KPVD - TF Green International [WIP]

[czoog]

Hi All,

 

This will be my first real attempt at developing a custom airport.  I chose KPVD because of it's modest size, yet has all the bells and whistles of a very large airport.  I've also flown in there a few times (as a passenger).  It is decently fleshed out in the global scenery, so I will be adding custom buildings and areas bit by bit.  I'll update this thread as I progress.  Any suggestions or feedback is welcome and appreciated!

 

Goals:

 

• Fully modeled terminal, including all gates, curbside drop off and interlink buildings and "T" station
• Fully modeled accessory buildings
• Accurate ramp and taxiway markings/lighting
• Auto-gates
• Ground Traffic
• Accurate ATC flows
• POSSIBLE orthophotos
• other stuff....

 

It will be freeware obviously.

 

This will be a learning experience for sure.

 

Well... here goes nothing!

Edited May 13, 2014 by czoog

[czoog]

First up, the ARFF.  I've model the building and a single crash truck (#2), still need to model the bigger trucks.  I've used the light bar lights, but they always seem to look bad for me for some reason...still working on it.

 

This is what I used for reference http://capecodfd.com/pages%20special/ARFF%20Apparatus%2009.htm

 

[czoog]

Moving onto the terminal... modeling is about 75% done for just the terminal building and concourses.  I started some texturing and laid out a few gates.  Texturing needs work for sure, I am testing out different methods of baking the ambient occlusion, getting close to something i like..  Haven't done and normal maps or anything yet.

 

[Peter T.]

Truly amazing work there! Looking forward!

[john82088]

Looks great!

[czoog]

Thanks for the encouragement.  Here is some more progress.  Drop off area is getting there and all of the taxiways updated and enhanced (correctly positioned, etc) and includes real markings at confusing intersections...these are FAA hot spots:

 

 

 

 

ummmm...Which way????

 

 

 

[john82088]

This is really coming along nicely!

[Jesse]

Wow, very very nice! The drop-off area looks fantastic

[czoog]

Work continues....

 

Today, I took a break from the tedious texturing of the main terminal to do a fun little building on the the northern end of the airport.  Officially know as the  Rhode Island State Airport Terminal building, it was built in 1932 as part of the initial airport construction.  It served as the main terminal building and ATCT until 1961.  It's a lovely little art deco gem, that is still in use today as an office of the US weather service:

 

 

Its interesting that taxiway A on the north ramp actually jogs to miss the building:

 

 

I've also been toiling away at the main parking area and interlink connection to the train station about a mile away.  The main connector is built, i just need to add the station, and clean up the roads and autogen:

 

 

The taxiways, markings and lighting have all been finished (for the most part):

 

 

Finally, I'll leave you with a shot looking across the airport looking southeast to the Providence River and Greenwich Bay, if you look close you'll see a SW B737 lifting off from runway 5.  (can you tell I like night shots ;-))

 

Edited May 7, 2014 by czoog

[FloB]

Stunning!

Keep going, this is going to be a wonderful airport to fly to/from, great work. 

 

Flo

[czoog]

Still going....lots yet to do, but I can see the light!!

 

I had to get creative with the interlink "T" train station...a bit of facade a bit of modeling.  I'll be adding the factories and stuff that goes around the station:

 

 

Finished the ATCT facility, complete with spinning radar...my first animation!

 

 

Work continues on the ramp and equipment:

 

There are a few areas which ramp vehicles can pass underneath the terminal.  I hope to get marginal's ground traffic zipping through there.

 

View from the flight deck.

 

Interesting that many of the lead in lines and ramp marking are very different from each other.  Kind of a pain. haha

 

Still lots to do...

[Nano]

Flown in and out of PVD many times and your work looks marvelous!  True immersion.  Can't wait to add this one.  Thanks for all your effort.

[czoog]

Flown in and out of PVD many times and your work looks marvelous!  True immersion.  Can't wait to add this one.  Thanks for all your effort.

Thanks for the kind words.  I should be finished soon.

[czoog]

Doing some photo scenery testing.  They are high res (4K tiles)  should take about 36 of them to cover the airport.  In the images below are 3 of them.  I had my doubts, but I think it looks pretty good:

 

 

The runway texture is by FLYJSIM, the blast pad is the orthophoto:

 

Coloring is not too bad, kinda close to the deafult textures so hopefully it won't stand out as bad:

 

[czoog]

Ok, that wasn't so hard.  I think i am going to package this as an add-on scenery to the base airport, because it will eat up VRAM like cookie monster.

 

 

[Jesse]

Oh my goodness, WOW! The photo scenery looks absolutely incredible! Everything looks matched up perfect

[czoog]

I am sure you guys are getting sick of all these updates, but...I am having too much fun with the photo-scenery

 

I am still adding little details here and there (new segmented circle) combined with the orthophoto's things are looking pretty realistic:

 

 

I've just about finished up the backside of the north concourse:

 

I am going to have to crop the photo's at the road...looks a bit weird like this:

 

Dusk is the best light

 

 

Good night from PVD!

[krogerfoot]

Looks beautiful. I'm mired in the texturing stage of a large terminal complex and it's making me miserable. Next up is lighting, which in SketchUp is not so bad, but with Blender, I haven't figured out any way around coding the lights and coordinates directly into the OBJ text files. Very tedious, and makes me wish I were handier with SketchUp so I could have done the buildings in that program.

 

The old terminal you made is absolutely lovely. Was that SketchUp? And are the lighting effects in the dusk shots from X-Plane's custom lights, or more from LIT textures?

[czoog]

Looks beautiful. I'm mired in the texturing stage of a large terminal complex and it's making me miserable. Next up is lighting, which in SketchUp is not so bad, but with Blender, I haven't figured out any way around coding the lights and coordinates directly into the OBJ text files. Very tedious, and makes me wish I were handier with SketchUp so I could have done the buildings in that program.

 

The old terminal you made is absolutely lovely. Was that SketchUp? And are the lighting effects in the dusk shots from X-Plane's custom lights, or more from LIT textures?

Thanks krogerfoot.  I agree, texturing is the worst 

 

The old terminal is Sketch-up, I am not very good with blender yet.  The light are actually named lights, I found the building uplight in the lights.txt and tried it out (you can see it in the screenshot).  Worked perfectly, got lucky on that one.  I find it difficult to use Lit textures on buildings, beacuse of the shear size of a typical building...it's tough to get lights lined up, unless you really plan it out well, which i did not, ha 

[krogerfoot]

I see. I'm not adept with SketchUp, but the ability to place lights is a godsend (with thanks due, as so often, to Jonathan/Marginal.uk for his tutorial on that and much more). One more thing—do you color the faces somehow yourself in SketchUp, or are those details mostly from texture files? Apologies if that's a stupid question; it's just that I tend to model in the seams and joints of a structure in Blender and then spend days and weeks lining them up with similar details in photo files. (See here and here for examples.)

 

Again, really really lovely work all around. Very well done.

[czoog]

Wow, very nice work there, I love the interior! Unfortunately i do have basically the same workflow, you still need to use that same texture file.   i typically model in areas of the same material, then break them up if i have too based on image scale and repetition if needed (eg bricks).  I also try to "bake" in some AO by adding it to the texture, by hand painting in some shadows, etc.  I would love to actually bake the ambiet occlussion in 3dsMAX and then use a UVW unwrap to get the texture file, but i have not been able to do that yet.

 

One thing is if I have a really good photo of something, I won't model in the detail, and if i don't.... I'll model it in and try to "color" the objects based on the material (making color patches in the png).  If you want I can send you the sketchup file for the old term building, and you can see how I did the textures if it helps at all.  Not sure if its anything you don't already know based on your work, though.

 

I'm surprised the lights are so hard in Blender, I would think they would be accounted for in one of these plugins.  Like you said Marginal's plug-in has made it soooo easy in sketch-up.  So how do you do it now...Place a helper or something in blender to get the XYZ coordinated then hand code it into the OBJ file?

[czoog]

Ok, it is not completely done to my satisfaction, but I decided the pull the trigger an post it anyway.  I'll continue sprucing it up, and I still need to add the ground traffic, but that will come in v1.5

 

It's up at the org and pending here at x-pilot.

 

Thank you everyone for the words of encouragement and the feedback!

 

-Chris

[krogerfoot]

I'm surprised the lights are so hard in Blender, I would think they would be accounted for in one of these plugins.  Like you said Marginal's plug-in has made it soooo easy in sketch-up.  So how do you do it now...Place a helper or something in blender to get the XYZ coordinated then hand code it into the OBJ file?

 

I haven't figured out a way yet to place anything in Blender that will help me find the coordinates later. Even the units within Blender itself baffle me. All I can do is open the OBJs in a text editor and take semi-educated guesses about where I think the lights will go. It's painful. If you place lights in Blender and then export, the OBJ code doesn't give you any coordinates that I can figure out.

 

What I'd like to experiment with is exporting a much-simplified "shell" of a model made in Blender, opening it in SketchUp, placing lights and exporting that dummy model back to X-Plane. SketchUp does provide the coordinates of lights, so in theory I should be able to copy/paste that code into the full-sized model.

 

Looking forward to downloading KPVD and poking around! Great work.

 

[Edit]

I am a fool. I didn't look hard enough for the light coordinates in the text file exported by Blender—they're right there in the middle of the code. I have been doing things very much the hard way for a long time, it seems. I'm editing this reply just in case someone else stumbles across it.

 

How is de-bugging going? I haven't yet tried opening KPVD in X-Plane yet.

Edited May 30, 2014 by krogerfoot