Overlaying Terrains/Excluding Landscape Data

[paul.chaney]

Hi there,

 

I'm looking into the best methods for adding airports into a terrain.

 

Ideally, we would like to be able to create large areas of terrain, then add some 3D airport models to the scene.

 

I would like to be able to turn airports on and off and therefore would like to add them without permanently affecting the underlying landscape.

 

I have been able to import the high resolution aerial photography as a decal, but I still have ground surfaces and vegetation from the underlying landscape showing through. Is there a mechanism for excluding sections of the terrain? If so, please could you advise how to achieve this? I'd prefer not to have to turn off entire layers and remodel them. In an ideal world, I would like to be able to define an area (through a mesh?), within which certain landscape features below can be excluded.

 

Looking forward to your reply.

 

Kind regards,

Paul

[silent]

Hi Paul,

 

In this case (if you see trees in airport area) you should configure vegetation masks accordingly (remove these part of mask image where trees should not appear). You can check the Portangeles demo airport area (in separate layer) that can be turned off and on at any time.

 

I'm afraid there is no other tool to control landscape features (especially clusters and clutter) except the masks.

 

Thanks!

[ulf.schroeter]

Just as an addition: for ObjectGrass also FieldSpacer objects can be used for excluding certain areas from grass planting.Nevertheless their number/geometry is limited, so in most cases this functionality is limited to some special situations (e.g. excluding grass from the inside of some house surrounded by a grass area)

[paul.chaney]

Solved.

 

I hadn't realised this, but the mesh mask can be used in conjunction with the image mask to provide an exclusion area for clutter/grasses/cluster objects. Currently it's used in the Washington scenery (for example) with exclusion meshes for the roads. It's quite straightforward to add a plane to cover any additional areas, then export the mesh. If it's saved with the same filename as the original (e.g. exclusion_m.mesh) it will automatically disable all clutter/grasses/cluster that use the same exclusion mesh. It would be nice to have another way to override certain sections of scenery without having to edit the original exclusion meshes, but this is definitely a workable solution.

 

Kind regards,

Paul