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Playing Around with WED


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I spend most of my time flying GA planes and always wanted a decent version of my hometown Airport (Republic Airport KFRG) in Long Island NY.  I took lessons here, got my PPL here and now fly here from time to time with my brother in his Cirrus SR20 (lucky devil!).

 

Republic Airport was the home of Republic Aircraft Company and built such legendary aircraft as the P-47, F-105, and A-10 Thunderbolt. It is also now home to the Airpower Museum which has a large collection of WW2 planes, some of which still fly. The airport has a large number of Private and corporate jets and of course, lots of GA.

 

I had worked on trying to create this airport in FSX, but it didn't come out that good. I also found, i'm not that good at scenery creation. I don't think I have the patients for this type of thing.  When I saw that someone was creating this airport for X-plane and making custom buildings for it as well, I was estatic! He did a fantastic job! here is a link: http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=26017

 

However, the perfectionist in my couldn't stop from tinkering with it, so using WED, I was able to add a bunch of objects and stuff to it to not only make it pop, but as accurate a representation as I can get in a PC simulation. I also placed a lot of buildings in the area around the airport, so the entire airport area will look very familiar from the air. I am very happy with how it all came out. He even made custom buildings to represent the shopping mall across the street.

 

I found WED not only easy to use, but fun and very addicting. I am now going to mod a bunch of other airports in my area so there are all at a similar level. I used mostly objects from other freeware scenery and libraries, but I also used objects from some of the payware scenery I have, which means I can never upload or share this version. I just wanted to point out what you can do with wed on your own if you want to make a particular airport really pop. Also, I might add that despite the large number of objects, my frame rate hardly dropped at all.

 

Rob

 

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Great work. Scenery creation can be addictive so beware. I just wish we had better tools, WED really does not have a nice UI and is clunky to use, it also is full of bugs (e.g. It doesn't render draped objects, it's impossible to select things easily when the scenery is busy). OverlayEditor is a little better, but also no longer maintained and is clunky to use. It would be nice to be able to create the entire airport inside a nice 3D editor such as Sketchup or Blender.

 

Incidentally, has anyone here ever used 3DS Max (or gmax) to create scenery for FSX (or even X-Plane). From what I can tell, people create the entire scenery inside the 3D application and export them out has different objects. Blender kind of supports this and I used it to create the ground polys for one of my airports, but the exporter is clunky and requires you to group objects into layers for exporting to X-Plane, as opposed to doing it per object. Being able to see all your objects together in the 3D editor including the ground polys would really help get the right colors and dimensions.

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