Facade-Scrapers

These four buildings are facade-scrapers, a new feature in X-Plane 10.

X-Plane 8 and 9 support facades.  A facade is a building definition that is extruded to an arbitrary shape and height specified in a DSF.  Facades allow us to build custom-shaped buildings that fit a precise footprint.  The walls are created by cutting and repeating a grid texture of windows.

With a facade-scraper, two objects are placed in the center of the facade to form a tower.  The facade base itself can exactly fit a city block, while the OBJ pair gives us a tower with architectural detail.

This is a wire-frame view; the facade itself is wire frame, and the ground is wire-frame, revealing the two objects.  The base of the facade sits on the ground, but the tower can move up and down, with excess underground.  This allows us to customize the height of the building to precisely meet the DSF height.

(This facade is a test case that I built out of Alex’s Chrysler building; the UV mapping on the base is pretty rough since I was just creating test files.)

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

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