I want to build/make a Island.

Hello:

So. No help as far as Bill Lyons scenery.

Well this is a build scenery forum, Right.

How do I build a Island?

What tools do I need?

Sorry I have FSXA

Of course. SBuilder I forgot.I'm going to stick with it till I get a volcanic island.

Thanks for reply

Well I downloaded SBx and started to watch some videos.

I don't want to build a airport, I want to build a volcanic island in a Pacific location that already has scenery objects.

I'm looking for a tutorial that has step by step instructions for building a mesh volcanic island and location.

I have a top down picture of a volcanic island I don't know how to scale it up, make a mesh that duplicates the elevations. place it where I want it and probably several things I'm not aware of.

Where do I start?

GDR1944

FSX-A

Maybe a hint?

"Terrain Sculptor" looks promising....

All I understand of SBuilder is square blocks of texture.

So if that is all I get then how do I set/put it where I want it?

I guess I'm not asking the right questions or maybe not the right way?

GDR1944

I don't think there's really a practical way to make an island where one doesn't exist in the real world. It would be very difficult, and that's probably why you don't see tons of "secret island" addons available. Terrain design has a lot to do with using real world source data and it's pretty much required. You can (for some parts of the world) download digital elevation models (DEMs) and with the SDK turn them into mesh. Likewise you can download orthoimagery and turn it into photoreal. Problem is if an island doesn't exist at a given location in the real world it's not gonna exist in the source data either.

The way a photoreal drapes over a mesh makes things look real because all the shadows, vegetation, etc. in the imagery match the ridges in the mesh. If you tried it with photoreal that didn't match the humps & bumps in the mesh it would look terrible - just an example of the kinds of problems you'd run into if you tried to do sloped flattens with terrain sculptor or SBuilderX - you'd rule out photoreal for sure.

Maybe you could download DEMs and ortho for an existing island and move it somewhere else by editing the coords in the .inf that resample.exe reads to compile the mesh/photoreal, I've never tried it, I'd expect it to be not as easy as it sounds if possible at all.

I think you'd be better off to doctor up an existing island that maybe has some lousy default coastlines and lousy default mesh or something. You could kick all the people off Tahiti and turn it into your own private island, lol.

Either way you're in for a h*ll of an education in terrain design, there's a lot to it. :)

FSDeveloper is where you need to be hanging out BTW, go there and search "island", you'll find plenty to read.

Jim

Thank you for info.

I think I found the answer

Terrain Sculptor works in FSXA ..

"Terrain Sculptor can operate stand-alone and create sculpted terrain files from scratch, or it can import data from sBuilder, sBuilderX and ADE (ADE not yet implemented) to enhance their capabilities"

GDR1944