Now that we have a helicopter to work with, I am trying to make my local hospital a heliport. The issue I’m running into is that you can only place parking stalls at ground level. I am trying to place on on top of a building. Is there any way to do this currently?
You might put up an appeal at flightsim.to as well.
I bought the Okavango Delta scenery pack the other day, from Sim Works Studios, and many of the camps included have elevated helipads. That said, I have not tried landing on them, so I don’t know whether they are merely cosmetic or fully solid objects.
Having just built a helibase, I have a few pointers…
#1. There MUST be a runway. It can be tiny and hidden but it must exist. If you only have parking spots, the “airport” will not appear on the World Map.
#2. IFAIK all runways, taxiway points, and parking spots can be above ground level. Just turn off “snap to ground” and move the thing vertically with the gizmo.
So, what I’d do is create a very short, narrow, transparent, non-ground-snapping runway with only 1 spawn point. Move this up to the building roof line and cover it up (if needed) with one of the “helispot” objects which are only graphics, they don’t have spawn points.
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Hello, I’m currently facing the same issue now. My problem is that the transparent runway always terraform the terrain around it with no way to disable that… you mention about “non-ground-snapping runway” how did you go about to create that?
You can’t have a runway that isn’t rooted to official terrain. If you want to raise the runway then the terrain has to follow it.
Setting the falloff number decides how the runway effects the surrounding terrain.
The lower the number the less smooth the terraforming will be, so in theory a runway with a falloff number of 1 will have completely sheer sides. 1000 and it will be a smooth hump that goes a long way.
In reality this isn’t the case. Every area seems to have terrain that responds differently. Sometimes you can manage it, other times the runway will distort badly at low numbers.
In photogrammetry areas it often falls apart completely.
What is possible is for the runway to be a metre or two below a separate hard surface and the helicopter will sit on the separate surface.
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That I didn’t know. Thanks for the info.
So as of yet there is no way to have an above-ground spawn for an airport?
You can have air between the runway and a solidified spawning point but only a small number of metres. Once you go above that it’ll favour the runway surface and ignore the other one, but I haven’t tried large heights.
So that’s an effective no as far as I can tell.
From my testing so far, it seems to do it based upon the height of the aircraft. My helipad is about 50 meters AGL and therefore the helicopter does not hesitate to spawn below it.
Do you think that placing a large, invisible collision object beneath the helipad would force it upwards?
Worth a try but I doubt it.
It’s the spawning that’s the problem.
The sim will acknowledge where the runway is placed and only want to start you there. It won’t ‘see’ any of your modifications when flight planning. If it’s a metre or two between your terrain and theirs it seems to be OK.
I guess you could try placing a parking space instead and put the runway somewhere else, but that might ignore your height too.
Is there a step by step instruction out there for a hood on how to build a heliport?
*noob (dang spellcheck)
It’s covered in this - A Guide to MSFS Scenery Creation » Microsoft Flight Simulator
I need to update it for the new SDK changes which I’ll do in the next 2-3 days hopefully.
It also includes the project files for a heliport so you can open that up and take a look.
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I have the same problem, even tho you put the parking spot on the roof, the darned helicopter starts at ground level.
not the helo’s fault. Things will come along in time.
As I can read in your tutorial, it’s fced up and requires a lot of practicing and good 3d models for hiding the actual runway
If you want to a runway or parking space on an existing building then yes.
If it’s an autogen building or one of Asobo’s models most of them have a collision box that extends beyond the visible appearance, that’s why the helicopter bounces in the example project in those locations.
Photogrammtery buildings are more dependable, but terraforming in photogrammetry areas is very glitchy and I’m not sure a runway would work, or whether the sim recognises a photogrammetry surface as terrain.
If it does you could place a parking space on top of a photogrammetry building and not worry about runway terraforming. I haven’t investigated that but I should.
But your own 3d model of a building offers the most control.
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