Resolved: Gaps Between Aligned Objects

General discussion about Scenery Design. Questions about SBuilder for Flight Simulator FS2004.
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Mick
Posts: 59
Joined: Fri Oct 05, 2007 7:42 pm
Location: Germany

Resolved: Gaps Between Aligned Objects

Post by Mick » Wed Apr 30, 2008 9:03 am

Dear all [:)],

I'm beginning to create a little city scenery, which has many of the same buildings. My question is about the best way to handle details in SB, and I would really appreciate some experienced advice. Here's a first screenshot:

[img]uploaded/mick/200843014754_Siedlung.jpg[/img]

I designed one copyable building object with gmax, assuming that this would be preferable to using different objects regarding the frame rate [?]. Then I placed, copied/pasted and aligned in the highest zoom level in SB2.06 like mad... (more than 80 objects by now) [B)]

- As you can see in the screen, there are still gaps in the rows at the buildings edges. How can I avoid this? Should I rather overlap the objects than trying to align them exactly? There's no further revision of SB [;)] with a line tool yet, rignt?
- The buildings seem to have slight differences in altitude, which might be due to the default altitude(s) of the area. Is there any way in SB to level them without flattening the whole quarter? Anyway, flattening works to make the gaps disappear at least.
- Somewhere I read ... and can't find it anymore ... that I could bulk change polygon (object?) properties in SB with any combination of SHIFT / CTRL / CLICK. I tried different methods for a while now, but only get to the properties of one single poly (or object). Could anyone let me know the exact way again?

Thank you very much for some hints,
Mick

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Luis Sa
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Joined: Sun May 18, 2003 11:17 am
Location: Portugal
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Post by Luis Sa » Wed Apr 30, 2008 2:53 pm

Hello Mick,

I will be away for a week and this is a short answer to your problem:

1) altitude: instead of using a flat (but why not use a flat if the buildings have the same height?) you can use the AGL flag in the Objects Properties and set the altitude. In this way you can make the building float our you burry (spelling?) it.

2) gaps: that means that the footprint that you assigned to the object is not exactley the real footprint. If you search my forum with the words BRIDGE VASCO DA GAMA you will see how I have aligned a number of bridge sections to make the 10 km long bridge Vasco da Gama in Lisbon. The thread has pictures explaining some tips that you can use.

Kind Regards,

Luis

Mick
Posts: 59
Joined: Fri Oct 05, 2007 7:42 pm
Location: Germany

Post by Mick » Wed Apr 30, 2008 5:41 pm

Thank you for them moment, Luis - I'll go on studying and maybe someone else knows the bulk-change-trick.

I wish you a very very happy vacation [8D] (hope you're away for that [:D])

Kind regards
Mick

Mick
Posts: 59
Joined: Fri Oct 05, 2007 7:42 pm
Location: Germany

Post by Mick » Thu May 08, 2008 10:31 am

Hi Luis,

hope your vacation was beautiful and as I see now I can access the usual forum again... although the possibility to edit all the other peoples entries [8D] has gone away [;)]

After your brief message last week I went on examining my objects and found two different reasons for the gaps - both don't have to do with SBuilder! The first was that I hadn't properly set my objects to zero x/y/z values before making the mdls in gmax, and therefore got a shifted footprint. The second was a probable bug in Arnos "Library Maker XML" which additionally seems to export wrong footprint data into the SBuilder "*.txt" (Arno is away so I don't have response on that by now).

Resolution: After exporting from gmax with properly set X/Y/Z values, I manually edited the footprint data in the (libraryname).txt that Arnos program wrote for SBuilder... AND THERE WE GO: No more gaps and exactly fitting blocks of houses! [:D]

Thank you for the hint!

Have a nice day
Mick

Mick
Posts: 59
Joined: Fri Oct 05, 2007 7:42 pm
Location: Germany

Post by Mick » Thu May 08, 2008 10:36 am

Luis, I just found that I can still edit other people's posts but not my own last one (the edit icon always leads to the top entry). Maybe that's worth checking...

Regards again
Mick

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