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Quick Start

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32kda edited this page May 5, 2020 · 10 revisions
  1. Edit/ elaborate area of interest on OSM site - they have a pretty good online editor, very convenient for editing lines and polygons
  2. Download the OSM data file of an interesting area. At this moment (06.2019) bbbike.org is a good choice to do this, follow instructions on their site
  3. Launch OSM2XP, choose X-Plane 10 mode using toolbar "Modes" action. On "Scenery" tab in "Scene file" field choose your OSM PBF file using "Browse" button or just paste a path to it. Edit "Scene name" field to change resulting scenery folder name if you want step 2
  4. If necessary, go to "Buildings" tab and in "Facade sets" section configure used facade sets by selecting either facade set folder or facade set descriptor file. One facade set is provided by default with OSM2XP as an example, but it was composed by me from Alex Krug's work, some other open stuff from the Internet, and some my facades created using Blender, and, of course, it would not suit for any area on Earth). If you want to edit facade set and/or preview its facades, use toolbar action Tools > Facade Set Editor or just select facade set on "Buildings" tab and double-click it or choose "edit" action to the right of facade sets list You can read more about Facade Set Editor here step 3
  5. If necessary, go to Advanced Options tab and under Generated Items section choose item kinds which will be generated step 4
  6. Click "Build" on the toolbar (hammer icon). Generation process will start step 5
  7. After generation finishes, you can go to the folder, in which the original PBF file was located. You would see generated scenery folder there

Installation of the generated scenery

If your input name is e.g. my_city.pbf, you'll get a folder named my_city containing generated scenery near your original pbf file. You'll need to copy that folder into the Custom Scenery subfolder of your X-Plane installation folder. In the scenery_packs.ini file it should be placed "above" all base meshes, but "below" all custom airport scenarios. Read more here

Airfields installation

If you've chosen to generate Airfields (read more here):

  • If input PBF contains only one airfield, nothing more needs to be done - apt.dat for this airfield will be placed inside my_city scenery folder
  • If input PBF contains two or more airfields - a folder named my_city_airfields will be created near your input my_city.pbf, containing several subfolders named like osm2xp_[Airfield_ICAO] or osm2xp_[Airfield_name]. You'll need to select folders for the airfields you want to install and copy them under the Custom Scenery subfolder of your X-Plane installation folder.

Generated scenery should be copied into "Custom Scenery" folder of X-Plane installation.

Of course, the generator can't extract and use more data, than the OSM map contains, and e.g. choose color of a house.
Roads, railways, powerlines, fence are just lines on a map, and generation can't guarantee that they wouldn't overlap, will contain gates where needed, etc. After all - it's a generation, please don't expect too much from it.

Further reading

OSM2XP Directory structure - take a look if you want to know, where OSM2XP stores default facades, 3D object models, forest definitions etc.

Using Facade Set Editor

Generating airfields

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