Condor

Hi everybody,
I wrote a booklet in PDF in French my mother language, fully illustrated (12.5 Mo), to build airports for Condor 2, with Wings 3D. The explanations of the illustrations are already bilingual French, English.
The English version is now available, and translation to any other languages is allowed.
Use this Topic if you need more detailed explanations.
Nothing is perfect in the real world.
Send me a PM, and I will give you a link to my cloud. The download could be limited to my monthly traffic.

I can put it on the website if you want X..

Hi Chris,

If this text seems for you in the spirit of Condor Team, you can put it on the Condor Web Site

The translation is done in English, and is under correction. But English is not my mother Language. If you want to have a look, I can send you the last draft in Word (40 Mo) or Pdf (12.5 Mo).

Merci Xavier...

Very Sorry, but the English version is still under correction.

Here are 2 pages from the draft:

How to create the "Grass Object" using "Boolean difference":



And How to use "Muck" for markings on the airports elements:




My two pence

News from the English version:








In this booklet, we have covered all the main basic techniques for creating an airport in Condor 2.
Your creativity and imagination, starting from these techniques, will allow you to go even further in
improving the visual rendering of airports in Condor 2.

The English version is now available.

Translation to any other languages is allowed.

Use this Topic if you need more detailed explanations.

Send me a PM, and I will give you a link to my cloud to access to the English and the French Version. The download could be limited to my monthly traffic.

These guides are now hosted on our website in the downloads section.

I had some trouble with the boolean subtract operation (even after creating boolean difference). To get a clean cut without wastage or many more connecting lines being formed it was necessary to connect the corresponding vertices on each side of the main extruded (thickened) object.

I drew all the cut lines onto a flat polygonal leaving the lines connecting the areas to be cutout to the outline (these can be left 'soft' and do not show in Condor), extruded the surface for thickness, THEN went through and connected all the corresponding vertices on the top and bottom surfaces - thus creating internal walls that would form the sidewalls of the cutout areas. Lastly I extracted the surface to be cutout, made a copy of that to keep and then extruded it for thickness and dropped it into the main object for subtraction.

This created a clean cutout with no extra lines being formed.

An excellent guide publication - thank you Xavier. It has helped my airport creation tremendously.

Just to add to my previous post (I know Xavier et al probably already know this but for the benefit of those who may read this later I thought I should clarify what I was saying). I recently started on this behemoth of a runway.
I created a block form of the basic runway shapes out of a flat cube with all of the basic cutouts made ready for boolean. I left all the radii (curves) out of the picture for now and kept it completely straight and as simple as possible. The important part is that you MUST select the lines to be cut by dragging a selection from outside the object then deselecting those you don't want. What this does is select right through the object selecting lines on the top face AND bottom face. If you just point to the lines it will only select those on the upper face. You want to create an identical image both top and underneath.
Once you have finished the basic line construction, extrude the top faces y upwards. Then go through all the vertices inside the shape and, pair by pair, connect all of the top face vertices to their corresponding vertices underneath (this is the reason I kept the shape as simple as possible - you dont want to have a million vertices from a bunch of complex curves to connect - it easy to add the curves once you have subtracted the unwanted faces (holes) through boolean difference then boolean subtract). Use right click>'connect' as simply pressing 'C' won't work. Being thorough like this avoids any unwanted complicated geometry being created that can't necessarily simply be cleaned up. "Clean up" will often delete things you need to keep.

HAHA!
So after writing all that about connecting top and bottom vertices I managed to cutout the runway without doing it. Boolean difference is supposed to do this for you.

It IS however essential to create a mirror image top and bottom so definitely select by dragging in from outside the object both for interior lines and vertices (ones on the edge dont matter as they are 'clamped' together - although there are actually two vertices there - it's true)

What IS important is to not leave any hanging spaces within the shape. You will know if you have left these when you extrude the runway as there will be bits 'left behind' or voids that should not be there. For example I had to join the vertices as per red outline to get a solid extrusion. And yes DO extrude the runway, don't leave it flat, if you do you will still get vertical faces that get added during the subtraction process which may be impossible to remove.

The boolean operations were performed one block at a time - using 'boolean difference' and then 'boolean subtract'. I tried doing them all at once but it made a mess so played it safe rather.

The last step is to collapse all the vertical lines. You cant extract the runway faces as this simply fills in all the holes again.

.......Aaaaand even then weird stuff happens!

Luckily in this case simply deleting the two vertices that refused to collapse worked - thank goodness. Maybe joining the opposing vertices by hand is a good idea after all? See what you can get away with.

This is the runway mapped to the actual aerial photography image (lightened somewhat - still comes out dark) using the muck file for shading. Quick and dirty! I wont use it as the runways are not straight in the image but it does open up the possibility of not constructing a runway at all but simply having one big rectangle that covers the runway mapped to a similar muck file but with the parts you don't want asphalt blacked out in the alpha channel (asphalt won't display there). If you use a pen and clipping path to create the selection for the alpha you could get all the curves really neat, smooth and round. It would require quite a big muck image of at least 4096x and of course you want an image where the runway is actually straight! . A possibility for really quick rendering of photoreal runways.

Ok sorry HAD to post (boast? ) the result. A long haul to get it all done but came out pretty awesome looking. Still got work to do scrubbing the ground texture and some buildings to make but getting there nicely.