William T. Piper Memorial help please!

[Hornit 3]

I have decided to work on some scenery for Piper Memorial airportin Lock Haven PA. In doing some research it has been really hard to come by photos of this airport. If anyone has anything usuable or some decent links it would be appreciated. The second problem is Microsofts crappy placement of roads and rivers, they got it all wrong here. Here is a shot of the Microsoft depiction with Justin's FS Genesis latest Landclass.http://www.x-plane.org/users/hornit/lh.jpgIn this shot you can see what I have wanted to do with the roads and rivers. The lighter blue is where the rivers should go. The arrow in the upper left corner is where the Sesquehanna joins back where it should be. I don't mind the other piece branching off to come back to itself again, not significant. The yellow indicates roads that need to be deleted, and the read is the reposition of the highway from along the ridge, to down in the valley where it belongs. My request is that someone who is proficient with groundmaker or the coastline program take this on. I just haven't been able to get it right and have tried a few times. Im kind of frustrated by the programs. I have mastered Airport, and Nova but this one is just giving me fits. If anyone would like to step up and work this for me it would be HUGELY appreciated. My e-mail is campisij@bellsouth.netAgain thanks for all the help i have recieved in the past, this and the other forums are a godsend for scenery designers and painters.Hornit

[Guest]

I use the usgs photos for my airport work. Here is the image usgs provides for Piper...they are always a few years old.Bob Bernstein

[Hornit 3]

Thank you Bob, I actually have that and a few more to boot thanks to a fine gentleman over on the regular FS forum. I'm just hoping someone can help with the road/river issue. I will still do the scenery but it won't be the way I really want it I guess without a rework of those issues. My hat is off to you, your sceneries are fantastic, I won't be going into the detail you do but I want it to be something closer than boxes and yellow fueling areas if you get my drift. :) I have already excluded the default buildings and the large fuel tank on the west end of the field boundary. It took me about an hour of trial and error to do that, but Im on the way. Thank you for the help! Hornit

[Guest]

Hi Hornit, thanks for the kind words. re roads and rivers, it somewhat depends on your general approach to terrain. I haven't seen that other thread, so forgive if you've described it all, but are you planning to place custom terrain textures as the ground, like you get using resample.exe? Or...were you planning to place polygons down, more like the default did, using VTP1 or VTP2 polygons? Or...perhaps still a different choice?This will make a difference in how to approach rivers and roads. I still use the first idea above, using resample.exe to slice an image and replace the default ground with my textures. This means that repplacing the roads and rivers with the photographic version is a natural result...problem solved.If you plan to use polygons to place your airport on, then the new understanding of VTP will also make it easy to fix roads and rivers. Christian Fumey's awesome utility, ground2k, can do it all for you. English is not his first language, but I can tell you that his readme is sufficient, and you will be able to produce all the polygon types after only a few hours of study. You can also exclude the existing vtp polys that ms used for the default.Best of luck, I love this airport. I went to College at PSU and used to hitch hike to Lock Haven....teacher's college there. Ah, the good ol days.....B

[Hornit 3]

Well, here is my philosophy about this scenery stuff Bob. I want better scenery like we all do. I have invested a good bit of time learning how to use Nova's api/macro creator. I have learned to use airport 2.6 very well, still not up to its full potential, but I am very satisfied with what it can do for me. I have learned how to manually insert AI of my choice and use AFCAD and TTools to get it work well and realistically. I have learned how to repaint aircraft and modify textures in the sim to my liking. So far this stuff about VTP poly's and creating landclass and ground cover has escaped me. I want to be able to use the groundmaker and coastline drawing programs but have had bad experiences lately. It just doesn't seem to want to work on my box. I probably have not invested the time in order to "get there" yet so that may come, but right now its not in my box of tools so to speak. I also try to use everything in the scenery that I can without adding too much or taking too much away. I'm still stuck with Airport 2.6's innefficient use of macros and polygons destroying autogen so I work around that. Mostly what I do is try to remove the default stuff and use the existing r/way and t/ways if they are close, then reintroduce structures which are close in color and type in thier proper places. I then add small details missing from the default and some vegetation. Then I go to Lago's scenery program and add small details like cars, people, and more vegetation. I don't go overboard with Lago, most of its objects don't look right, but for small stuff it adds a lot. This actually results in pretty good scenery for the smaller airports and I enjoy doing it. I use Nova to create simple buildings and hangars that have textures which at times can be very close to accurate. I try to make sceneries that enhance the experience, but don't destroy frame rates either. So my sceneries while big improvements IMHO, don't approach the things you are doing, which are marvelous by the way :)Hornit

[Hornit 3]

Here are some shots of my home town airport, before and after my work on the scenery. This is Peachtree City, GA. Falcon Field about 20 miles southand west of ATL. Just remove the brackets from these links to see the shots.While not quite up to your level Bob, they do add a lot IMHO and my frame rates stay good too.{http://www.x-plane.org/users/hornit/ffc2.jpg}{http://www.x-plane.org/users/hornit/ffc1.jpg}Hornit

[Guest]

The only way I know to change the roads default roads is to use one of the two methods I described. btw, I was talking about ground2k, NOT groundmaker...different proggys.cheers,B