This scenery was a Work in Progress!
But all fun things have to come to an end…Check out the official release thread!
[RELEASE] Chunilna Cabin Strip, Alaska | Emerald Scenery Design
Not to be confused with Chunilna Creek Airstrip, from my latest scenery for FSX & P3D. Chunilna Cabin Strip is located 9 NM to the south, and shares a similar name, because as it happens, the exact same creek runs next to both airstrips! Well, that and there are absolutely no other landmarks or known names to call it… Even my contacts around Talkeetna, AK didn’t know it was there. 
As luck may have it, I bumped into a guy on Discord who works seasonally at the Talkeetna Airport. He was kind enough to do a flyover on this strip and snap some aerial photos while out and about! Thanks to this, I was able to get a much better idea about what the airstrip looked like going into the project. A rarity for me…
Much like my last scenery for FSX & P3D, Chunilna Cabin Strip will be highly detailed, all the way down to some little things that you will have to look for to notice. With this scenery coming to MSFS, I can now afford to push a lot more polys per project before seeing a performance hit (At least, on my system)! So, almost all models have taken a giant step up in quality!
A Firewood Shed/Shelter I modeled last night. Officially, my second model done fully in Blender!
All building objects, and most newer library objects in the scenery have been done in Blender v3 and Substance Painter. Although, the Cabin is a bit of a hybrid, as it’s base model was done in Sketchup. However it was later brought into Blender, cleaned up and refined. Moving forward, this will be my new workflow. That said, I guess this is the part where I feel obliged to give a shout-out to Mykrode and 270inc over at Got Friends. They have been a huge help the last 2 months, putting up with my million questions as I learn Blender and Substance. I am positive that without their help, I would be nowhere near as far along with this project, and likely in or on the edge of a burnout, like in the past. Heck, I have even done some animations, which I never thought I had the skills to do. Turns out, it ain’t really rocket science. (At least, when everything is going smoothly… 
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Current Features
So far, Chunilna Cabin Strip boasts a pretty decent set of features. Some of these are still works in progress. Mainly the dynamic stuff, but they are features that will 100% be in the initial release! I originally wrote this fairly late at night, I have probably left out some stuff…
- Custom vegetation: weeds, wildflowers, shrubs/bushes, including 3D trees.
- Custom ground textures.
- Environmentally dynamic features, using XML simvars.
- Animated Butterflies (4 native species).
- Chimney smoke.
- Water/Mud Puddles.
- High quality 3D building models & clutter, with up to 4K res PBR materials.
These are just some of the features currently in the scenery. I have plans for more, including dynamic stuff, but am holding back until I can get the XML code working correctly for the current dynamic objects.
Progress!
I am making this post quite a bit further along in the development process than I normally have with past projects, so a lot of the major visual progress is already done. However, from this point out I’ll be sharing what progress I make here, as well as on my Discord!
Until then, here’s a volley of screenshots from the last month, showing the current progress on this challenging backcountry airstrip!
Definitely looks like a nice challenge though!
I went through several design iterations on the windsock, as I was trying to get the dimensions correct, but the main source of my struggles was just trying to figure the animations out. This windsock was literally baptism by fire, as I had to learn how everything worked in Blender, learn how to do animations, and run cloth simulation after cloth simulation to finally get results I was happy with. And of course, along the way, I had to figure out the things MSFS needed to be happy.
