Fictional mesh terrain... Suggestions needed..

[eguven14]

Hello fellow flightsimmers... After a long hiatus period (about 10 years!) I am happy to be back amongst you again... (I found my flightsim.com account is still working, by the way!). Then I was a very eager scenery design enthusiast working on a personal great project of a fictional island in the pacific using programs like ScBuild, Pascal Meziat's Airport and many other minor programs to be rendered in FS98 (long before mesh terrain was introduced!); I am also the author of some small program named "Aquarius Macro Extractor".. Sceneries were all but polygons then, but now I see that many have changed... I am trying to figure out the current structure of sceneries, with an ardent desire to revive my fictional island project in FSX.

Do you have any suggestions, which programs can I use?.. Where to start in order to create a FICTIONAL land mass in the ocean. I have analyzed many design programs in the file library, but they're all focused on creating airports and objects. How can I create a mountain, a river, etc... Suggestions are greatly appreciated...

[eguven14]

Noone has an idea?? :(

[meshman2]

FSX has changed from previous versions, in that the world is all land with water added in. So to create an island where none existed before you would need to do this;

1. Exclude all default water in the area. Exclusions work on an area of LOD 11 size, so it's not a precise operation.

2. Add back new water polygons where you had removed the default.

3. Cut a hole in your water polygons drawn in #2 to allow the land mass to show thru.

But you're not going to show much in the way of elevation, it more than likely will be as flat as the water. FSX allows you to construct multi-level polygons, this might give you some elevation, but I wouldn't be drawing mountains in this method.

SBuilderX, by Luis Sa, can handle these tasks. If you decide to look into it, I would highly recommend the SBuilderX tutorials by Luis Feliz-Tirado which explains the programs use and FSX scenery design in general. Most of the general scenery work available in FSX can be done with SBX and is a tool I use frequently.

SBX requires the SDKs that are part of the Deluxe version, as most scenery tools will.

[eguven14]

Thanks Meshman2; greatly appreciated...