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North Texas Regional Terminal

Ed, this hangar looks great! It is good to have real photos to use as textures. I remember how good it was to texture the big white hangar at Fantasy of flight because I had good pictures. Lots of work in photoshop to adjust them but it is worth it.
 
Dimus said:
Ed, this hangar looks great! It is good to have real photos to use as textures. I remember how good it was to texture the big white hangar at Fantasy of flight because I had good pictures. Lots of work in photoshop to adjust them but it is worth it.
Click to expand...
Yep, I know I won't always have the ability to get up close photos of every building I will do, but it sure is nice to be this close to the airport and have the chance to go there and get new photos whenever I need them. I guess the two things I'm working through right now are getting the textures onto as few sheets as possible (right now, every texture is separate) and "where do I stop" with the custom buildings and rely on default or other objects to fill in, lol.
 
This is what used to be one of the FBO's (Air1) where I worked. It's now a Flight School. There's a deck on the west end of the building. . .still very much a WIP as the hangar is fenced and requires a code to access that area, so it'll take some doing to get the rest of the shots I need to complete the texturing. I'm also having trouble getting several areas to "close-up"....no matter how many lines I draw, the openings remain and everything appears to be on the same plane. . .not sure where the problem is.
 
Another building. . .it seems to be endless, lol. I may not live to see it published if I don't stop finding "one more" building I want to add, lol.
 
falcon409 said:
Another building. . .it seems to be endless, lol. I may not live to see it published if I don't stop finding "one more" building I want to add, lol.
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Oh Lordy, another simmer done went and caught the "one more" affliction. I warned you...:kilroy:

Seriously, everything you've posted is looking really good.:medals:

RD
 
Ed, no need to disagree any further. YOU'RE HOOKED!
Nice stuff too.

Welcome to the dark side.
By the way, I've yet to find a cure for the frustrations acquired. It looks like you're riding for the duration. :icon_lol:
 
Thanks guys. . .it has kinda "taken over" most of my time, lol. Gotta go back to the videos though, tubular railing is required on several buildings and I have yet to figure out how that's done. Onward into the darkness, lol:salute:
 
"Tubular Dude". . . .as long as you can start and end a tube type railing on a flat surface you're ok. Once I got the basic idea, it was just a matter of lining in the "track" for the tube to follow. Still more to do, but the results really add to the building.
 
falcon409 said:
"Tubular Dude". . . .as long as you can start and end a tube type railing on a flat surface you're ok. Once I got the basic idea, it was just a matter of lining in the "track" for the tube to follow. Still more to do, but the results really add to the building.
Click to expand...

They do, don't they, especially the shadows.

Ed, you are making excellent stuff and you are manipulating textures expertly. You do however start to think about optimization at some point. I have come to realize that tubes create a lot of polys and at that size, and that they are an unnecessary complexity and FPS eaters. It is quite OK to replace circular tubes with flat surfaces or T-sections and still get a good effect when in FSX. Fences with a lot of bars can also be made by plain flat surfaces with a texture using alpha channel for transparency. You just don't get the shadow that way.

In the image below of my home base's gate in Tatoi, the vertical tubes in the back holding the base emblem were represented by a rectangular section. The fence is done by transparent texture:

View attachment 89098

The F-84 gate guardian was also done in sketchup btw.
 
Texoma Jet Center in the works. This is the sole FBO on the airport. Sits on the north end of the ramp. Going to see if they'll allow me to take interior shots of the hangar. I did that with the Flight Academy and then textured the walls and ceiling. Looks pretty cool that way.
 
Dimus said:
They do, don't they, especially the shadows.

Ed, you are making excellent stuff and you are manipulating textures expertly. You do however start to think about optimization at some point. I have come to realize that tubes create a lot of polys and at that size, and that they are an unnecessary complexity and FPS eaters. It is quite OK to replace circular tubes with flat surfaces or T-sections and still get a good effect when in FSX. Fences with a lot of bars can also be made by plain flat surfaces with a texture using alpha channel for transparency. You just don't get the shadow that way.

In the image below of my home base's gate in Tatoi, the vertical tubes in the back holding the base emblem were represented by a rectangular section. The fence is done by transparent texture:

The F-84 gate guardian was also done in sketchup btw.
Click to expand...

That is one of the beauties I have found with FSX, it isn't so much the mesh that affects performance, but textures and drawcall. I have also found that using ModelconverterX to create LODs makes a huge difference in seeing that detail closeup with little loss of performance.

Here is an experiment I did, each soldier is 12332 polys (a little heavy for a scenery object), with 4 LODs and 1 drawcall (1 texture at 2048). I only saw a drop of 2-4 FPS when approaching this line and since the last LOD is empty, you can see where they start to vanish. On the railing, you could do a version without the railing as the next LOD model and keep the first version for closeups.
View attachment 89128
 
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