Heightmaps from DEM data - SwissAirfields/SwissAirfieldsFS2020 GitHub Wiki

Source Data

Download the necessary SwissAlti3D Data as GeoTiff from Swisstopo. The whole of Switzerland is 43GB in the 2m Resolution (so possibly up to 16 times more for the 0.5m resolution) so you might want to download just the portions you need.

  • The interface on the web page produces a list of URLs for Download. You might find some downloader software that can deal with that. I just use a one-liner batch file with the following content:

FOR /f "tokens=*" %%a in (filelist.txt) do curl -O %%a

Generating Tool

Download the MSFS Toolkit by Nool This tool can do many things, we mainly use it to generate (small scale!) heightmaps.

Process

  1. Use google earth to draw a (minimal) polygon around the runway(s) of the airport. Heightmaps are always square and the tool will make sure that at least the polygon is covered. Post World Update Switzerland we don't need to improve the vicinity of the airport any more - in actual fact the heightmap is probably slightly reducing the mesh quality.
  2. Save the polygon in kml format.
  3. Run this command (more command line parameters to be explored):

msfs elev -imagery swissalti3d*.tif -border lsxx_hm_boundary.kml -epsg 2056 lsxx_hm.xml

  1. Transfer the contents of the resulting xml into your airport xml (same level as the "Airport" tag, before the "Airport" tag). Can create quite a large file.