MSFS20 [GUIDE] How to create custom aerial scenery

[pl4sma2389]

Hello,
So I've been working on two airports and I wanted to get some better orthophotos in game for reference for building the airports. The first airport I did, I68, worked fine, but the second airport I tried to do it for, KMWO, it doesn't show up. I see that sometimes photogrammetry can obscure the orthophotos but this area has no photogrammetry. I tried turning it off anyway, and it didn't help. I know I'm following the steps correctly because it worked at the first airport I tried. I even redid it multiple times to make sure I wasn't doing anything wrong. Does anyone know what could be going on, what I could try?

Edit: I did this for another airfield, 19i, and it worked fine, but another airfield, KISZ, won't work. Why?

Edit 2: I think I see a pattern. All of the times it has worked, the package folder contains one .cgl, named "sai001.cgl". Every time it doesn't work, the package folder contains two .cgl, named "sai000.cgl" and "sai001.cgl", of which the former is the larger one. Maybe if I could combine the .cgl into one it would show up?

Edit 3: So I tried deleting all the empty .png from the aerialimages folder before building the project, and after building it, it now is only generating one .cgl file. And, best of all, it works in game!

 

[erocfx]

Hi all,
Having a little trouble with my aerial. I did the steps for the custom aerial and that part was fine. However, I have to turn photogrammetry off to see it. Is there a way to have photogrammetry on and still have my custom aerial show?

I am having the same problem. Did you ever figure it out?

 

[Clutch Cargo]

Tried d/l the Guide on the first post. Comes up blank? New Link or way to grab it? Thx. Clutch

 

[Clutch Cargo]

Nevermind, I was able to grab it.

 

[Bucky]

Hi all, I got to the end of the document without too much trouble. I know Augustine strongly recommends only attempting this as a seasoned scenery developer, but being the irresponsible brash old bugger I am, I decided to press ahead anyway, and have a couple of questions regarding the 'compiling' section of the guide:

1. The guide says the asset directory should be set to PackageSources\CGL. It says the output directory should be CGL\ ... Does that mean both directories are the same?
2. Is there a way to have the console text remain? It appears for a few seconds then disappears.
3. After what I assume is completion (the console text doesn't hang around long enough to confirm it's finished), I have a 'Packages' directory created, but there's only layout.json and manifest.json in there, with nothing else. I assume that's incorrect?

Thanks very much Augustine for the guide, and y'all for any help

Cheers,
Bucky

 

[Sasa]

1. The guide says the asset directory should be set to PackageSources\CGL. It says the output directory should be CGL\ ... Does that mean both directories are the same?

No. The second one will go the your output folder. Likely called "Packages" alongside the "PackageSources" folder unless you have changed that somewhere in your configs.
That output folder will also be the one that goes into your community folder.

2. Is there a way to have the console text remain? It appears for a few seconds then disappears.

Yes, just call it from an open CMD window or create a BAT file as follows alongside your project XML:

"<Your MSFS SDK Directory>\Tools\bin\fspackagetool.exe" YourProject.xml
pause

 

[Bucky]

Thanks @Sasa! I'll give the windows console trick a try! Appreciate the responses, and thanks very much for the help!

 

[Bucky]

Thanks to your tip, I was able to see the console errors, however, after much fiddling to try and figure out what's wrong, I'm not really any closer. I have an aerial-imagery.xml located in PackageDefinitions and it looks fine. I'm not sure if that's what it's referring to?

 

[Sasa]

Download the SDK samples and check out the Simple Aerial sample.
I assume it's the CGLBuilderConfig.xml this error is referring to. It's a simple file describing the location to the source files (not exactly sure why this extra jump to the source files is required but it is...)

 

[Md Alavi]

anyone knows why the tiles2bing not converting files? I had geo referenced the imagery through QGIS.

 

[weok-sim]

Hello everyone
Is there any way to rename CGL file and it's folder to make it visible in sim? I am trying to make a new island aerial imagery (1.3 gb CGL file) ZL19 and besides some strange errors in console all looked fine for me at the build stage (tho it taken 30-40 minutes to build) and the package was fine for me. But I saw mentioning here that similar names for CGL files make community ones not to load.

For me the folder name is already taken by Asobo CGL's but not the CGL name (which is sai333.cgl) and changing folder name and folder path in layout.json of exported package didn't help.

I followed the Guide provided above, except Othro4xp part - made initial aerial PNG image myself


Also I found this mention in the docs.flightsimulator:
"All image files for aerial images should be authored as 16bit PNG with a fixed size of 256x256px, and the build process will automatically generate the images for the lower levels of detail. "
I can see that .png tiles created for sim with this guide have a 32 bit depth. Can this be a problem?

 

[uuseri]

Attention, is this worrying?

Ortho4XP readme states:

Download the following packages from https://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/

Pyproj, Numpy, Gdal, Shapely, Rtree, Pillow (or alternatively Pillow-SIMD)

Website is closing:

Unofficial Windows Binaries for Python Extension Packages​

by Christoph Gohlke, Laboratory for Fluorescence Dynamics, University of California, Irvine.

Updated on 24 June 2022 at 07:27 UTC.

Funding for the Laboratory for Fluorescence Dynamics has ceased. This service will be discontinued before July 2022.

 

[weok-sim]

I am trying to figure out why is my CGL don't show in simulator. This is the console log after package build is completed, looks ok for me. But maybe there is some bad errors you can see here?:

 

[phrgflyer]

For time saving I recommend using Sbuilder515 to generate a single image file containing the whole airport.
Here is the process I used and didn't need to spend as much on GIMP
1- Open Sbuilder ignore the paths warning for FSX and its sdk tools by clicking OK. Just ignore everything until you get to the main screen.
2- Click on View show Background and navigate to your desired location. To move faster you may need to go to Edit > Tile Servers and choose Google_api3_Basic Map until you get your desire position then revert back to google satellite server (Google_api3_Satellite)
3- Navigate to your airport location then zoom enough to show everything you want to capture
4- Go to File > Add Map > From Background
5 -Choose the zoom level you want. Left Click on top left and drag to the bottom right to encompass the area you want with a red rectangle. Then you wilI see Number of Tiles and size to the right. I would recommend something with less than 1000 tiles as the size can be very large, so may need to make several captures. My computer can handle about a 1000.
5 - Click OK and it will process the tiles, it may crash or get stuck. I'll show you how to handle that.
6 - It will show a notification box that says xxx tiles are being downloaded at this moment. Please repeat this operation when downloading is complete! Click OK. Then Click OK again. If Everything is good it will have generated a .BMP image file and a .TXT text files with coordinates for it in the following folder: SBX315\Tools\Work
7 - You can now open this single image in GIMP and add a selection using the Free Select Tool for instance or Fuzzy Select tool around the area you want to keep, invert the selection (CTRL + I) then go to Layer > Transparency > Color to Alpha
Make sure you have the image into a new layer and that you can see only see the area you want everything else having been erased.
8 - Export your image (Shift+Ctrl+E) as a PNG and continue the rest of the tutorial.

Where can I download the Sbuilder515? I have 315, but cannot find 515. Disregard, I did not look far enough. Thank you

 

[uuseri]

I'd appreciate a little help with this.

Goal: merge aerial imagery into previous project. SDK 0.18.0 and current samples in use.

Initial test: 1) A working test has been completed by using image capture methods described in the pdf manual dated 2020-08-31 except step 6 2) I've used the "SimpleAerial" sample folder instead and placed the images created by tiles2bing into aerial_images 3) After opening the SimpleAerialcba7TEST project in sim's World Map and building it, the aerial appears correctly.


Moving onto the old project. "Add asset group" button and settings are entered. image1:


It appears like this. image2:


aerial_images and the xml are copied into "secondaryaerial" folder. image3:


After trying to build the package, the error appears. image4:


Folder contents. image5:


What's the issue here?

 

[rhumbaflappy]

Did you save the project before you cleaned and built it? Somehow, the compiler cannot find the directory with the aerial imagery. You could give a link to a cloud storage that has the saved project, and someone might be able to unravel the problem. The pictures never help a lot.

 

[PhobosDesigns]

Did anyone confirm that excluding TIN data will allow for a square of secondary aerial to show up that previously wasn't?

I've been smashing my head against the wall working on KBDU and am only seeing maybe 50% of the imagery squares showing up and ended up giving up.

After reading through this thread, I'm now wondering if my exclusions simply need to cover 100% of the space on an aerial square image for it to show up currently. The airport has TIN data all over the place... I removed most of it around the airport proper which is where the images are working, but everything around it won't show.

Wondering now if this is the key...

Edit: Looks like CGL is allowed over TIN since SU9 - Now I'm wondering if the squares directly over the airport are higher detail than the ones around it that aren't showing up. Need to look in debug but this whole 'different resolution per tile' thing is new to me.

 

[=rk=]

TIN, or triangular irregular network," is the protocol MSFS uses to place terrain and it does not interfere with custom aerial. "Exclude TIN," is for making a small flat area to place a building.

 

[PhobosDesigns]

Thank you - at this point I'm just exhausted and stuck trying to figure this out.

My aerial won't fully show when Photogrametry is on

Looking through here, am I literally just screwed unless Asobo changes something?


I followed this tutorial to a T
Compiled and setup with no errors with fspackagetool
Built again in MSFS then zoomed in after it completed and here's what we've got:


Here the stitched (before tiling) image for reference - white is alpha in the real image and tiles (removed them for the forum/size)

Here's the CGL on the World Map after project build without color editing so you can see it pretty easily - it's all there

Here we are in sim with some random amount of tiles showing up (the problem)

Here's with debug - looks like everything's 'fine'

So to the question at the top - am I just completely unlucky here due to the photogrammetry issue?

What a headache to have to manually cover so much stuff... Any other options other than:
- Projected Mesh (will look like garbage with how they render)
- Create a scenery model matching the DEM, layer the area texture over it, insert simobject into project and raise .001 (or similar) over the terrain

 

[=rk=]

Pretty sure there is something glitchy about KDEN ass well, could be the area. I had a whole island scenery in the South Pacific about 3/4 completed, when a world update introduced badly outdated "default" satellite imagery that would not allow CGL to override it.