How to create photoreal scenery for FSX

[Tiberius K.]

PART VIII - Working with Airport Design Editor (ADE) (continued)


21) We will have to add an apron now or else your airplanes will park on dirt. Select "Asphalt" as apron surface and then
select the "Add Aprons" tool and draw your apron.







22) Click the "Add Gate" tool and put two gates onto your apron.





23) Now select your "Add Apron Link" tool and draw a path from your taxiway node to the center of your gates.





24) We still have to add two aprons at every runway end. Select "Asphalt" as apron surface, select the "Add Aprons" tool and start drawing your aprons.







25) One last thing we have to do is to adjust our airport area altitude. Runway altitude has to match airport area altitude. We do this with a flatten polygon. Zoom out and select "Add polygon"





26) Now draw your polygon by clicking along the airport ring road. Your last click will open a properties window. Select "Flatten" as Tag and 21 ft as Altitude and click "OK"





27) Your airport area should look like this now.





28) Now we have to make sure that airport background and runway have the same altitude. Go to "Change Airport Altitude"





29) Set your airport altitude (this means runways, taxiways and aprons) to 21 ft like your airport background area.





30) Save your project and compile your airport bgl. Start FSX and have a closer look:





OK, no floating runway, looks quite good for an extremely basic airport. We might have to adjust our flatten polygon borders and altitude a bit later because there is some water flowing uphill. But so far it's ok, we can land there without falling off the runway and that's enough
for this tutorial.

What's missing now are some trees for this green island and maybe some objects for our immediate airport area.

[tvieno]

Thanks for the great tutorial! This should be sticky'd!

[Tiberius K.]

You guys are the best. I wish I could build some sceneries myself.

Anyone who has FSX installed and a internet connection can create photoreal scenery. Just follow the tutorial and if you get stuck somewhere just post your questions in the scenery design forum.

Unbelievable. Great tutorial. I'm sure a lot will benefit from this.

I hope so. Now you have it all together at one place. You don't have to browse thru dozens of forums anymore to connect the dots. Creating photoreal scenery isn't difficult at all. When you've done a few sceneries yourself you will see that it's actually a piece of cake. Later your biggest challenge will be to get good satellite images.

Thanks for the great tutorial! This should be sticky'd!

You're welcome. Yes, it should be sticky'd. But it's not finished yet.

[Tiberius K.]

PART IX - Working with Autogen Annotator Tool



Now we want to place some trees on our island. We do that with the Autogen Annotator Tool.


1) Go to your "Microsoft Flight Simulator X SDK/SDK/Environment Kit/Autogen SDK/" folder and double-click "Annotator.exe"

2) Now there will be a bunch of windows on your screen. Close the "Properties" window, the "Find Results" window and the "Find" window.

3) Go to your Autogen Configuration Editor and open "autogendescriptions.xml" - it's in your "Microsoft Flight Simulator X SDK/SDK/Environment Kit/Autogen SDK/Autogen source xml" folder.This xml file contains our trees.





4) There will be a new window, "Vegetation groupings".





5) Here you can choose the trees you want to put on your scenery.
There is a catalog of all trees used in FSX. You should study it carefully and then select the trees that fit your region.
You can choose via groupings or regionalizations. We choose some small coconut palm trees





6) Now open your Nauru.bgl file with Autogen Annotator Tool. Select "All", otherwise you might not see your bgl file.






7) Now you can see your island. You can zoom in with your mouse wheel and move it around as long as you have selected "pan" in the control panel.

[Tiberius K.]

PART IX - Working with Autogen Annotator Tool (continued)


8) Now zoom in where you want to plant your trees, select the type of tree you want to put there in the vegetation groupings window, click "set Guid" in the control panel.







9) There are two different ways to bring your trees onto your island. If you have to cover a large area, you can just draw a polygon (select "Polygon Region" in your control panel, then left-click your polygon onto your island and close it with right click). That's fast but unfortunately not very accurate along the edges.







10) I suggest you do it "by hand", it's more accurate and you can correct it more easily later.
So choose the type of tree you want to put there in the Vegetation Groupings window, select "set Guid" in the
control panel and start drawing little squares by holding your left mouse button.











11) To move around use the "pan" tool in the control panel. You can choose as many tree types as you want. If you want to add other types of trees, just select them and draw some new squares above the other ones.
When you are done, it should look like this:






12) Now save your newly added autogen (CTRL+S), it will be automatically saved in your "Nauru/Texture" folder.
Start FSX and have a look:





Looks okay.

[Tiberius K.]

PART X - Adding Object to your scenery with ADE


There are different methods of filling your scenery with objects. If your scenery is rather small like our Nauru project,
then a free, fast and easy way to add objects is using ADE.



1) Start ADE and open your Nauru airport file:





2) Zoom in and you will see that our yellow flatten polygon is blocking our sight. So we will delete it and add a new one later when we are finished adding objects. The only problem is that we will have a floating runway again after our flatten poly has been deleted. So go to your Nauru/Scenery folder and rename your flatten polygon (ANYN_ADEX_ADE_CVX.bgl) to "ANYN_ADEX_ADE_CVX1.bgl". That way we can still preserve our original flatten polygon even if we deleted it in ADE, so we don't have the floating runway problem when testing our objects. After renaming, double-click one of the flatten polygon lines, then right-click and select "delete object" and our background image will be visible again.





3) Now we will add a tower. But first we will adjust the height of our tower camera, it's usually too low so that you see antennas and lights and such when you choose tower view in FSX later. Double-click on the tower spot, a properties window will open, set altitude to 100 ft and then click "OK"







4) Right-click on your airport spot and select "Add Library Object"





5) In the Add Library Object window select "Airport objects" under category.





6) Select "small tower2", you will see an image of your selected object on the right.





7) Now you can adjust the quality of your objects under "Image Complexity". Keep in mind that if you should set your
complexity level to "extremely dense" you will have to set your autogen settings in FSX display settings to "extremely
dense" as well or your objects won't show up.





8) Now click "add" and you will see a little orange square with a little dot above. If you click on that you can rotate your object. So bring your tower into position and then we will add a few more objects.

[Tiberius K.]

PART X - Adding Object to your scenery with ADE (continued)




9) Now we will add a terminal building. Right-click again on your airport and select "Add Generic Building" and click "Add".





10) Save your project (CTRL+S), compile your airport bgl (CTRL+C) and have a look at our objects in FSX.











11) Ok, looks good. Even tower view is ok. Now you know how to litter your island with objects. You can also add vehicles, taxi signs, and all kinds of stuff, even boats. You have to play around with it a bit. You will notice that for some objects you won't see an image in ADE (maybe scruffyduck can fix that!). Fortunately there is a catalog of all FSX objects, you can find it here

12) One last thing we have to do is to re-do our flatten polygon. So do your flatten polygon again, delete the "ANYN_ADEX_ADE_CVX1.bgl" file, save your project, compile your aiport and then:







Happy Flying!

[ferrarimanos]

man 1st thanks for the fantastik totorial... 2nd in the step that you put the senery on the fsx ... i go to add area... then to my folder.. and then ok.. and nothink is hapening.. (i press also right click cose thats the why to do it..) plz tell me how to do iit..
gridings...
manos.

[NASTAR]

Will this tutorial also work in FS9?

[kjb]

Parts of it will, but FS9 photo scenery is a different animal and SbuilderX is for FSX only.