Simmo's Scenery

[Simmo W]

As a welcome diversion I thought I'd dabble with xplane scenery 'development', I'll be blogging in plain English anything I learn! so far, insertion of the myriad of available objects appears quite easy. I expect a few hurdles along the way, especially when I get into Blender and custom building creation!

http://xplane10.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/my-most-exciting-time-for-ages-scenery-creation/

[Goran_M]

As a welcome diversion I thought I'd dabble with xplane scenery 'development', I'll be blogging in plain English anything I learn! so far, insertion of the myriad of available objects appears quite easy. I expect a few hurdles along the way, especially when I get into Blender and custom building creation!

http://xplane10.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/my-most-exciting-time-for-ages-scenery-creation/

I think a decent Sydney Airport is in order, Simon.

The freeware version at the org has a voracious appetite for framerates.

[Ben Russell]

Sydney, a resource hog? Surely you jest.

[Ben Russell]

Simon, I'll be following this thread with interest, I'm keen to know what bugs people that are new to the scenery tool set.

I want to kick down a few walls here and there if need be.

[Simmo W]

in the interests of demystifying the scenery tools available, please enjoy my first effort, a demo video of turning the sparse Yosemite airfield into a more populated strip (getting ready for Norcal!)

indii- please contact me if u want my direct feedback. after getting past the multiple sources of info and reading the good tutorials in the wiki, it's much easier to 'tweak' and even create than I thought. As ever, its like a barrier for the average user, preventing more from happening. im sure the xp10 tools will be much better...

the HARDER bit is creation of original facades and designs, naturally.

http://xplane10.wordpress.com/2010/07/31/scenery-design-adventure-1-overlay-editor/

[Simmo W]

Ok, so no need to pay $1000 for lightwave etc.

Hopefully no need to learn blender either.

Google Sketchup is amazing, I only hope Marginal's Sketchup exporter makes conversion into Xplane easy, or I've just embarrassed myself in getting quite excited at ease of using this progam! Don't worry, I won't be designing YOUR house in future!! ;D

Thanks to Uwe for referring me to it.

[OlaHaldor]

sheesh, I've already had feedback that this masterpiece could be too complex! I'll be testing on the weekend.

I really enjoyed whipping it up with sketchup in 20 mins.

if u need help testing, don't hesitate to ask.

Too complex? I don't think so. It looks like a box, with another box, with another box and.. You get the idea. It's just like how I model my sceneries. Boxes everywhere, with modifications. The boxes vary in size, width, height, lenght - but it's still a box.

If you look at an airport, you should be able to break it down into simple geometric shapes. Box, ball, cylinder. These are the three shapes I mainly break down a building with. Combination of these shapes may create new shapes never before seen, thus giving the idea of "this is an advanced structure".

I'll see if I can get some time to show a practical example of what I mean, with the tower at Alicante. The supporting tower is basically three circles with a box or two to stitch them together, and then extruded to give it height. And then there's a hexagon for the tower itself..

OK.. I MADE some time..

[vimeo]13908306[/vimeo]

[Simmo W]

thanks Ola, I can't view vimeo on my iPhone (running linux ;D ) so I'll watch on weekend, after I've attempted to texture my box and export into xplane. I now have big respect for guys like Theo too - the fun bit is building, the nasty hard yakka bit is the texturing and alignment, me thinks.

[Simmo W]

First person to build a city in Xplane wins:

http://xplane10.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/scenery-revolution/

Google Building Maker

[Oliver]

First person to build a city in Xplane wins:

http://xplane10.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/scenery-revolution/

Google Building Maker

Building it wouldnt be as hard as texturing a whole city and alligning everything properly, now that would be absolute hell unless you're very good at texturing. I made my home airport (KSRQ) in sketchup and must say it was pretty fun making it.

[Simmo W]

Ah, but pm did u see the video? auto-texturing...

yes sketchup is too much fun, the texturing is the hard bit, that's why this variant is exciting, well for me!

[Oliver]

Ah, but pm did u see the video? auto-texturing...

yes sketchup is too much fun, the texturing is the hard bit, that's why this variant is exciting, well for me!

I saw the video but didn't know it was auto texturing. Yeah sketchup is very fun 

[uwespeed]

This Building Maker looks really as a good idea for building scenery. But may I raise concerns?

When you would use e.g. buildings you see in Google Earth which have been made with Sketchup and own photos of the creator, and you're asking the creator for permission, it seems to me not being problematic.

With Building Maker, even when the building is built by a person like you and me - the textures most likely are copyrighted by the company which sold the material to Google. So I doubt that it would be really legal to use these buildings. You can hope on "no plaintiff, no judge".

[Simmo W]

I may ask Mr Google if fair use policy applies.

but maybe VERY senior Xplane people could confirm too. If you go around selling the stuff you'd be in trouble

[Wynthorpe]

Been playin with GBC a lot today, dont quite a few buildings in Dublin and Birmingham, i reckon we could do the whole UK in no time at all if we really wanted to and use in XP!

[Simmo W]

Been playin with GBC a lot today, dont quite a few buildings in Dublin and Birmingham, i reckon we could do the whole UK in no time at all if we really wanted to and use in XP!

great news. I finally had a quick go, did an apartment in 4mins. copyright prevents wide distribution, again if only we could use freely....or I'd  pay to use if better integrated. show screenies!

[XPAfrica]

i've been messing around with it for a bit and i have to admit it eases a part of the process, but only a part... In my opinion one is better off taking the time to get accointed with SketchUp or even Blender (which seems more and more like a true pain in the butt, as i go forward into trying to learn it) if one wants to make more than cubes.

I've found i work faster in Sketchup to make a more complex hangar than in GBC, provided i have created a propper texture file in photoshop prior to that.

[Wynthorpe]

i've been messing around with it for a bit and i have to admit it eases a part of the process, but only a part... In my opinion one is better off taking the time to get accointed with SketchUp or even Blender (which seems more and more like a true pain in the butt, as i go forward into trying to learn it) if one wants to make more than cubes.

I've found i work faster in Sketchup to make a more complex hangar than in GBC, provided i have created a propper texture file in photoshop prior to that.

Hmmm i dont think it gets any quicker than GBC....

Im gonna do some more now infact!

[Simmo W]

i've been messing around with it for a bit and i have to admit it eases a part of the process, but only a part... In my opinion one is better off taking the time to get accointed with SketchUp or even Blender (which seems more and more like a true pain in the butt, as i go forward into trying to learn it) if one wants to make more than cubes.

I've found i work faster in Sketchup to make a more complex hangar than in GBC, provided i have created a propper texture file in photoshop prior to that.

have to agree Mr Africa, I managed to get in some building maker time today. Its very quick for square buildings but sketch is better for more complex items. basically building maker only works really well when all 4 or more sides are unobstructed, very rare in this day and age! once u know what u are doing it's pretty quick n easy, to produce varied little structures. For medium quality and above, sketch is the go!

here's a little one I tried

one day I'll try blender, su is only a buildup. as I've said before, texturing is the real hard and unsung bit, those guys are the best. I bought Theo and Goran's Duchess  ;D, but can't try it till Saturday, such torture!! Please anyone, shower the forum with screenies of those dials and interior for me'!

[XPAfrica]

Simon, just a quickie about the newsletter i just got about the screenshot with the apt.dat open in notepad:

To search in a text file, replace, edit and display propperly (which eases a lot of processes when you work directly in apt.dat's, .obj, .for etc. ...), it's best to use a good, "pro" text editor. It makes it easy to find the faulty "line 344" in the 20.000 caracter dsf when you get an error message in x-plane, easy to serch for a particular airport in the global apt.dat (just open the apt.dat, do a search for KJFK (for example), and it takes you right there), or search and replace a certain command or value in several .obj files at once - in short, it makes it all waayyyyy easier.

Personally, i got myself BBEdit (on mac but i guess it exists on Win as well), but there must be a load of other good (possibly free)^ text editors for windows as well.

In my opinion it's a must-have tool when you want to work in such data files.

I haven't looked at all the newsletter yet, if something else pops into my mind, i'll post back.

[EDIT]: oh, and i'm sorry, i have to insist once again (  ;D ) WED is definitely the tool you want to look at a bit closer - it takes a bit of time, but once you get the principle and your patience is trained for the occasional bug (in 1.1b1 they're pretty scarce, but still: BEN we want it final !!!) you'll do apt.dat's in a flash and lay down vegetation like you're sowing sunflower seeds...seriously. For working with .for or .pol, WED is just plain amazing, not even mentionning (for US  airport builders like you) the terraserver option.

[EDIT-2]: Ok, now about Sketchup and texturing - instead of just orienting and widening/collapsing the texture on the surface you're targetting, you can do a single click on one of the four pins, drag/move it to one of the corners of the "sector" in your texture file that you want to use, do the same for the three other pins (in order to have one pin at each corner of the part of the texture file that you want to apply to the surface) and then shift-click on each pin to move it to each corner of your surface, thereby stretching and pinning your texture over said surface and pinning the corners to the surface's corners, in order to obtain a perfect result.

[Simmo W]

Thanks for the reply Africa, can you post it to the blog to, or Ill do for you?

others, he's referring to my update posted here:

http://xplane10.wordpress.com/2010/08/21/scenery-update-no-3-success-with-sketchup/

I've got a couple more funny signs and a detailed control tower (well fairly detailed for me).

is there a trick to easily find the ending line for . apt data, I assume the pro editors make it easier

is WED 1.1 beta bug free enough for me' to really give it ago? It sounds like it's intended to replace overlay editor eventually...

thanks for mentioning the fixed pins technique for sketchup. I used it for the signs. yes it's great for more accurate positioning. but when u have a lot of faces to cover, I found the 'give it a quick flick and enlarge' method fine.

I didn't mention either- using the 'projection' method saves considerable time if painting  many surfaces with a similar colored area, as you can quickly drop say 10 perfectly enlarged images and then just have to realign instead of starting from scratch.

[XPAfrica]

[edit]: sorry for the big images, i hope it's not against forum rules/guidelines - if it is, i'll resize

Thanks for the reply Africa, can you post it to the blog to, or Ill do for you?

i'll leave that up to u if you don't mind i'm alone with my 8 months old daughter today, it's kinda difficult to stay online more than 10mn. at a time.

...

is there a trick to easily find the ending line for . apt data, I assume the pro editors make it easier

Yes, indeed there is - have a look at these screenshots here:

first, the beginning of a normal, custom scenery apt.dat in BBEdit(taken from XPFR's LFOM):

You can see that the text editor numbers each line of the document but also provides a line-by-line layout, regardless of the text encoding used while creating the file (unlike notepad).

here the end of the file:

notice that a second airfield is mentionned in this apt.dat (5022 Portbail-for ultra-lights only) and that there is no apparent sign of the ending of one airport info, just a couple of empty lines and the info for 5022 Portbail starts with "1     " before the whole apt.dat ends with a line containing "99".

now to the global apt.dat:

In this screenshot we see the Global apt.dat open in BBEdit, where i performed a search for KSBD as an example.

The text editor took me right there and is highlighting the first line of the apt.dat info for KSBD

Now, again, when you have multiple airport described in one single apt.dat file, the info for each airport is marked with a clear beginning, but the end is open and the only thing that truly ends the info for one airport are the lines that start the info for the next one.

And that's how you can jump from the first line (in our example KSBD) to the last line: by searching for the next occurence of "1     " as displayed in the screenshot below:

is WED 1.1 beta bug free enough for me' to really give it ago? It sounds like it's intended to replace overlay editor eventually...

it is stable enough for me (i'm using computers for over 25 years, i have the "save-every-five-seconds" reflex in me) and frankly it does not hang much anymore when you're not working with huge loads (editing DSF and apt.dat in WED with a lot of objects and a very complex apt.dat). It does quit without warning sometimes, for no apparent reason but it's fairly rare. It looks like it's intended to replace OE to a certain extent, but the one thing WED does not do and which still makes OE a must-have tool is the fact that you can view "in 3d" in OE, not in WED. Both tools are complementary in my opinion, even if i use OE less and less, but i still use it to check out my objects and the way the whole thing sticks to the (incredibly crappy) x-plane mesh, which is always important and that WED cannot do at all. Give it a go, just make sure to save regularly and most importantly make backups of your files every day, not because WED might mess them up, but because handling all layers of a complex scenery in one software makes you prone to make errors and forget stuff, especially since you'll be using the very usefull "show/hide" options to keep a clear overview of your work, and that hidden stuff in WED will not be exported with the rest when you finalize your work.

[Simmo W]

thanks Mate, really useful info! Yes I am a true noob, so had never seen a decent text editor in action. yes I'll move these great replies to the blog too, as a further source of info.

I've got a 4 yo, so know what it's like. that's why I live off the iPhone, can post stuff while cooking or chasing the kid for 20 mins to get him in the bath! good fun though!

[Simmo W]

sheesh, I've already had feedback that this masterpiece could be too complex! I'll be testing on the weekend.

I really enjoyed whipping it up with sketchup in 20 mins.

if u need help testing, don't hesitate to ask.

Too complex? I don't think so. It looks like a box, with another box, with another box and.. You get the idea. It's just like how I model my sceneries. Boxes everywhere, with modifications. The boxes vary in size, width, height, lenght - but it's still a box.

If you look at an airport, you should be able to break it down into simple geometric shapes. Box, ball, cylinder. These are the three shapes I mainly break down a building with. Combination of these shapes may create new shapes never before seen, thus giving the idea of "this is an advanced structure".

I'll see if I can get some time to show a practical example of what I mean, with the tower at Alicante. The supporting tower is basically three circles with a box or two to stitch them together, and then extruded to give it height. And then there's a hexagon for the tower itself..

OK.. I MADE some time..

[vimeo]13908306[/vimeo]

Thanks Ola, finally watched this, looks like good software. I can see your hangars in the background of the duchess, they look great.

[Simmo W]

So I've finally done it, it's reasonable enough to share, although I'm about to find out if many people DON'T have the cool R2 scenery package. Chip and i have been flying around here for weeks as I've been completing things, the Duchess now needs an overhaul!

I only built the control tower (with Chip's design work), all the funny signs, the asphalt signs and the bins (my favourite, the texture came up well). This will go nicely with the Norcal scenery when it finally comes out.

Yesterday I was working on a large terminal, but Chip's designs were too intricate, I could see the FPS dropping as I was texturing each wall. So I'm learning to watchout for the no. of faces.

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=11317

Simon