Paul Surgeon wrote:
We're still stuck not being able to model airports properly.
TaxiDraw is a great tool but I really don't like being limited to rectangular
taxiway sections - they look awful.
I started playing with the idea of modeling them as a 3D model in Blender and
sticking that into the terrain instead. Yes it's a lot slower but you can get
things spot on like the real thing. A few decent, well known airports would
be nice in FG. I'm sure Curt would love to include a few dozen of them
everytime he does a scenery rebuild. :P
What would be really helpful though is a way to snap the vertices of the
terrain in fgsd to the vertices of a placed model to eliminate seams or a way
of converting a 3D model to one of those special binary model files that the
airports are in. (*.btg.gz)
In the long term an automatic airport slicer/cutter would be the best option.
Pre-generate or generate an airport on the fly and cut and stitch it into the
underlying terrain at run time.
Hi Paul,
We have had past discussions about making FG specific extensions to the
X-Plane airport format and possibly maintaining the extra data
ourselves. Curved taxiways is very high on that list, as well as some
(yet to be determined) way to lay down arbitrary taxiway and hold short
markings on top.
That won't let you do every thing you want to do, but could be a big
step in the right direction and make future airport building better and
faster. (If you haven't noticed, I like to concentrate my effort on the
db/algorithms side of life, rather than the one-off hand modeling side
of life.)
In terms of matching airport cutouts, you could provide an exact hole to
the terragear scenery builder and it would honor that and leave that
exact hole cut out of the scenery. There are some issues when a hole
crosses tile boundaries, you might get some transformation/math errors
so your points end up being up to a pixel off (from frame to frame) in
the tiles that don't own the airport object. One idea to work around
this problem is to build small skirts around the airport and the
cutout. That hides the gaps pretty well if both sides have skirts.
Regards,
Curt.
--
Curtis Olson http://www.flightgear.org/~curt
HumanFIRST Program http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/
FlightGear Project http://www.flightgear.org
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