Coming soon: FSX Time Capsule - - Mount St. Helens Pre-1980 Experience.

[Steve Rosenow]

CURRENT PROGRESS REPORT

After an antagonizing, and extremely frustrating batch of trial-and-error runs, the new, updated, and much improved terrain overlay image has finally been completed and compiled.

This newly-updated terrain image is actually the same image I had been using in the previous posts (above, in this thread). However, a contact with the USGS gave me a high-fidelity, master-resolution copy in *.TIFF format. The new image was more than 8,000 pixels wide by 8,500 pixels high. The new image was of such crystal clarity that individual people could be seen at the Timberline parking lot and on the flanks of the peak. One climber shows up on the false summit ridge. The image was so sharp that I tried a test compile and was blown away at the clarity, although at FS display, the people blur out significantly but individual details can still be seen.

BUT, since the original image had to be warped to match the DEM, I then set out in a painstaking process that took four days to do. That involved warping eight individual layers to match every contour of the peak using the existing overlay PSD file I saved as a guide. Once that was done, it was off to creating seasonal variations, and then compiling.

Once the updated terrain overlay had been completed, I then set out on the task of "remodeling" Harry Truman's Mount St. Helens Lodge. The existing model was found to be inaccurate in many details, and inaccurate in color depiction. A contact of mine put me in touch with Shirley Rosen, Harry Truman's niece, who happily provided me with photos of the lodge as it appeared in the 1970s, in high resolution.

Afterwards, I set out on modeling the other lodge in the area: The Spirit Lake Lodge owned by the Smith family. This lodge (often confused for Harry's lodge) was a mile and a half downvalley from Harry Truman's and provided gas amenities, food, and restaurant amenities. An email was sent to the family of the owners of the lodge (who still own a resort founded in 1992 in the area), who graciously provided me with details on the lodge, including several high resolution photos taken on May 17, 1980, one day before the historic eruption.

Finally, I set out on replicating the road network to the Forest Service's Spirit Lake Campground on the south shore of Spirit Lake, immediately east of Harry Truman's Mount St. Helens Lodge. This also included replicating paved parking areas, as well as both boat/canoe ramp launch sites.

In addition, I've begun the process of modeling (which is arguably the most tedious of tasks in this project), all of the YMCA and scouting camps (Boy Scouts, and Girl Scouts) that dotted the north shore of Spirit Lake's east arm, as well as the Harmony Falls Lodge on the east shore of Spirit Lake. Several cabin owners have also supplied me with photos of their properties (which were destroyed on May 18, 1980), and I plan on modeling those as well.

In a few weeks, I will seek beta testing on this project. As it is extremely large, file transfer will be done through WeTransfer, and due to its size it will not be released on AVSIM and other FS sites. The terrain image BGL file alone is 1.4GB!

As always, photos of progress:

Mount St. Helens Pre-1980 for Microsoft Flight Simulator X - Updated Terrain Imagery (now in super high resolution) by Steven Rosenow, on Flickr

Mount St. Helens Pre-1980 for Microsoft Flight Simulator X - Updated Terrain Imagery (now in super high resolution) by Steven Rosenow, on Flickr

Mount St. Helens Pre-1980 for Microsoft Flight Simulator X - Updated Terrain Imagery (now in super high resolution) by Steven Rosenow, on Flickr

Mount St. Helens Pre-1980 for Microsoft Flight Simulator X - Updated Mount St. Helens Lodge (better modeling, texture mapping and accuracy) by Steven Rosenow, on Flickr

The Road to Timberline - Microsoft Flight Simulator X by Steven Rosenow, on Flickr

The Spirit Lake Lodge - Microsoft Flight Simulator X by Steven Rosenow, on Flickr

Mount St. Helens Pre-1980 for Microsoft Flight Simulator X - Spirit Lake Campground Update by Steven Rosenow, on Flickr

Mount St. Helens Pre-1980 for Microsoft Flight Simulator X - Spirit Lake Campground Update by Steven Rosenow, on Flickr

 

[Steve Rosenow]

PROJECT UPDATE OCTOBER 26, 2021


A huge improvement over the last update has taken place since the last post. An initial beta test - a worker with the Forest Service actually working on Mount St. Helens kindly tested it out - had illustrated that the imagery for the pre-1980 cone ground texture had a huge saturation of pinks and purples on the northwest slope of the peak below an area known as Goat Rocks (an area that became the focal point of the bulging north side before the May 18, 1980 eruption). Since the source image had an overly-blue tone to it, I color corrected it in Adobe Lightroom. This color correction ended up having a purple-pinkish-hued tone to the north flank and an overly tan shade on the upper Forsyth and Nelson glaciers.

Last night, an epiphany came via experimentation with Adobe Photoshop in the way of levels adjustments in each of the RGB channels separately. This resulted a surprisingly-natural tone to the peak that matches much of the colors we see on the volcano now, especially near Sugar Bowl and Dog's Head domes on the NE flank.

In addition, further modeling of the landmarks around the volcano, and further improvements in the road and landclass adjustment continues. In the process of investigating the area as it was before 1980, several former Spirit Lake property owners have generously provided me with key details of the environment around the lake. Additionally, those who recreated in the area, including renting cabins at Harry Truman's Mount St. Helens Lodge and those who camped at the U.S. Forest Service Spirit Lake Campground on the lake's south shore, generously provided me with details Google searches could not. This has led to many improvements in accuracy, especially the road network at the Spirit Lake Campground (previously posted above showing dirt roads; The actual roads in the campground were paved). Other improvements in accuracy include slight updates to the models depicting Harry Truman's Mount St. Helens Lodge, as well as the Spirit Lake Lodge a mile and a half downvalley from Truman's. These improvements come directly from those who knew Harry Truman, and from the family that owned the former Spirit Lake Lodge.

Looking SE to the NW flank:
Mount St. Helens Pre-1980 for Microsoft Flight Simulator X - Updated Terrain (improved color accuracy) by Steven Rosenow, on Flickr

Looking SW to the NE flank.
Mount St. Helens Pre-1980 for Microsoft Flight Simulator X - Updated Terrain (improved color accuracy) by Steven Rosenow, on Flickr

Looking north over the summit dome. Spirit Lake in the background, and Mount Rainier further beyond:
Mount St. Helens Pre-1980 for Microsoft Flight Simulator X - Updated Terrain (improved color accuracy) by Steven Rosenow, on Flickr

Updated Harry Truman's Lodge (note the chimney smoke plumes)
Mount St. Helens Pre-1980 for Microsoft Flight Simulator X - Updated Mount St. Helens Lodge (fleshing out the details) by Steven Rosenow, on Flickr

Updated Spirit Lake Lodge:
Mount St. Helens Pre-1980 for Microsoft Flight Simulator X - Spirit Lake Lodge Updates by Steven Rosenow, on Flickr

Mount St. Helens Pre-1980 for Microsoft Flight Simulator X - Spirit Lake Lodge Updates by Steven Rosenow, on Flickr

(nearly same view as above, with updated terrain imagery)
Mount St. Helens Pre-1980 for Microsoft Flight Simulator X - Spirit Lake Lodge Updates by Steven Rosenow, on Flickr

US Forest Service Spirit Lake Campground (with restroom huts and ranger station)
Mount St. Helens Pre-1980 for Microsoft Flight Simulator X - US Forest Service Spirit Lake Campground and Ranger Station by Steven Rosenow, on Flickr

Mount St. Helens Pre-1980 for Microsoft Flight Simulator X - US Forest Service Spirit Lake Campground and Ranger Station by Steven Rosenow, on Flickr

And lastly:
Mount St. Helens Pre-1980 for Microsoft Flight Simulator X - Spirit Lake area cabin (modeled from a real residence) by Steven Rosenow, on Flickr

Mount St. Helens Pre-1980 for Microsoft Flight Simulator X - Spirit Lake area cabin (modeled from a real residence) by Steven Rosenow, on Flickr

 

[Steve Rosenow]

MAJOR PROJECT UPDATE:

In an unexpected turn of events, I have been contacted by a living relative of Harry Truman. In the dialog we have established, it has been decided that the Mount St. Helens Lodge model and the Flight Sim models of his cabins will undergo an extensive overhaul. This is in light of a hoarde of new details that have now emerged as part of that dialog.

Stay tuned, folks!

 

[Steve Rosenow]

UPDATE OCTOBER 30, 2021

The last eighteen plus hours have been spent in a 3D modeling frenzy, as a result of extensive conversations with none other than Harry Truman's own granddaughter. She was gracious enough to provide me with key details about his cabins that helped me greatly with the pursuit of accuracy. Those conversations led me to realize that the existing models of his cabins, as well as other features of his lodge complex, were horribly inaccurate.

Alas, I have extensively overhauled every structure seen in the following screenshots, as well as added new ones I'd missed. And yes, the typo on the gate sign is actually how that sign was painted by Truman, and the reference material for that was provided by way of a five minute news story done by KATU anchor Robin Anderson in the summer of 1979.

Mount St. Helens Pre-1980 for Microsoft Flight Simulator X - Updated Mount St. Helens Lodge (better modeling, texture mapping and accuracy) by Steven Rosenow, on Flickr

Mount St. Helens Pre-1980 for Microsoft Flight Simulator X - Updated Mount St. Helens Lodge (better modeling, texture mapping and accuracy) by Steven Rosenow, on Flickr

Mount St. Helens Pre-1980 for Microsoft Flight Simulator X - Updated Mount St. Helens Lodge (better modeling, texture mapping and accuracy) by Steven Rosenow, on Flickr

Mount St. Helens Pre-1980 for Microsoft Flight Simulator X - Updated Mount St. Helens Lodge (better modeling, texture mapping and accuracy) by Steven Rosenow, on Flickr

 

[Steve Rosenow]

PROJECT UPDATE NOVEMBER 2, 2021

Nothing in the way of screenshots to post in this update. However, a YouTube video showing the current status of the project will be linked at the end of this entry.

At present, 3D object modeling continues with the Longview and Portland YMCA camps, and two other lodges that were on the east shore of Spirit Lake. Spirit Lake Campground is now complete.

On the terrain/SBuilderX forefront:

About 70% of the former Weyerhaeuser road network in the coverage area of the project have now been faithfully recreated per a series of 1979 USGS aerials downloaded from the USGS National Map viewer and the USGS EarthExplorer download utility. Incidentally, these roads and the former alignment of Highway 504 were included in one ESRI dataset. Included with these roads are faithful renditions of all the lands that had been clearcut by logging operations prior to 1980. In addition, I received several pre-eruption Weyeraeuser road maps, one of them marked with the 1980 locations of state-mandated closure gates on Highway 504.

Even more importantly, a few well-placed emails have gone out to three officials with the United States Geological Survey. These emails have inquired about the availability of pre-eruption DEM mesh of the area I'm working on, excluding the DEM mesh I already have of the volcano itself.

Most notably, this request is of the availability of pre-eruption elevation data of the upper North Fork Toutle River and Spirit Lake area, as the landslide deposit raised the valley elevation up to 600 feet higher in places than before 1980. Two of those emails have generated responses, and one of them has generated a lot of interest to the point the USGS is actively assisting with the project now.

As a result, the Northwest Office Liason for the National Map Viewer service the USGS offers, is investigating the availability of that mesh. He is certain it still exists, however it cannot be explained why that mesh is not publicly available for download. In the response I received, he assured that there is going to be a deep inquiry, even to the point of reaching officials within the David A. Johnston Cascades Volcano Observatory to ask where that mesh is and provide me with copies once it is found.

Lastly, I have received a lot of additional reference material for Harry Truman's property, as well as other properties in the Spirit Lake area that were destroyed in the May 18, 1980 eruption. This material was generously gifted to me by the curator of a well-known local Facebook page dedicated to life in the Mount St. Helens area prior to its eruption. This reference material includes several copies of actual brochures from Harry Truman's Mount St. Helens Lodge, as well as several never-before-published photos of the spread.

Lastly, here's a YouTube video, captured yesterday morning, showing the current status of the project. The helicopter being flown is Dodosim's Bell 206, taking off in a simulated late-August 1979 morning flight from the present site of the helipad at Johnston Ridge Observatory's parking lot. At that time, this site was on the southeast corner of a logged-out clearcut, accessible via Weyerhaeuser road 4020. For reference, the last six miles of today's Highway 504 up to Johnston Ridge Observatory follows much of the old 4020 road grade.

 

[Steve Rosenow]

PROGRESS REPORT for November 10, 2021.


What was thought to be impossible, has now become a reality.

In the last few days, I have been immersing myself into the workings of Q-GIS, an open-source geospatial data processing suite similar to the ArcGIS software in use by professional mapping agencies, college geology courses, as well as the USGS. Additionally, I have also been exploring SAGA, another open-source geospatial data processing suite. Through a lengthy process of trial-and-error, and much experimentation (which can be seen here: https://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/threads/sbuilderx-sloping-ground-polygons.454002/#post-893586 ), I have successfully created a test file recreating Spirit Lake's pre-1980 elevation data and former lake shore.

Additionally, this test also successfully eliminated the landslide deposit north of Mount St. Helens in an area immediately west of Spirit Lake itself.

To achieve this I set forth on a test exercise in Q-GIS, by creating an ESRI SHP "shape file" data package. Then, I began an extremely tedious process of tracing every contour below elevation 3,600 feet (I started at the contour line denoting 3,520 feet), in area directly encompassing Spirit Lake to the north base of Mount St. Helens. This area also went west to just below the western end of present-day Johnston Ridge, at the boundary line for Cowlitz and Skamania Counties.

As to how laborious this process is, this one test sample took seven hours. Six of those were spent doing the "hard" work - tracing those contours - by hand - using a mouse cursor placing a multiple series of lines to which elevation data had to be attached.

After that, it was a trip over to SAGA GIS, where the contour data was then extrapolated into a working digital elevation model. However, since this file was not quite ready for Flight Simulator's Resample SDK application, it had to be imported back into Q-GIS. It is in Q-GIS, where "the fatty part" (e.g. the unusable data) was then trimmed to meet the test coverage area, and then subsequently exported out to a working GeoTIFF file for Resample to convert into a *.BGL scenery file.

After some initial hiccups, the resulting test of this test file in Flight Simulator X was a resounding success. Initial tests of this file showed large plateaus and large ground spikes where the DEM met the clipped out areas. This was achieved by reworking the*.INF file to the following parameters:

[Source]
Type=GeoTIFF
Layer=Elevation
SourceDir="."
SourceFile="test_BGL_SpiritLake4.tif"
MinValidValue=755
NullCellValue=-32767

[Destination]
DestDir="."
DestBaseFileName="test_BGL_SpiritLake"
DestFileType=BGL
LOD=6,16
FractionBits=6
BaseValue=1000

The MinValidValue line denoted, in meters, the lowest elevation of the DEM. The NullCellValue is derived from a YouTube tutorial here: (

)

This tutorial was viewed as I was having issues eliminating the initial plateaus in the test DEM. The "MinValidValue" call in the BGL subsequently eliminated that.


As this is a significant update (and a very important learning experience, I am posting in this update, a step-by-step illustration showing what was done. Photo captions below each illustration.

Selecting the coverage area in Q-GIS. The underlying data are georeferenced GeoTIFFs of five USGS 15-minute quadrangles, with a contour interval of 80 feet. These were sourced from TopoView, a USGS public domain download portal.

The traced contours in the test area.

Importing of the traced contour SHP shapefile data into SAGA GIS.

Selecting the interpolation parameters. For this I chose Multi-Level B-Spline, however the final exported DEM will be a TIN interpolation for greater accuracy and 3D display of the DEM.

After a ten-minute wait (it takes this long to compile the DEM, at least for the test area selected), the DEM is now ready for further processing. At this point, it is unusable for Flight Simulator, and must be converted in Q-GIS to a georeferenced GeoTIFF.

Importing the raw data back into Q-GIS. Note that unprocessed DEMS such as this need to be cleaned up for further use and display in GIS data applications, as well as Flight Simulator.

For this, I drew a polygon on the outside edge of the extent of the outermost contour. This was selected because I felt it unnecessary to do the entire area, and I am only after the first five hundred feet above the pre-eruption shoreline.

The final DEM, ready for export to Resample.exe.

Testing in FSX. The shoreline elevation and surrounding hills are restored to their pre-1980 elevation. This view in FSX in fact now matches an aerial of Spirit Lake in my reference archive taken from roughly the same vantage.

View to the NE and NW, overlooking the area of the Dave and Mariam Smith's Spirit Lake Lodge.
Harry Truman's Mount St. Helens lodge is on the SW corner of Spirit Lake at far right in the first image.

These ground spikes and the cliff behind them, illustrate the elevation changes between spring, 1980, and today. The Spirit Lake Lodge, sitting on the spike to the left, and a private cabin (based on photos of the real cabin), sitting on the spike to the right, were placed in the scenery on two AB Flatten polygons to eliminate display issue conflicts caused by the present-day elevation in that area. The cliff behind them, and the height of these spikes, are a direct illustration of the depth of the landslide deposits left behind by the collapsing north flank of Mount St. Helens in the May 18, 1980 eruption. It is in this spot that the landslide rode up and over the ridge, and then into the valley behind.[/URL]
This cliff will be eliminated, and full ground data restored to pre-1980 eruption elevation.[/URL]
For the next few months, I will be hard at work retracing all those contours, then compiling multiple test DEMs, to ensure this displays as accurate as possible.[/URL]

 

[Rotornut44]

Glad to see you got the DEM issues resolved, Steve. I feel your pain on tracing all those contors, but man, it's turning out great. Keep it up!

 

[Steve Rosenow]

Glad to see you got the DEM issues resolved, Steve. I feel your pain on tracing all those contors, but man, it's turning out great. Keep it up!

Thank you.

There is still a lot of work left to do, and I still note the presence of some terrain anomalies where this mesh meets existing...

 

[Steve Rosenow]

It's been a couple days since the last post on this project, and last night I completed yet another milestone. It had been decided a long time ago, that the pre-1980 package will contain two distinct eras. Package One features the area in the late 1970s, before peaceful tranquility was abruptly altered by seismic, and later, volcanic activity.

Package Two, featured in these introduction screenshots, is a two-part sub package, and features the look and appearance of the volcano in the early phase of the 1980-eruptive episode, before the cataclysmic eruption at 8:32 a.m. on Sunday, May 18, 1980. Part One of the package replicates the look (seen here) of the volcano in late April. Part Two, will replicate the the peak as it looked on May 17, 1980, one day before oblivion.

To illustrate the labor involved, the images I am showing here, are the result of six hours of recontouring the summit region from the crater down to Dog's Head and Goat Rocks, and an hour of back-and-forth testing in the sim. Custom aerial image overlays are in the works, while I have GIS data specialists assisting me in the finalization of the base pre-1980 terrain mesh.

The contour data for this particular fork in the development were sourced from Figure 69, Page 125 of USGS Professional Paper 1250, titled "The 1980 Eruptions of Mount St. Helens." Figure 69 is a full-page contour elevation map of the bulge in mid-April overlaid on top of the 15-minute topographic contour map I have as base reference for this project, and was extracted from the downloaded PDF from the USGS website. It was then georeferenced in QGIS, and finally imported into the base project file to which I've stored my existing contour data.

Now, to place a steam and ash plume in there. As an added bonus, I am looking up the code to determine when the steam and ash eruption effects can be called. If successful, I hope to replicate every phreatic steam and ash eruption, based on specific parameters from which to call the effects in the XML for that particular BGL.