do that when the sim has ripened a bit more.  I am also looking hard at DCS world and their heli-addons.

 

 

Thanks for Looking...

Awesome shots ! :Applause:

Very nice. Looks like the scenery converted nicely. A solid 25-30 FPS isn't bad with all that detail, either  B)

I like it, but for some reason I liked Chicago better.  No idea why.  Don't get me wrong, nothing wrong here with your excellent work and shots.  I guess I just like the Chicago skyline better.

 

A question:  On the pad on the BoA Tower pad I see red lines.  Are they the same thing as a runway center line for helicopters?

Excellent and informative post!

 

John