Mesh editing

[IslandBoy77]

I was thinking about FSX tweaking again last night - a subject never far from my thoughts! And I was thinking about Napier. With VLC, the area certainly looks a lot more "Napier-ish" than I've ever seen it, which is great. But (and you knew that words was coming, didn't you?), there are still a good number of things in the area that are wrong. The most notable for me is a geographical feature, just barely to the left of the flight path when landing from the South, called "Park Island". Currently, it does not show up, where in reall life it most certainly does! It's not a "huge" feature, but it's big enough, covered in trees (a lot of which are Australian Gums), and is sorely missing from the sim experience.

Where I'm going with all this is this: how hard is it to "edit" the mesh to make this feature visible? Is it something that is do-able by the "uninitiated", or is it basically "rocket science"? I really don't have enough spare time these days to sit down and look into these things in depth, so if it's going to be one of those "bridge too far" deals (and don't get me started on bridges - the FSX ones SUCK: ramps at the ends and extremely un-NZ looking - yuck!), I guess I'll just have to put up with it.

Any thoughts / comments?

Ta.

[creator2003]

There is a tool called SbuilderX that will do this sort of work for you ,pretty easy to pick up and lots of info on how it works all over the place ..freeware

[IslandBoy77]

QUOTE (creator2003 @ Sep 3 2010, 11:04 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

There is a tool called SbuilderX that will do this sort of work for you ,pretty easy to pick up and lots of info on how it works all over the place ..freeware

Thanks. I downloaded that some time ago with the intent of "having a lash" at various editing things - it seems to have a lot of "scope" in what it can do, which makes it (for those of us "looking in" from the "outside") a little difficult to know where to start is learning to use it.

So, for a "noob editor" like myself, with limited time to self-learn the knowledge / skills require to do mesh editing, how difficult would you say sbuilderx is on a scale of 1 - 10, with 1 being "too easy" and 10 being "building a trans-dimensional portal"...
Ta.

[creator2003]

Probably a 3-4 as it does go more into it if you know how ,with land stuff you can draw vector poly shapes into the area you need to work on, then set the height of the poly shape to what you need or think the height is , it will pop outta the ground and slope the sides etc..
One thing this program does well is connects to fs and shows where your aircraft is sitting ,giving you no doubt where you are in the world ,also you can load background images in from a number of mapping ,ie goggle yahoo and some others
just go to view i think and in the drop down is load background or show aircraft position which help navigate etc ..
hope this helps alittle more, if you get into grief ill bail you out with info on how you may do it ..
mike

[IslandBoy77]

Thanks Mike, I really appreciate you taking the time to give me a few pointers. I seriously doubt I'll get time this weekend, but I determine to have a crack, so perhaps next weekend might be the go.

About Google and such - is it illegal to use screen captures of their stuff? I see that the imagery for the immediate Napier area has been updated to July 2009 (at last) and is pretty good res down to 300m viewing distance. I know that ideally one needs geo-tags to get the coordinates right - but is it possible to manually place individual "tiles" of any size using the sbuilderx prog?

I know a bloke at the Hastings District Council who says he might be able to help get me so proper imagery for the Bay area, but I have only had a very preliminary meeting with him at this stage.

[creator2003]

Its is ok to use goggle and the likes for personal scenery projects on your pc ,but redistributing them as scenery is a no go ,its been covered here before about the use etc .i know most of the ozx runways are google but how they get away with it i dont know ,
i have areas that ive covered in imagery that was placed by only using sbuilder it is very possible to do what youve said above ..