Video tutorial: build stairs for your scenery

[OlaHaldor]

This was originally my answer to a question by another scenery developer.

I did this for my LEMU scenery, and it could easily be done for any kind of building. The techniques can be used to build stairs, ladders, hand rails etc..

Software used: LightWave 3D and LWCAD plug-in. The plug-in is a must if you want superb precision along with great tools with loads of possibility to do whatever you can imagine.

Spiral stairs

http://vimeo.com/8898449

Fire escape stairs

http://vimeo.com/8953964

[Wynthorpe]

Thanks Ola! Ive made my decision

[dan]

Careful, or you'll run out of polygons ;D

What I'm more interested in seeing is how good the UV tools are, and if texture mapping can be automated. Creating the UV map by hand in AC3D and trying to get everything in proportion to one another is a PITA and extremely time consuming. If it could be somewhat automated with a decent result and efficient use of the texture space, then that would make me interested in LW....

[OlaHaldor]

Yes, making stairs might get a bit poly heavy, but hey! If the scenario is relatively small and not so detailed anyway, why not add a few thousand polygons with those little things that makes the scenery really stand out! That's what I'm doing with LEMU, and I'm VERY happy with the feeling of taxiing in front of the largest hangars and see the stairs really pop out, and not being some flimsy texture on the wall.

About texturing: I've mostly just done a one-click operation if I know I'm not gonna paint manually. So I make general textures as images and add to the model wherever it should be for planks, panels, roof shingle and so on, and render it in LightWave, to get the interaction of shadows and ambient occlusion. I render this directly to an image that saves it with the UV map. Render. Done. Apply to the X-plane object in Blender, and export to .obj. I can show you this process later on as well.