This tutorial covers how to terraform the landscape of your airports using the polygon, rectangle and profile editor tools in the SDK.
I plan to create more tutorials covering all aspects of airport creation, and I’ll be adding those to the tutorial playlist below. If you have any questions or there’s anything you would like to see in a future tutorial let me know in the comments!
More SDK tutorials:
• Microsoft Flight Simul...
0:00 Intro
0:16 Altitude isoline view
1:13 Polygons
2:03 Rectangles
2:42 Rectangle profiles
3:26 Intersecting terraforming
4:02 The runway
4:40 Flatten an airport
5:50 Don't forget to save and build
6:43 Outro
Hey, I just wanted to thank you for this tutorial. Several airports didn’t get generated in my neck of the woods and you’ve just given me the skills to generate them. I did my first one today with my son helping out. Not only can I now get to places I couldn’t before, my son and I had a great time hanging out and working through it - keep it up!
You're very welcome, nice to hear you found them useful. Kudos for getting your son involved in the hobby, I hope you have great adventures together!
Absolutely brilliant. Once again you have answered all my questions before I could ask. Great job. I look forward to the next one
Glad to help!
Thank you so much for this tutorial. It really helped me to make better terraforming.
Very helpful thank you!
Thank you vey much for your tutorials. Although many things have changed I learned a great deal. Just have one question though, any way to easily implement altitude data to a region, with the help of another software, etc?
Thank you wery much!! excellent tutorial, simple made and clear.
Cool, seems to be easier than I thought! I will use this to fix some river elevation issues at my favorite flying locations. The surroundings of Bella Coola definitely need some fixes, for example. Thanks for the tutorial.
It takes a bit of getting used to but it's quite powerful. Good luck with your project!
Thank you so much. Cheers from Belgium
No problem!
Hi and thank you for these great tutorials they are really helpful! My question is if you know how to make a taxiway bridge or a taxiway that goes over a road since the airport I am making has one of these but I don't know how to make one. Thank you for your help!
Thanks for the video
Glad it was useful!
Thanks for the tutorials, grate work. Every time i am using the tool for teraforming i am having difficulties. It doesnt make the changes in real time. I always have to zoom out and back in to see the changes. Do you think my system is not powerful enough to see the changes in real time? I have nvidia gtx 2080 Intel -I9 processor 64 gb memory
Excellent!👍👍 I had no idea the terraform tool was so versatile. I've been using it to simply raise or lower certain areas using a polygon and lamenting it doesn't do slopes, shapes, etc. BTW how do you deal with the odd terraform bug where it sometimes creates a deep chasm when you only slightly raise or lower the polygon height? Also, is there a way to modify the isolines map to tweak the elevation boundaries? Sorry, such great info here I just had to subscribe! Cheers from Thailand!😁
Thanks, glad you enjoyed the video! Not sure I've encountered that bug before. Things I can suggest are just creating a new polygon and seeing if you get the same error, or maybe increase/decrease the priority to see if that fixes anything. As for modifying the isolines I don't really know what you mean there.
@@Benney I'm surprised you haven't encountered that bug before as it seems to be fairly common. I trigger it fairly often trying to replicate or correct lake beds, ponds, waterways, etc. 😭 It seems to occur more often when lowering the elevation of an area, especially when the fall off distance is short and abrupt. It can either result in a deep chasm or it creates an island in the middle of a Grand Canyon type abyss. Of course, it doesn't happen all the time. I'm guessing it gets confused with the fall off if the polygon is irregular and has several points. Maybe one or more of these points get crossed in the fall off and a rift occurs. Here's an example: kzhead.info/sun/itiboLqtpmejfX0/bejne.html Regarding my 'isolines' map comment, yeah, it's a bit whacky. In X-Plane the terrain is shaped from published global elevation mesh database(s). Wasn't sure if this sim does the same or uses topographical 'isoline' maps to do the same thing. After all, they are a viewing option in the VFR map as well as in the terraform function, that you pointed out in this tutorial. My apparently flawed thinking was, if Asobo uses 'isoline' elevation maps, it would be very cool for us to be able to mod them to create or revise topographical features to suit.
thank you for the video, im trying to make a bush airport, i actually want to keep the terrain how it is and add a runway that just drapes over the default terrain. when I add the airport runway it auto terraforms and messes my water or other terrrain. Do you have any ideas on how to not cause the runway to terraform
I don't think there is a way to not terraform with the runway. Best bet is to add a profile and try to match that with the existing terrain.
Hi thank you for these great tutorials! I've started modding on my home airport because of you :) Question: I cannot get any of the shapes to load properly. I call it something different from my scenery, like I called the first one ENCN-airport and the other ENCN-shapes. Still, everytime I save and load it up, all the scenery is there (runways, taxiways, markings, tower object etc) but the polygons I made are gone. When building package, it says 0 errors, but 1 skipped. I cant from the text in the console figure out why the polygon is skipped (it doesnt say it is the polygon that is skipped but in the end it is the polygon that doesnt make it over to the build). What can I do?
To me it sounds like you're having some issue with your shape file not saving correctly. I'd recommend making a new airport project as a test, follow what I do in the tutorials carefully and see if the same issue arises. You could also check to see if you have the files .shp in your asset directory. It should be ENCN-shapes.shp if that's what you're calling it.
I’m trying to change terrain around and add-on airport CYHZ but it won’t let be change the terrain within the airport boundaries. Got any solutions??
Thanks very much, very useful your tutorial. It's a pity that I can terraform using Polygon but it does not allow to create a profile
Hi, I followed your tutorial for flattening FYWE airport before adding extra hangars and lights. Draw a polygon for terraforming. In the editor it looks correct, but in the sim I found the terrain flat, but with some more holes that were absent before, like something on the ground preventing the terrain to come up. I had to adjust the height of the new "terraforming" as it was too high and default buildings sinked into the terrain. Any options that maybe I missed to check?
I've found terraforming a bit strange in the sim. It doesn't always behave the same in sim vs in the editor. I don't know any tricks to get it working other than trial and error.
@@Benney ok. Thank you 👍
Great video! When I tried my first attempt at making a hill with the rectangle object , it seems to make a depression in the ground instead! I try raising the height arrow for the rectangle object up, but it does not move the hill up. Any idea how to fix this? thanks
Do you have any other terraforming objects that could be overriding the rectangle? E.g. polygon set to flatten, other rectangles or even the runway?
Does this work on terraforming hills that are quite a distance from the airport? Does it save the terraform? Reason I ask is about 20 miles from my local airport is a hill and it's pretty flat and should be raised a fair bit. Thanks for the video!
Yeah it should do. You don't need to create an airport object to place rectangles and polygons if I remember correctly.
ya im late but, i try to make an island in the ocean put when i raise the ground theres always water left on top of the hill. Can you show a tutorial how to create an island?
Hey. Thanks for your video. Great work. Question, i created an airport with buildings of other addons. I see everything correct. But if i share my folder of my own airport with friends, they don't see the airport completely due to the fact that they don't have the other addons installed, were i took my buildings. Is there an easy chance to import these buildings and objects to my own airport folder with SDK. Thanks for an answer 💪
I don't think so. If you use assets from another package the users will need that package too. If you want assets shared between multiple packages you can make a common package and ask users to install that too. Obviously if the assets aren't yours then you don't have the source files so can't do this.
Can you make a tutorial how to make the airport building?
So I've made four attempts to smooth out my runway based on what you showed in this video and just am not having any luck. I can't tell if I'm doing something wrong or if the game is just really really bad at rendering when applying these changes in developer mode. By default the runway after I've defined it using your earlier videos is crazy bumpy, so bad that at takeoff I've actually crashed nose first after hitting one. I'd settle for just smoothing out the entire airport: the surrounding region is pretty flat anyway so it wouldn't be very noticeable. Unfortunately once I draw a polygon around the entire airport I can't figure out how much to move it up to smooth things out. The fancy camera view that shows the contour lines either doesn't refresh or half refreshes. If I try and look at just the normal view I can't tell if anything is getting applied, and then I keep futzing and all of a sudden I see big gashes in the earth :(
The best thing you can do is try and find out the altitude of your airport in meters. Look at charts or other airport information to find this. Then position your terraforming polygon and runway at this elevation using the gizmo panel and everything should be perfectly flat.
@@Benney Thanks for the tip. I can definitely get the elevation in meters from charts. Are the values in the gizmo panel in meters?
@@missamo80 Yeah, all units in the SDK are meters as far as I know (Asobo are French after all)
@@Benney That seemed to help. Sitting in the cockpit the runway still looks undulating, but rolling down it in the plane seems smooth. i.imgur.com/qN4p8kf.png
how do I add just a regular grass strip to match a sloped hill
For the grass strip you can just choose a grass texture for the runway texture, then to match it to the terrain you will have to use the runway profile like I show in this video to match the elevation profile of your hill.
How do you turn ON the Profile Editor window ?
rectangle polygon
Is there a link
Link for what?
Thanks a lot for the great tutorial. I have the following topic which I could not solve yet: The runway of the airport I am modifying has a different elevation on both sides. At terminal side the runway has the same elevation as the airport. At the other end of the runway the elevation is lower. I did the "Terraform" of the runway and added a falloff distance of 2000. Without the falloff the runway creates a valley at the far end. with the falloff the connecting taxiways and the overrun area go uphill till they have the airport elevation again. A polygon could not solve the issue and also with a rectangle I am heavily struggling to slope the whole area towards the end of the runway so that taxiways and terrain match the elevation of the runway in all positions. Maybe I have not understood how the rectangel works in all directions. Any hints? Thanks a lot Added some immages to better explain: ibb.co/3f2Hjq6 ibb.co/pZRpMh1
That's a nice looking airport! If you don't want to flatten the entire airport your best bet is to add a profile to the runway and work around it with smaller polygons as necessary to get the correct terraforming. Currently the terraforming tools are quite fiddly so it might take a lot of trial and error to get right!
@@Benney Thx :-) and thx for the quick reply. It is one of the airports where Bing only has blurry textures and so Asobo did not include the airport. I played a little more with the polygon terraforming after your advice and it is getting better. Still have to get rid of some bumps but as you already wrote: trial and error... ibb.co/XSQm30y ibb.co/nghnznR
Looking much better! That really is one crazy elevation map for an airport haha, thanks for sharing.