SCENERY

// INTRODUCTION

Scenery development is a great way to get into X-Plane add-on development! Build amazing airports or cities. Use X-Plane's World Editor, to build a global airport and contribute to the database, or go full-on with customisation with your own objects and textures.

//SOFTWARE AND APPS

[THIS SECTION WAS EDITED AND EXTRACTED FROM MARGINAL IN X-PLANE.ORG]

Add-on scenery packages live in folders within the X-Plane/Custom Scenery folder.

Start by making a new scenery package folder within the X-Plane/Custom Scenery folder - either in Explorer/Finder or using the "New scenery package" button in OverlayEditor or WED (for which see below).

• To edit airport runways, taxiways, aprons, and associated lights, markings and signs: use WorldEditor (WED). The WED manual is here.
• To place objects (eg buildings, static planes etc), facades, forests, draped polygons (eg grass) and orthophoto polygons (ie photoscenery) on top of the terrain: use OverlayEditor or WED. Help is available in OverlayEditor by pressing the Help button.
• To place or edit roads, railways and powerlines: For X-Plane v10 use OverlayEditor; a mini tutorial on editing roads is here. For X-Plane v9 no interactive tools are available, but you can use XPOSM to generate roads/railways/powerlines from real-world OpenStreetMap data.
• You can use the X-Reloaded plugin to tell X-Plane to re-load your scenery package after you have made changes to it.
• X-Plane comes with a libraries of objects, facades, forests and draped polygons that you can use. Additional objects, facades and forests are available if your install the OpenSceneryX Object Library and/or other 3rd-party libraries into your copy of X-Plane. Note that any user of your scenery package will also need to have these libraries installed.
• There's a whole bunch of objects available for in the Downloads area of this site. Typically you should put these objects inside the scenery package folder that uses them - but read the instructions (if any) with each download.
• To create your own objects: use AC3D with the X-Plane plugin, or Blender with the X-Plane scripts, or SketchUp (Free or Pro) with the X-Plane plugin, or 3ds Max with the X-Plane plugin. You'll have to purchase AC3D or 3ds Max, but Blender and SketchUp are free. Alternatively you can use any 3D modelling application that can save in 3DS or DXF format and convert to X-Plane OBJv8 format using ObjConverter, but you won't be able to use animation or X-Plane-specific features and some data may be lost in the conversion. See the 3D Modeling forum for tips.
• To create your own facades, forests, draped polygons or orthophoto polygons: These are simple text files created by hand. The file formats: Facade, Forest & Polygon. Search in this forum for tips, and look at the files under X-Plane/Resources/... for examples.
• To create photoscenery: use PhotoSceneryX.
• To replace X-Plane's "autogen" scenery: Use osm2xp to generate new buildings from real-world OpenStreetMap data.
• To edit the terrain mesh: No interactive tools are available. Use Meshtool to generate terrain mesh from DEM data.
• To share your scenery: use X-Publish to create an archive and upload it to this site's Download Manager.

Strictly speaking, you don't need to use any of the above tools; all the file formats are text-based so if you really want to you can create them by hand in a text editor. However some files (eg objects and terrain mesh) are sufficiently complicated that you're unlikely to get them right by hand. The file formats: airports/navaids and everything else.