Creating/Modifying the airport background with SBuilder
Posted: 11 Mar 2010, 01:59
This short tutorial will cover how to create or modify the airport grass background for a given location.
If you don't have SBuilder installed, please visit this thread to learn where to obtain SBuilder for free and how to get it setup as there are additional programs you will need to install to get it working properly:
http://www.militaryaiworks.com/newforum ... =33&t=7672
Most airfields in real life have all the trees and obstacles that sit near the runways cleared and the terrain flattened for safety purposes. This leaves a large cutout grassy area (unless in a desert environment) that gives a very distinctive look to the airfield complex. Often the stock FS2004 airports or airbases have a very quickly drawn background that is not at all accurate to the real life airfield. Additionally when we choose to modify the afcad for a given airfield to make it match the real world, often the new afcad parts will not fit completely inside the boundaries of the stock airport background.
This is a problem for several reasons. For one, visually it looks odd and out of place for a given ramp area that now, does not sit inside this grassy boundary. Secondly one important function of the airport background is to exclude all autogen inside its boundaries. When we end up drawing a ramp or taxiway outside the boundaries of the default background, we lose that automatic exclusion of the autogen and often times find trees, shrubs and other autogen objects popping up through the bottom of our ramps and taxiways. While that can be dealt with using a separate exclude file, sometimes the autogen is stubborn and will not go away. So using a regular airport background polygon is a much easier and more reliable way to get rid of the unwanted autogen objects. This also saves you from having to make an extra exclude file to take care of it.
In this little tutorial, we will look at Randolf AFB in Texas and get rid of its original airport background and replace it with a new one that we create using a different grass texture than that of the original. We will also add a second polygon to place the golf course that sits between the two runways sounth of the ramp complex.
So let's get started:
If you don't have SBuilder installed, please visit this thread to learn where to obtain SBuilder for free and how to get it setup as there are additional programs you will need to install to get it working properly:
http://www.militaryaiworks.com/newforum ... =33&t=7672
Most airfields in real life have all the trees and obstacles that sit near the runways cleared and the terrain flattened for safety purposes. This leaves a large cutout grassy area (unless in a desert environment) that gives a very distinctive look to the airfield complex. Often the stock FS2004 airports or airbases have a very quickly drawn background that is not at all accurate to the real life airfield. Additionally when we choose to modify the afcad for a given airfield to make it match the real world, often the new afcad parts will not fit completely inside the boundaries of the stock airport background.
This is a problem for several reasons. For one, visually it looks odd and out of place for a given ramp area that now, does not sit inside this grassy boundary. Secondly one important function of the airport background is to exclude all autogen inside its boundaries. When we end up drawing a ramp or taxiway outside the boundaries of the default background, we lose that automatic exclusion of the autogen and often times find trees, shrubs and other autogen objects popping up through the bottom of our ramps and taxiways. While that can be dealt with using a separate exclude file, sometimes the autogen is stubborn and will not go away. So using a regular airport background polygon is a much easier and more reliable way to get rid of the unwanted autogen objects. This also saves you from having to make an extra exclude file to take care of it.
In this little tutorial, we will look at Randolf AFB in Texas and get rid of its original airport background and replace it with a new one that we create using a different grass texture than that of the original. We will also add a second polygon to place the golf course that sits between the two runways sounth of the ramp complex.
So let's get started: