It’s been a long time since I’ve perused YouTube for videos on MSFS scenery development, so I can’t recommend good ones anymore, it’s a whole lot easier now than it was.
What I do is install Airport Design Editor, and have it create a project from the stock airport. It’s a little iffy there to get things right, but you’ll get it.
You’ll have to decide where you want to create your projects (I put it in Documents\MyFSProjects).
Then start up MSFS in Developers mode, and open the project (xml file at the root of the project directory) you created. In the “Project” window, Click on the project name arrow so you can see the “BGL” asset. Select that and in the “Inspector” window, select to “Load in Editor”.
Then, in the “Objects” window, select “Polygon” and create a Polygon over the trees you want to remove. To create the polygon, I select “Add”, then click about where I want to create the polygon on the scenery, then hold the Ctrl key and click points to “draw” the polygon a line at a time. Double click to end the creation process. You can move points by clicking on them. With the Polygon still selected, choose “Vegetation” check box, and set the (I forget the name, Density I think), and set it to 0. This should erase the trees.
You can also exclude buildings and photogrametry (TIN) with a polygon. So if there are photogrametric trees (those super ugly ones), you’ll also want to select “Exclude Buildings” (or maybe it’s just “Buildings”?), click the list open, and click on the types of buildings/stuff you want to exclude that falls within the polygon. You’ll see them permanently disappear when you’ve selected the correct option. Each time you select stuff, buildings will rebuild themselves. But they’ll stay disappeared when you select the right option.
You might need an “Exclusion Rectangle” for some things, like windsocks, simobjects, lights, car parking lots, etc, etc… They’re a little bit of a pain, because when you select “Add”, it adds this humongous rectangle. To resize it, you have to select the dots on each side and drag them to where you want them. I forget if you can rotate exclusion rectangles.
To rotate things, click with the middle mouse button on the coordinate system that shows up for what you have selected, and you’ll see the edit mode change of the coordinate system. You’ll see a plane you can select so that it slides in a plane, and you’ll see circles for rotating in each plane, which is a pain in the butt when you want to rotate out of plane, because you have to orient the object into the direction of the direction you want to rotate, or you’ll “twist” your object. You have to turn off “stick to ground” (or whatever it is) to rotate an item out of plane. Be very careful when dragging runway objects. They are not stuck to ground, and change height and change the landscape very easily. First is planar move, next is rotate, next is scale. You can also adjust things like scale and position with the “Gizmo” window you can open from the menus in the Scenery Editor Window.
Create as many Polygons as you need.
When you’re done, in the Scenery Editor window select “Save Scenery” at the bottom under the list of stuff you created. If it asks for a name for the shape file, make sure you name it something different from your airport xml file (you named that when you created the project, even though you don’t know that).
Then, select the project name again in the Project window, and in the Inspector window, Select “Build Package” at the bottom of that window. Close the project in the Project window, exit MSFS, and navigate to your MyFSProjects directory. Assuming you didn’t see any errors when you compiled your project in the big “Console” window that will pop up when you build your package, in your project directory you created will be a “Packages” directory. In there should be your package (directory) that you can copy to your community directory.
If all works well, your trees should be gone when you start MSFS again.
It took me longer to type this than it actually takes to do. But, it will likely take a couple of tries before things work well for you.
After you’ve done that, you can add objects to your scenery from the “Scenery” selection in the “Objects” window, and add taxi paths by connecting taxiway points, and then add taxiwayParking spots, which you have to connect to your taxi paths. And on and on. Tons to learn and have fun doing. But, removing the trees is pretty easy.
There’s lots of people and threads to read for help over at FSDeveloper.
