Help - Upgrade area around airport?

[alderon57 7]

Hi. This may be the wrong forum, but I want to learn ADE to upgrade my airport. But I also would like to upgrade the scenery around town near the airport. What software would I use, and where can I find some direction on how to do that?
Thanks!
Ron

[robb13 22]

You need to be a bit more specific about what you mean by scenery and which sim you have.. If you just want to get the land class more accurate around the airport you can do that with ADE so start by reading the pdf. Making a poly over an area and selecting a specific land class for it will alter where the default autogen scenery will appear. 

If you want to make scenery and lob it into the area, then I consider FSDS a very good low cost modelling tool that will do the job nicely, The latest version FDSD 3.5.1 incorporates a tool to allow direct export of the scenery into FSX at the desired spot. Its time consuming  andi It will take you longer to learn FSDS than ADE though... familiarize yourself with ADE first and find out what you can do with that to improve the area before creating specific scenery.

You could also put in a background satelite image to override the default background using SBuilderX

It just depends on what you want to see for an outcome... If you want high accuracy then a background satellite image might be the way to go and any models you make would then be placed very accurately over the image. ... and If you do use a background image then changing land classes useing ADE will be pointless as they wont display. (Background image overrides land class selections)

[alderon57 7]

Great info!  Thank you, Robb.  I'll give this a try.

Ron

[robb13 22]

Heres some hints for ADE. I found everything pretty easy to work out but the following took me a while... why... because I ignored the pdf..!!.

Have FSX going when you open up ADE. If you only have a blue set of co-ordinates in top left corner then press Connect button and a red set of co-ordinates will display.. That is the position of your aircraft and it will show up in ADE as a red icon.

 Once you have the red co-ordinates, you will have two extra options in your right mouse click ... its Move Aircraft Here and Centre on Aircraft. These two buttons used in tandem is what makes ADE really useful for manipulating the land class scenery as you can see the default background in FSX whilst you traverse the ground in ADE (the bigger the screen the better) and make changes at specitic spots or vertices.... in addition to being an object placement tool,   this is found in right mouse click in Add option.

If you dont see a poly after saving and going back into FSX it will be because of the layering process. right mouse click has the options for moving to front, back etc.

Something that took me ages to work out is if you want to move a VOR or NDB, it wont drag.  You have to be Connected to FSX and move the plane to where you want the nav aid to be and then highlight the original and use the Move to Aircraft option under right mouse click. Then move the NDB object and put an exclusion rectangle over the original one. Even in the right spot you may want to move it a little as for example  it could be right on the edge of a creek in the default scenery.

[alderon57 7]

Robb,

Thanks very much for this advice!  I haven't started anything yet; but this makes a lot of sense from other types of software that I've used.

Ron