xDraconian wrote in Mon Mar 16, 2020 11:12 pm:I would like to get some automation working for a single building - such as a terminal building. That would be a quick way to make a base mesh to work from and I would not expect that to be too difficult.
FWIW, a couple of years ago a few contributors used dTPPs (digital terminal procedures) charts to extract vector information to generate airport/terminal buildings in a semi-automated way. This was back in the DAFIF times, so such data would have been in the public domain anyway (in the US at least).
Back then, the tool was called "svg2ac", beause the vector graphics in the PDF would be extracted, turned into SVG, which was then used to create AC files.
Original thread to be found here:
https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/ma ... patico.ca/https://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear ... 01581.htmlAmpere wrote:Tiago and I have been working on a svg to ac converter to create airports
from pdf files.
Most of it is done, however we still have 2 problems, the first is that the
code can't at the moment produce the accurate location of the origin
(lat/long) and the second is that most of the polygons making the buildings
are non convex, thus the ugly result in the following screenshot.
Also svg2ac automatically fetches the altitude of the buildings from a
running FG via telnet.
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Dynamic_Airport_Generation Obviously, all the screen shots have disappeared since then - and that probably applies to the code, too.
Nevertheless, some of the talks/ideas may still be interesting today, e.g.:
Well we have an SVG parser that reads the input svg file and extract
the polygons for the keywords buildings, runways taxiways. The
vertices are then stored and duplicated to create the roof. The side
polygons are computed by duplicating again 2 consecutive nodes that
form an edge.
The altitude is fetched from a running session of FlightGear via telnet for the location of the center of each building.
All the coordinates are then converted to meters using the 4 Lat/Long
lines present in the SVG file and then the Lat/Long coordinates of the
origin is obtained, this is needed in the .stg file.