New KBHM Airport Project

Hi all,
I’m not sure if any of you remember, but it’s been a while back. I wanted to get back on my project that I tried to work on about 2 years ago, which was the Birmingham Shuttlesworth International Airport, or KBHM. In 2010 or 2011, a new construction for a new terminal took place and was completed in 2013. As I said, I’ve tried working on this project but kept running into problems, and there’re some things I did not do that I think contributed to the issues I had. I’m not going to use the same Sketchup files I used at the time but I’m going to start a new fresh one.

Before getting started, I have a few questions about how I should go about creating this model.

  1. Should I use Components or Groups when designing this terminal? I was thinking that it would be best to use Groups because if I should need to reposition a particular terminal for some reason, I would be able to do so. If I can only get the exact dimensions from the contractors, it would make things a lot easier. But I’m not sure who to contact, or if they would even allow me to have access to them. I also need to know the exact dimensions of the windows.

  2. When I first begin the project and place the Axes as my reference, should I leave it there for the entire project or should I move it to the next terminal I work on? Also, some of these terminal buildings have unique angles.

  3. Or should I just start my project and keep everything together as one Component or Group?

  4. Below is a satellite view of the new airport terminal. What’s so challenging about this terminal is that it has acute angles. There NOT at 90 degrees. In one area, it seems to form a triangle which I’m not sure how to do in Sketchup. Of course, I know I can just draw lines by following round the edges of the terminal, but this is something that requires accuracy in order for the windows to be textured in. If the angle is wrong, this will make the length of the outside edge wrong as well, and that affects the size of the windows how many will fit, and having their proportions correct. Could someone with construction knowledge as well as using that in Sketchup give me some assistance and what tools to use, and if they should be grouped, such as, terminal C being grouped from the round section.

The thing I don’t like about using the Geo-Location - Add Location is that the image is way too blurry, and is not sharp enough nor show good detail. I tried importing a j-peg satellite image that I made using the Print Screen on my keyboard but it I get an error message saying “Image File Invalid.” It was a much sharper image than using the Get Geo Location - Add Location in Sketchup. The satellite image is in good detail but once I get the location into Sketchup, the image is lost a lot of its detail. Is there something I can do about that?

Ken.

Yes, it is always useful to use them.
Good organization skills go far in modeling.

Because north angle (for shadows) is based on global axes, you don’t really want to move the model to the axes. Moving the axes is better idea since you can always reset it to the default (starting point). As differet terminals would have different logical axes, you can assign different axes in the components or groups.

Every case would be different. but you would need at lease several groups and components. To me, the most logical thing to do would be to have different blocks/buildings/terminal in different groups.

There isn’t really a fency tool for this purpose. A good use of all native tools in SketchUp will get you there.

There is a limit on how much pixels your image can show in SketchUp.

As SketchUp versions up it seems like the value changes. So I actually don’t really know the actual value now. But if you check “Use maximum texture size” in Preferences/OpenGL, you should get more pixels visible granted your original image contains that information.

The skp file itself forms one complete component, and will import into other models as such.

Hi,
I did finally finish my KBHM project a few months ago and have it installed in FSX. But there’s still some problems with it that I don’t like. Below are 2 screenshots of the rounded area of the terminal:

I hope I’m close enough to the terminal, but if you look carefully at the 1st photo, the edges have no detail whatsoever. In the 2nd photo, where you’re looking down onto the roof, top of the terminal, there’s no detail at all. But in Sketchup, there was good detail but after it converted in mcx, it’s nothing like it looked in Sketchup. Even the colors are not correct. The textures don’t even look bright and clear as do some other airport sceneries made by fsdt or aerosoft. Why is this?

Ken.

Hi
I don’t know if I’m in the correct forum or not, because this forum looks totally different from what it use to. Are you still in this forum? I wanted you to look at my KBHM Terminal that I completed several months ago, but I’m not satisfied as to the way it looks, and it doesn’t give good details on the edges and everything seems to blend together without any detail. Do you know why it does this?

Ken.

This is the right place.

Yes, the old forum was a Google Group. But this newer forum has been running for at least 3 years.

Who is YOU ?

You would need to post it’s 3D Warehouse link, so others could look at the model.

I suspect it’s style settings, but then FSX (MS Flight Simulator v10) may render models differently than SketchUp.