Howto:Make an airport

From FlightGear wiki
Revision as of 22:35, 28 April 2014 by Bigstones (talk | contribs) (→‎A note about licenses: OSM is a compatible, good source of data)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

This article will guide you through the process of creating an airport and link you to related articles.

A note about licenses

Official FlightGear scenery is, as the rest of the program and data, licensed under the GNU General Public License v2. In order to have your work included in the official scenery, it must comply with this license.

In short this means that you can only use images that:

  • you created yourself, entirely from scratch. This is the case when you draw something, or take a photograph of a building.
  • you received permission for to release under the GNU GPL v2.
  • are licensed under a GNU GPL v2 compatible license (eg. Public Domain).

Google Earth imagery is per definition not compatible. For the USA you can download the High Resolution Orthoimagery jpeg from http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/ and use that to trace airports or buildings. For other countries, you might use OpenStreetMap data if available. Note that OpenStreetMap has been granted the right to trace over Yahoo and Bing aerial images, so it can get quite accurate. Consider learning how to map airports in OSM.

Alternatively you can estimate the lengths and widths of the buildings by looking at pictures.

Runways, taxiways and aprons

What you need

Ubuntu users, can use the script in Ubuntu fg tools.

Airport layout

The very first step before creating a new airport layout is to check if the airport already exists in the airport database. Latest data is available at http://data.x-plane.com/get_data.html If we find our airport there, we can improve it, if not, we start a new layout. This is all done in WorldEditor.

So if we have done the airport in WED, we save it as "ICAO.dat" (replacing ICAO with the ICAO code of your airport). That's the X-Plane fileformat, which is used by FlightGear too.

Turning the airport into FlightGear scenery

There are three possibilities, the later two require TerraGear, but have the advantage that you can view the result immediately:

Share your layout with the world!

Don't forget to send your new "airport.dat" to Robin, so we all will benefit from, with the next scenery release!

Terminals, towers and hangars

What you need

  • 3D modeling software, like Blender or SketchUp, as long as it can export to the .ac file type.
  • Lots of pictures of the buildings at the airport.

Making a 3D model

One meter in FlightGear is one meter in the real world. If you use aerial or satellite imagery to measure out the buildings you'll be fine.

Placing objects

1rightarrow.png See Howto:Add details to your airport for the main article about this subject.

You can either place the model manually using the UFO, or if you are developing an actual building, it's usually good to get the co-ordinates of one of the corners of the building so you can place it extremely accurately. You also need the elevation and the rotation of the model, but those are easy to estimate.

Share your models with the world!

after finishing a building, send your model to the scenery database, as that is the best way for them to be distributed. Everyone who downloads the airport from then on will be able to see your building!

Related content