Coastline design - better approach?

This is the Forum to discuss the use of SBuilderX (version 3.10 and above). For previous versions of SBuilder please use the "SBuilder for Flight Simulator FS2004" forum.
Post Reply
User avatar
roger-wilco-66
Posts: 92
Joined: Wed Apr 14, 2010 1:56 pm

Coastline design - better approach?

Post by roger-wilco-66 » Fri Apr 16, 2010 8:32 am

Hi everybody,

first of all, I want to thank Luis for all the work he put into SBuilderX, I really like it and the more I use it the more I am in awe of its capabilities.
Right now I redesign the the Solomon islands with it and "regress" them and their airfields to what they looked like towards the end of 1943. I tried to do it with other tools, too, but I always came back to SBuilderX.
So, I would say 90% of my workload is the redesign of the coastlines and adding all these little islands and reefs to the scenery. This is a very labourios and boring job and I was pondering about it a little and came up with a few "what if" ideas.

1. Tracing the coastline once by hand is ok, but I think doing it a second time for the shoreline (or even a third time for some other polygons) is too much and prone for errors. What if there would be a function that does the following:
- the designer captures part of the edge of the water-polygon with a mouse selection and SBX builds a vectorline out of that on the same location.
- Then the designer can define its properties (e.g. direction, size and type).

2. It also would help if a vectorline or polygon could be "broken up". I mean, take a line and split it at a certain vertex in two. Then you could build a continous shoreline with above simplified method and fine tune it afterwards.
Also, sometimes you notice that the shoreline type changes and you have to start all over again.

3. I like the way you can trace lines/paths in GoogleEarth. Here the vertices are set automatically, you don't need to click the heck out of your mouse. It would be nice if SBX had a function like that - maybe controllable, where you can control the distance between the vertices. Maybe even with a "smooth" function that takes out unneeded vertices afterwards (that don't affect the shape of the line inside certain boundaries).

4. What if you could make a selection of vertices of a shape or line and plainly copy and paste them, without their properties (set to "none")? See point 1.

5. It would be great if KML / KMZ files could be imported into SBX. That also would open a lot of possibilities of new methods!


I'm just pondering away... but this would really help designing these coastlines. I put two attachments of my work to this post.

Cheers,
Mark
Attachments
sbx-segi.jpeg
fsx-segi.jpeg
Development of historical sceneries for FSX and Lockheed Martin Prepar3D Simulators

My scenery development galleries:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/x0skkam7xu8zz8r/DFwnonB1nH

User avatar
luisfeliztirado
Posts: 436
Joined: Sun May 15, 2005 9:15 am
Location: Santo Domingo

Re: Coastline design - better approach?

Post by luisfeliztirado » Fri Apr 16, 2010 11:50 am

Hello Mark,

It looks like a very nice project. Congratulations.

Perhaps you would take a look at the SBuilderX Help file - you can access it from the... Help menu! SBuilderX already does everything you mentioned and it is all documented and explained in the Help file.

The only exception is importing KML files, but SBuilderX can append shapefiles and there are numerous tools to convert KML to shapefiles - just Google to find them.

Best regards.
Luis

JoeW
Posts: 42
Joined: Sat Mar 12, 2005 2:05 am
Location: USA

Re: Coastline design - better approach?

Post by JoeW » Fri Apr 16, 2010 11:21 pm

Hi Mark ... I followed you over here from FSDeveloper. As I said, I have been doing coastlines in GE and the good thing about that is you can copy a poly and paste it and it goes in at the top, if you make a folder and have all the KML polys in that. After a copy you can alter the properties as needed with a rename and a new tag. This works really well. I can't remember if you can rename a poly after you copy it in SBX or not. This alone is worth that change. With all the polys in one folder you can save the folder and compile into one file.
Thanks
Joe W

User avatar
roger-wilco-66
Posts: 92
Joined: Wed Apr 14, 2010 1:56 pm

Re: Coastline design - better approach?

Post by roger-wilco-66 » Sat Apr 17, 2010 11:32 pm

Hi,

first of all, Luis, please accept my apologies, because it is apparent that I didn't read the manual thoroughly.

Well, when I did so I found a revolutionary (for my work 8) ) approach to costline design that literally saves me half the time, by completly omitting the task of retracing a coast for the second time to build the shoreline. And the best thing is I stay in SBX and don't need another application. For the record, here's what I do to create a coastline now:


1. Trace the coastline by creating a water polygon

2. Change view. Deselect the everything except polygons.

3. Go into polygon mode and mark the formerly created one, right click and select "make line"

4. Go into line mode.

5. Change view. Select line view and deselect polygon view.

6. Now you see the newly created line. Mark all vertices that are not needed (from the old polygon) and delete them, so that only the coastline remains.

7. Mark the new coastline and change the properties according to your needs.

8. DONE! I love it!

Now you have an exact coastline, 1:1 to the water poly of the first step. No errors or discrepancies.
I never thought about using "make line" for this because it suggests that it makes a line out of your polygon and heck, no, I don't want to do that. I think that option should read "copy to line", because this is what it does.

@ Joe: I still will try to work with your appoach on the next larger island. There are lots of them down there :-).


@ Luis:
I wrote that I think that the Google Earth method of drawing a vectorline is great and you said that SBuilderX can do that too (thats how I understood it, because you did not mention it as a no-no). Have I missed something here? Can you draw a line and SBX sets the vertices automatically?

Thanks
Mark
Development of historical sceneries for FSX and Lockheed Martin Prepar3D Simulators

My scenery development galleries:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/x0skkam7xu8zz8r/DFwnonB1nH

Post Reply