Chapter 4: Terrain Objects

The Role of Non-Airplane Objects in a Flight Simulator

Just because you are developing a flight sim, doesn't mean that you will only be modeling airplanes. Even the most realistic airplane models can't stay in the air forever. They need airfields and/or aircraft carriers to land on. And who wants to fly over a barren landscape all day long? A richly populated world can add a great deal of immersion to even the most pure flight sim. Terrain objects can be just about anything that doesn't fly: control towers, hangars, support buildings, bridges, trains, trucks, cargo vessels, naval ships, submarines, trees, hedges... you name it, you can build it and put it into your Targetware flight simulator.

Terrain Objects in General

The process of building, texturing, and animating terrain objects is largely identical to that of building an airplane. Obviously, you won't be building control positions (cockpits, bombadier stations) unless you are going to make your object 'flyable', so you all you need is an external model. Of course, you'll still want to use good fundamental modeling techniques whenever possible: no shared edges without shared vertexes, accurate 1:1 scale, etc.

For some terrain objects, the external model might be a single 3D mesh. For others, it might be made up of several components, just as the airplanes are. For example, an anti-aircraft gun might be composed of the following parts: a base (fixed), the gun mount (swivels), the barrel assembly (swivels and elevates), one or more gunners, and a surrounding revetment. An aircraft carrier or battleship might consists of a large hull, and many animated guns. But a fuel tank that has no moving parts could easily be done as a single object.