SBuilderX Question

[falcon409]

I've posted this on the FSDevelopers website and it's gotten a lot of views but no replies so I'm trying here as well. I am doing a "non-photoreal" scenery enhancement for Hay River in the Northwest Territories. I've knocked out the default river system and added a new one, removed the shoreline that was left behind and the original Airport Boundary has been replaced.

The problem I'm having is where the Islands should be as shown in the SBX screenshot. After adding the water poly, I cut away the areas where the Islands should be and designated them as "holes" which I assumed would simply reveal the landmass under the water poly. . .it did, except that those holes have actually formed "deep holes" where the land should be rather than simply sitting at ground level like I thought they would. I've attached some additional shots to show the holes, the replacement airport boundary and the new river system, but the Islands are the problem right now:

 

[spotlope]

I assume you've tried this already Ed, but have you right-clicked your hole poly(s) and chosen "Set Altitude"? It's possible that an errant very low altitude got set for the cutouts.

 

[falcon409]

Hi Bill, well, in the case of the "holes", there isn't an option to set altitude like there is for say. . .the water poly's. I did end up doing that but I had to go point by point around the poly and set each point to a specific altitude, but when I was done and recompiled, the hole was gone but so was the Island, lol.

 

[roger-wilco-66]

Falcon,

did you assign the holes to your primary water polygon? They always need to be associated to a water polygon, and you also need to lay an exclude water poly over the hole in order for the island to show up correctly.
Do not change the elevation coordinates of the vertices, they need to be on sea level ( zero) .

HTH,
Mark

 

[falcon409]

Falcon,
did you assign the holes to your primary water polygon? They always need to be associated to a water polygon, and you also need to lay an exclude water poly over the hole in order for the island to show up correctly.
Do not change the elevation coordinates of the vertices, they need to be on sea level ( zero) .
HTH, Mark

Yes, I did the "set as hole" correctly, using the main water poly as the parent, so I had that part right, but I didn't set an exclude over the hole and that may be the problem. I know I've tried everything else but that, lol.
Does the "exclude water poly" need to be the exact shape of the hole or just make sure it covers the entire area of the hole?

 

[IanP]

I've had this one regularly, Falcon. What you have to do is create the poly, then set the altitude, then set it to be a hole. If you don't, as Bill suggested, it will end up at 0' altitude, hence the hole.

I managed to make the mistake with every [censored] island that I cut out of Lower Lough Erne for Enniskillen. Took me ages to go back and recreate them all, because as you have discovered, once you have made it a hole, the altitude is fixed and cannot be changed.

Edited to add: This is, of course, assuming that your water is not at mean sea level, which from your description of the problem, I don't think it is?

Ian P.

 

[NoNewMessages]

...After adding the water poly,...

Still early for me, what TAG did you use on the water polys? All your land looks to be flat? There's a significant elevation difference from the existing water to your's, as shown in the one semi-vertical island?

 

[falcon409]

I've had this one regularly, Falcon. What you have to do is create the poly, then set the altitude, then set it to be a hole. If you don't, as Bill suggested, it will end up at 0' altitude, hence the hole.
Ian P.

I'll give that a shot. I honestly don't remember now as I've tried so many different options, if I set the altitude for the water poly and then did the holes (which doesn't appear to be the case), or set the hole and then gave the water poly an altitude (more likely given the results).

 

[JoeW]

Try this, In this order:

1) Draw a polygon around the island (make a little bit larger than the island) and mark it as Exclude__WaterPolys. This will "erase" the existing water and hence erase the existing island. If you save and compile now you will see a broad expance of trees. This is one QMID 11 grid. Point the plane north and slew to the south-west corner. Zoom out so you can see the whole grid.

2) Make a polygon just outside the corners and mark it as Hydro_Polygons_Generic_Ocean_Perennial. Now you have a new patch of water.

3) Trace the new island shoreline and mark the poly as PolygonHole. This can be done by selecting the poly button in the menu, and clicking on the poly and right click and near the bottom of the selections is the command "Set as hole". Then choose the large water poly as the parent poly. The area that you set as hole should turn white or clear. If it doesn't you didn't select the poly right. you must be in poly mode to set it as a hole. This will make the island.

Build and have a look in FSX. You should see your new island. If you see nothing but water, the hole step didn't go right. If you see all trees the Hydro_Polygons_Generic_Ocean_Perenial poly wasn't done right.

You don't need to worry about the exclusions affecting any mesh. It won't.

When you do the shore lines, Go clockwise for lakes and counter-clockwise for Islands. Don't worry too much about this as you can reverse the direction of the line.

Regards, MatthewS
Edited by Joe Watson

 

[falcon409]

Try this, In this order:

1) Draw a polygon around the island (make a little bit larger than the island) and mark it as Exclude__WaterPolys. This will "erase" the existing water and hence erase the existing island. If you save and compile now you will see a broad expance of trees. This is one QMID 11 grid. Point the plane north and slew to the south-west corner. Zoom out so you can see the whole grid.

2) Make a polygon just outside the corners and mark it as Hydro_Polygons_Generic_Ocean_Perennial. Now you have a new patch of water.

3) Trace the new island shoreline and mark the poly as PolygonHole. This can be done by selecting the poly button in the menu, and clicking on the poly and right click and near the bottom of the selections is the command "Set as hole". Then choose the large water poly as the parent poly. The area that you set as hole should turn white or clear. If it doesn't you didn't select the poly right. you must be in poly mode to set it as a hole. This will make the island.

Build and have a look in FSX. You should see your new island. If you see nothing but water, the hole step didn't go right. If you see all trees the Hydro_Polygons_Generic_Ocean_Perenial poly wasn't done right.

You don't need to worry about the exclusions affecting any mesh. It won't.

When you do the shore lines, Go clockwise for lakes and counter-clockwise for Islands. Don't worry too much about this as you can reverse the direction of the line.

Regards, MatthewS
Edited by Joe Watson

Joe,
Take a look at my first post. . .there is a screenshot of the SBX program with the poly's that were completed up to the point that I posted. What you posted, has already been done and tried. I'm past that point now. Actually what I plan on doing is starting over from scratch as it seems that whatever I do simply causes another odd anomaly somewhere else in the scenery, so I'm spending more time chasing ghosts than I am getting this simple little project completed. Heck, it probably isn't even an airport worth messing with really.

 

[IanP]

The order that I do internal water areas such as lakes and rivers is as follows:

- Exclude existing water/shorelines where necessary.
- Draw entire outside shape of water area
- Set altitude
- Draw one island
- Set altitude of island poly
- Set as hole in water area poly

(Repeat island steps until all done)

I've attached three shots below: One of Lough Ramor (Co. Cavan) with no island, one with the island hole without setting an altitude for the hole poly and one setting the poly alt to 80m (lake elevation) before setting it as a hole.

As you can hopefully see in the second pic, the hole is just that - a hole down 80m to MSL. The third pic shows the original island (the odd shaped one) and two nearby smaller islands which I added at the same time.

Speaking as someone who is waiting for Ice Pilots to make a guest appearance on DVD, by the way, I'd kinda like Hay River!

If you like, I'll take a look at the area and put something quick together that you can compare to yours? Would that be any help?

Ian P.

 

[JoeW]

What I posted is what works for me. I have done several islands and am working on Jamaica and the Caymans right now. The Caymans were done just that way without any elevation problems. It really shouldn't affect the elevation at all.

 

[IanP]

The difference between Hay River and the Cayman Islands is about 500 feet, though, Joe...

You're talking about putting islands into seas and oceans, Falcon and I are talking about putting islands into lakes at considerable altitudes above mean sea level... :d

I've never been successful at creating islands in seas - but that's primarily because I've tried to do it to make fake islands and then, of course, they have no mesh below them, so it doesn't work well at all (creating fake mesh is next to impossible, as far as I can tell). On the other hand, I'm quite happily wandering around populating Ireland, bits of the US and Canada with some of the lakes and their islands that ACES missed.

I could just use UTX, of course, but I'm a glutton for punishment.

Ian P.

 

[JoeW]

Well ...... in that case all you need to do is adjust to the altitude of the lake.
You need the elevation of the water and adjust all polys to that elevation. The method I posted works and works everytime.
Where is this lake?

 

[IanP]

Yes, exactly - but it's the all polys bit that is critical. When creating a hole in a water poly above AMSL, you have to set the altitude of the poly before making it a hole. Other than that, plus obviously that your base water poly is the shape of your lake/coastline rather than a rectangle, everything is identical.

Poking at SBuilderX while adding yet another lake to Ireland a few minutes ago, I think you may be able to adjust each node of the polygon individually, if you forget to do so before, but you certainly can't change the altitude of the entire hole polygon at once, after you have made it said hole.

Anyway, I'll wait for Ed to come back now and see if he has had any more success.

Cheers,

Ian P.

 

[JoeW]

Ian ..... Just went there in FSX. That is one screwed up area. There is a definate step down from the river to the lake. The elevation of the river is 148.9664 meters (488' 8") while the lake is 145.5325 meters (477' 5"). I think I would first level it out. SBuilder will let you make a poly with different elevations at each corner.

As an aside ... while slewing I noticed that the aircraft would jump to the right about 200 yards, no joke. The coast lines are all screwed up too.

If I can help, let me know.

 

[roger-wilco-66]

Sorry, I wasn't aware that this is a lake in my previous post, so the elevation must be correct, of course. The exclude water poly should be larger than the hole, it should cover it. See attached image.

I made over 600 islands for the FSX Solomon 1943 project... no elevation quirks, but a load of others because of the complexity...


Cheers,
Mark

 

[falcon409]

Ok guys, I guess I figured this would be a simple task and it's turned into a real nightmare. Currently I have 18 layers of poly's I'm having to make heads or tails of and I've come to the conclusion that going back to the start is the best way to attack this. With what I've learned from mistakes and what I've learned from your posts, I think if I take this one thing at a time. . . .get the water in place and then the Islands and stop there until I have that rectified. The rest, which is basically the airport itself is simple, but this water thing has become more than I planned.

I took a couple of shots as a "see, this is what I'm working on" kinda thing. Anyway. I'm going to start from scratch and get one thing done before I move on to anything else.

Thanks for the participation, everyone's comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated.:salute:

 

[NoNewMessages]

If I can throw out a thought or two, which I hope may benefit future work in SBX or FSX KML?

The standard approach is; 1. exclude water, 2. make new water, 3. introduce a detailed hole to cut out the land mass from the new water. Most of the time the parent/child polygon works OK. Sometimes it doesn't, as Mark will attest to.

The given in FSX is that the entire planet is land, with water added in. In some work from a couple of years ago I found that the three step process above wouldn't work well if you were doing LARGE scale projects, like Hawai'i. There are eight primary islands that make up Hawai'i and only two are of the smaller scale. Anyone care to make an extremely accurate layout of O'ahu or Mau'i in one sitting? Me neither! I never got working on The Big Island (Hawai'i), but it would take at least a week of work to do it accurately, if not more time than that.

Borne out of necessity came the two step process; 1. exclude water, 2. make detailed water polys that form the shape of the island. These detailed water polygons can be more than one file. They can be a whole mess of files! Here's a grab of the smaller sized Lana'i, which is highly accurate and comprised of six water polygons. If I got tired and wanted to turn the computer off? No problem, since there was more than one file to the water all I needed to do is start on the next polygon.

And FWIW, I have the land mass files from the State of Hawai'i and "could" have used them for the work. But I found they were a little lacking compared to mine, even after I removed a "few" thousand vertices... There's more than one way to "get 'er done", but to still have the same results. Should work for open or inland water. But work the land area first and close the polygon outwards.

 

[falcon409]

When you get frustrated, sometimes you miss something that's right in front of you and it took going back over all the posts to spot it. It's not hidden necessarily, I probably read right over it and it never clicked. . .

The order that I do internal water areas such as lakes and rivers is as follows:
- Exclude existing water/shorelines where necessary.
- Draw entire outside shape of water area
- Set altitude
- Draw one island
- Set altitude of island poly
- Set as hole in water area poly

Ian P.

That's the missing step I wasn't paying attention to. Even Spotlope eluded to it in his post on the first page, but by that time I had already designated the "hole" and couldn't see any way to set an altitude. The obvious was staring me in the face at that point and I didn't see it, lol. I've done one Island and it's just as it should be. Now I can continue with all the little Islands and then move on the the easier stuff, lol. Thanks to everyone for the in-depth assistance and IanP, for putting that one step where I could eventually find it, lol.