A question about areas around runways.....

[Navy Chief]

This screenshot is of a recent FS9 scenery upload to Flightsim.com: NZCI airport. Nice scenery, by the way. I am in NO way being critical of its designer!!!

I merely have a question, and keep forgetting to bring it up. In so many sceneries, the field edging surrounding the runway is so perfect. From the air, (to me at least) it just doesn't look real.

Are the fields around real airports that well manicured?

Thanks.

NC

 

[Roger]

I remember Maskrider had a blend technique for the airfield edges in his Cfs2 sceneries. I don't know if it could work in FsX?

 

[Navy Chief]

Such sharp edges detract from otherwise so realistic-looking scenery sometimes. Just my opinion.

By the way, good morning to all! Having my morning coffee and checking my FAVORITE site: SOH!

NC

 

[harleyman]

Hi NavyChief..

I too would like to blend those areas out..They look stupid to me.....

No clue how to do it though...

 

[Roger]

Hi NavyChief..

I too would like to blend those areas out..They look stupid to me.....

No clue how to do it though...

I think Maskrider is on staff here? You'd find him in the Cfs2 forum and maybe he could explain the process?

 

[Roger]

I've just been to Maskrider's home page and there's a Cfs2 tutorial on blended scenery. http://www.geocities.com/crismahn@sbcglobal.net/MaskRider2008/index_maskrider.html

 

[IanP]

Blended scenery is possible in FSX, but nowhere near as easy as it used to be - Bill Womack explained it to me a while ago when I was asking about making custom ground textures for Digby.

What might be an easier method would be to place a landclass polygon of a more appropriate texture, then put a flatten/exclude autogen (only) on top to create your airfield shape. You could then put your runways on top of that. One thing that I never allow when I'm creating a flatten/exclude poly is straight edges unless there is a definite reason for it. Nature doesn't do straight and rarely are field boundaries or property boundaries in open land straight either, so airfield boundaries very rarely are.

 

[jmig]

To answer the original question. Yes!

Short grass doesn't provide dens for animals that could be hazards to aircraft, or food for birds. It is less likely to burn if an engine would come apart and scatter hot debris everywhere (I have some personal experience on this one )

 

[Bone]

Airport's go for straight lines and uniformity as much as possible.


Knoxville, Tennesee

Manchester, New Hampshire

Portland, Oregon

San Francisco, California

Auguadilla, Puerto Rico

Bangor, Maine

Melbourne, Florida

Duke Field (spec ops), Florida

Key West, Florida

Providencialis, Turks and Caicos

 

[IanP]

Don't forget, Bone, that America is different from much of the rest of the world. While American airports may have been built from scratch, without having to buy land, by the Government, the same does not apply in most of the planet, where airports have grown either from grass fields originally owned by farmers, from military airfields on land dictated by geography or what could be bought/was suitable, or on land bought by private individuals.

Fences may be straight, the land they occupy very rarely is. Also, while major airports tend to be very uniform and well kept, the same does not apply to smaller fields with a much smaller maintenance budget. Many airfields in Europe rent land inside the airfield boundary to farmers, who grow crops on it. It's not at all unusual to land between fields of corn at the end of summer here in the UK and even more common in parts of Europe. Africa and much of Asia... What's maintenance again?

 

[Bone]

Point taken, Ian. In the United States smaller airports aren't always uniform, and there are some with crops and even oil wells on them...a few more.

Monterrey, Mexico

Kingston, Jamaica

Cozumel, Mexico

Belize City, Belize

 

[Navy Chief]

Thanks for all the pictures, Bone! Of all those photos, "Duke Field" looks to be the one most defined. The others do not appear to be so much.

NC

 

[IanP]

Even Duke Field isn't that well defined - look behind the buildings and the airport boundary zig-zags all over the place.

It's important here to differentiate between an airport, which is subject to far stricter safety measures for commercial operations and where maintenance is a high priority, and an airfield which tends to have primarily light GA operations and which is subject to far less strict safety criteria. Many airfields really are still fields, which the farmer happens to fly his aeroplane from!

 

[Bone]

Of course they're not perfect rectangles. I chose a few pics that you could compare to the picture that started this post and see that many airports do kind of look that way. I've travelled extensively throughout the world, so it's not like I'm naive about what airports around the world look like.

The original post didn't make it clear that this was all about light GA airfields that have a runway that needs to be mowed. I would suggest that these type of airfields aren't the majority. The original post asked if "the fields around airports are that well manicured". I tried to answer.



I didn't bother to throw in the really big airports I fly into, the exception being SFO because it has uniform qualities. Most of the big ones are a mess! Like my home base of Atlanta...the "Worlds Busiest Airport"...it's an effing mess.

 

[harleyman]

I think what we are refering to more is the Cut)Out look of FSX airports,,, As in the hard lines of the color contrast...


You are flying in, its fall, everything is dull and dead looking, and BAM, the FSX airport is vivid green and well defined..

if only the borders could be toned out some to allow it to look not so Cut out of the scenery...

 

[Bone]

I hear ya Harleyman, but a good many real airports are cut out of the scenery, simply to make them visible and identifiable...the exception being the farmers field with a hangar. I'm not saying that all of these FS airfields are right on the mark...heck no! But they aren't that far removed from what a real one looks like when you fly in. They are certainly more "realistic" than many other aspects of the flight sim.

 

[harleyman]

I guess I'm more refering to the harsh color contrast on approach that makes it look like its just a totally different place in the surrounding area.....



BTW....Great shots there...I have flown into several of them..but I only got to see the wing view....

 

[Bjoern]

Bone, your pics leave me drooling and raging in jealousy all at once. Looks like you RJ drivers really get around!

 

[Bone]

Thanks Bjoern. We fly our arses off in these things. I hope you're able to fly profesionally someday...it's alot different than flight simming.

 

[anthony31]

To a large extent scenery designers are limited by what FSX can and can't do. Judging by the original screenshot it looks like the designer used FSX polygons to define the grass areas. The designer uses a program like SBuilderX to draw some polygons, assigns a texture to them (and the texture choices for airport grass are VERY limited) and FSX draws the airport based on this. There really doesn't seem to be anyway to blend these grass textures into the surrounding terrain. This is a bit different with landclass files which will blend into different adjacent landclass textures very well .

Add to this the much higher resolution of FSX and those edges look a hell of a lot sharper than they ever could in FS9.

Here's a couple of airports I've made for FSX. The first one shows an airstrip made using photoreal which does allow designers to blend into the surrounding textures (can you pic the joins?).

The second shows one I made using FSX polygons and FSX style runways (mainly because the Google Earth imagery for this airport was too low res to be of any use for photoreal). Note in the second pic how I've used a dark coloured polygon (actually a black sand texture according to FSX) to simulate old disused aprons. Note also how "grass" cross runway ends up looking more like dirt. Using FSX polygons and runways really limits your ability to control exactly how the scenery will appear. On the other hand it can be a lot quicker to work with as well as producing file sizes a fraction of the size of photoreal.

Hope this helps explain things .