About shapes


 

GroundMaker lets you add two different kind of items on the map: shapes and objects. This section describes shapes, how you draw and design them and what you can do with them... A shape is an open or closed figure made out of single points. You will have to create grass, asphalt and concrete surfaces, surrounding vegetation and night light effects to make your airport look 'real'. You make a ground surfaces with a polygon tool. Draw its outline and select the color or texture which you want to see 'inside'. A Texture is a bitmap image that is applied on the polygon's surface in order to give it a photo-realistic look. There are some other shape types available to you. Taxiway centerlines and roads are drawn using the line tool. Set their width, color or texture... Vegetation around the airport (forests) can be made using the tree-line or forest tool. Vegetation, unlike polygons and lines which lie flat on the ground, is three-dimensional and greatly improves the look and realism of your scenery. Of course, you are able to set 3-D objects like planes or buildings. Please see the objects section for more info...

 

First, a look at the available shapes, as they appear in the toolbar

Colored/textured Polygon:
Use to draw all ground surfaces like grass, taxiways, taxiway safety areas, tarmac. Polygons can be made of up to 80 segments: allows for very accurately and smoothly curved surfaces. Textured polygons are recommended.

Texture mapped polygon:
For the advanced user only. Gives you full control on how the texture is applied to the shape. Must be textured, max 4 points.

Line/road:
Use to draw taxiway center-lines and roads. Textured or colored. If you want so, you can enable automatic night lighting for taxiway center-lines.

Dotted lines:
Dotted lines are mainly used for night lighting effects. They simulate taxiway side and centerline lighting. Only colored.

Tree line:
A 2D line is rendered as a thin "wall" with a partially transparent forest texture applied to it in order to simulate surrounding trees. Features seasonal changes (leaves turn orange in Fall, no leaves in the Winter).

Voluminous forests:
They look like tree-lines, except they are closed shapes with a 3-D forest texture on top (in addition to the sides). Great to simulate real-looking forests without much impact on frame-rates. Features seasonal changes too.

 

The following table summarizes all shapes supported by GroundMaker:

 

Type of shape Max points Surface
Polygon - Poly() 80 solid or transparent color (RGB), texture
Polygon - TexPoly() 4 only textured, assign texture coordinate to every polygon point.
Line/Road 80 solid or transparent color (RGB), texture
Dotted line 80 solid color (Palette)
Tree line 80 only textured
Forest 80 only textured, voluminous, only convex
Flatten polygon 9 (invisible)

 

 

Drawing and editing shapes


 

Drawing

You can access any shape type in the toolbar. To draw a new shape, click on the icon of the shape of your choice. The mouse cursor will change to crosshairs. Move the cursor over the drawing area and left-click where you want to set the first shape point. Release the left mouse button and move the cursor to the next point's location and left-click again. Repeat the last step until your shape is done. To set the last point, double-click. The shape's settings dialog will be shown. Click here to learn more about shape settings...

 

Selection modes

There are three selection modes available for shapes: Selected, Edit points and Drag. When a shape has been drawn, it is automatically select into Selected mode. When in Selected mode, you can access its property dialog (SELECTION | PROPERTIES... menu item, or double-click on the map), copy, scale, rotate, save and delete it. To change to the other selection modes, either use the menu (SELECTION) or use the following hot keys: CTRL+S or ENTER(Selected), CTRL+E (Edit points) and CTRL+D (Drag). Using the hot keys is more convenient since you don't need to access the menu every time. The selection menu item can be easily accessed when left-clicking a shape's handle. Click here to learn more about selecting...

 

Editing a shape

To edit a shape's single points, select the shape of your choice (and only one) and go into Edit points mode. You will notice that every point is outlined by a handle. These point handles act like shapes/objects when selecting. Left click to select a single point, SHIFT + left-click + drag to select more than one. Selected points have filled handles. If you click on one of the filled handles and move the mouse, all selected points will be dragged. Selected points can be deleted (DELETE key). Press ENTER to go back into Selected mode.

To drag one or more shapes, go into drag mode. Left-click and drag on one of the selected handles to move the selection. Press ENTER to go back into Selected mode.

To add a point to a shape, press the Ins (Insert) key. A new point will be added right after the selection.

 

Note: all shapes are drawn with an accuracy of 0.5 meters (1 1/2' ). FS cannot handle decimal values (3.7, 55.678, -96.234333, ...) directly. It makes use of a scaling system. A scale determines the size of one *.bgl unit (scenery format). A scale of 2, for example,   would make one *bgl unit 2 meters large. That means a shape would be reproduced with an accuracy of 2 meters. In GroundMaker you can set the scale to be used for all polygons, all shapes and all dotted lines. The largest available scale is 1 ( 1 meter accuracy). Selecting a scale bigger than 0.5 may lead to badly slightly distorted shapes. It is highly recommended to use 0.5 as the scale to obtain the best results in FS. You can set the scales in the FILE | PROJECT SETTINGS... menu item.