Dams and bridges

[Guest osman]

Hi everyone,I recently took off from Aswan airport in Egypt and wanted to see whether MS has both the lower and the upper dam on the Nile. The result was disappointing: instead of the high dam, there is a stupid bridge crossing the Nile (The lower dam is missing completely). My question is:- what is the best way to remove that bridge?- what would be the best technique so make both dams? The lower one is a concrete & stone construction, so I could try to make it a gmax building, but how to fit that into the valley between two bodies of water which must have a different elevation, and the higher ground to the sides of the valley?The upper dam is one of those large earth dams with only a very short section build of concrete. I have a raher precise topographical map of the region, so I could try to do a re-mesh with Ground2k4, or would it be better to make a sloping lwm polygon with the high points on top of the dam and the low ones at its bottom and put over that a vtp polygon with a suitable bitmap? Any advice ?winfried

[Holger 0]

Hi Winfried,Sounds like a neat project!The default bridges reside on Layer 7 and you can use DefArea (Christian Fumey) or ExcBuilder (Paavo Pihelgas) to set up the exclude file.I can't speak to GMax but I've modeled both waterfalls (vicfalls.zip) and dams (bcmesh9d.zip & bcmesh9p2.zip) with Ground2K4 or external flatten files and it works pretty well. The steepness of the slope is determined by the distance between the upper and lower water flattens, the elevation difference, and your Terrain_Max_Vertex_Level setting (I keep it at 20).Below are screenshots of Hugh Dam near Castlegar, made entirely with LWM flattens in Ground2K4.I'm sure others can tell you more about how to fit a GMax model into the mesh.Cheers, Holgerhttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/82288.jpghttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/82289.jpg

[Guest luissa]

Hi HolgerI have seen before these pictures and they belong to the set that made me to post this:http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho..._id=20438&page=This time I will save the thread on my hard disk!Regards, Luis

[Holger 0]

Hi,Luis, you're right: it's too bad that the forum doesn't retain the images. If I was better organized I'd either set up a website as an image repository for direct links from this and other fora or upload a scrapbook of G2K4 production notes. Maybe one of these days... Until then, I usually copy interesting posts and images/attachments to a Word or Wordpad file and save it in a tips and tricks folder. Forgot to mention one aspect of dam design: The horizontal angle of the dam or waterfall also plays a big role. If you look at the screenshot above you can just see the steps in the dam's front due to the fact that FS uses only right angles in the horizontal plane (some of the steps are noticeable by a bit of water creeping up the dam's surface). With TMVL=20, these rectangular blocks are ~38m x 38m. If you can "fudge" the direction of your object so that it faces one of the four cardinal directions the dam face will be smoother.Cheers, Holger