Satellite background.

[Max Kraus 339]

Carl,By default the Afcad layer is always the lowest, therefore anything you create eg photoground polygon etc will cover up the afcad stuff so therefore you lose all your nice afcad generated lighting which is a pain. I have encountered this with my scenery and had to make all the lights in Gmax - took weeks. The ground was done using the old FS2002 layered ground poly method described over on fsdeveloper.com. I don't think you can cut or mask the afcad layer with alpha blending so it shows up. I have been wanting to know how the likes of flytampa (Boston for example) do it. They use Gmax ground polygons, tweaked and alpha'd up at the edges to blend away to the surrounding scenery and ocean. But I wonder how they make their lights. They do a "splash" polygons to simulate the light spill on the ground and halo around the bulb, the actual light polygon must come from Gmax though. Same with their shadows, look carefully under the baggage trolleys, little Gmax poly shadows - very clever kids at Fly tampa. Sorry I am rambling now.

[Guest CarlHill]

Yes, it seems the payware folks have mastered this stuff pretty good. From what I've read, GMax can do a ton of cool stuff, but the learning curve is absurd to me, so I stick with FSDS3. Actually, AC3D beats them both inmho, but getting those models to FS with all of the textures intact is over my head. I never have understood why Microsoft hasn't made an add-on to do scenery with. One program to do it all from the ground up. After all, who knows the ins and outs better than them? I bet that it would sell better than the "Acceleration" pack. MS just misses the bus in so many ways when it comes to making money. Meanwhile Flight1 and the likes are raking it in. We need a tool for this and a tool for that, etc. CH

[scott967 62]

I think maybe the core issue is this: In FS9, you can create photo terrain. This replaces landclass and works just like it -- AFCAD visual scenery will be drawn over the photo. The second method, is to create vector polygon using custom texture, in this case photo. Again, this works at the terrain (landclass) level and AFCAD visuals are OK with it. The third method is to use assembled bglc commands to create ground scenery objects (ground polys with photo texture). This has the advantage of not being limited by the 4.8m terrain texture resolution. However, these objects will cause AFCAD visual scenery not to show. This has a good side effect, in that FS2k2 airports can be used in FS9 without scenery conflict from AFCAD visual scenery -- AFCAD provides the "invisible" plumbing. The forth method is to create ground scenery objects in GMAX or other 3d object designer. For ground-level scenery, using GMAX with the FS2k2 gamepack can result in ground polys which IIUC work about the same as BGLC ones (not being a GMAX user, I can't say for sure).I think most detailed airports that use high resolution photos as the airport base, also use custom runway/taxiway/aprons rather than creating "cutouts" to let AFCAD visual scenery show through, though cutouts would probably work as well. You might also need to model lighting / PAPIs as well, or create holes for them (never investigated this myself).scott s..

[Guest CarlHill]

Now i am getting somewhere. How do you do #1 and #2, what programs? Obviously, the latest version of FS Architect uses #3 and I really don't want that hassle, I don't have the time necessary to work around the AFCAD visual issues.CH

[scott967 62]

Method #1 can be done manually, using the sdk resample tool (see example on creating custom terrain for Niagra Falls in the sdk). There are a couple tools available, one I have checked out in the past is TerraBuilder Lite. Mainly what the program does is help to get the photo properly sized.Method #2 can be done with Sbuilder 2.05, where it is called VTP Photo. Note that SBuilder can also do Method #3, which is called "high resolution photo" in SBuilder.a possible downside of Method #2, is that you have to place all the completed photo tile bmp files in the scenery/world/texture folder, which can create difficulties in deleting the right ones later if you want to remove the scenery.scott s..