FSX Selective photoreal scenery?

[lordofwings]

I was wondering how it is done. Sometimes I am lead to believe it is not possible but when I see products like NL2000 for FSX and from Aerosoft I see it is possible.

What I refer to is that when one adds photoscenery (satellite imagery) it looks nice from high but if you come down enough you see what it is, a photo of buildings from above. That means every buildings looks as if flattened against the ground. If you add 3D buildings then the contrast is weird because you have the satellite photo (flat against the ground) and your building.

So, how is it done that they achieve that the photoscenery is enabled from high down to a certain level and below that just the plain FSX with 3D buildings?

Or am I missing something here?

 

[hcornea]

I suspect you are interpreting it as being more complex than it is.

3D buildings are rendered even when you are at high altitude. Autogen is graded out at a distance depending on LOD radius.

So custom 3D buildings on photoreal resampled imagery is all that is required.

In fact, transitioning from photo real to "default FSX" with 3D buildings would be odd. If you wished to do this, it would be simple to compile photo scenery to a lower LOD that the underlying land class textures. But it would look horrible.

 

[lordofwings]

Thanks for the prompt response, I am still fuzzy about the whole photoreal stuff. I have been meaning to go the photoreal way but still unable.

Yes, it would look odd but I thought that was the only way. On the other hand, modelling whole city streets would be too great a task.

What would then be the natural way of showing photoreal when airborne and have it naturally (de)grade to custom buildings (or custom + autogen) when flying lower, say VFR and even landing? That is a concept I am still missing.

I suppose the photoreal "grass" would still look nice when I am at ground level, rather than the odd-looking FSX grass.

 

[toprob]

I'm not too sure what you mean here, but maybe you are basing your assumptions -- that photoscenery is not suitable for ground level -- on some older, lower quality photoscenery. These days photoscenery -- especially localised around an airport for instance -- may be of very high quality.
And simply autogenning a high resolution aerial image can give a good degree of realism down low, there's no reason why you couldn't annotate most houses in a city, for instance. It takes a while, but it can be worth it if done properly.
I'm working on Nelson City and airport at the moment, with a 50cm image for the city and 12cm for the airport -- the annotation is done by another developer, who just about annotates house-for-house.
So it really depends on the quality and resolution of your aerials -- normal 'satellite' imagery is not always the best way to go for FSX, but quality aerial images properly annotated can do the job.

 

[hcornea]

As Robin suggests

Same photoreal (altitude and ground)

Custom Autogen, and 3D models

( While we're into shameless plugs ... )

This scenery is made with 15cm and 60cm resampled imagery:

http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/showthread.php?t=23081&highlight=bundaberg

Not just photoreal grass ... photoreal everything.

 

[lordofwings]

Now you both are putting me to shame with the shameless plugs :-/ LOL but that is exactly what I am trying to achieve. For some of my airports I am afraid there is no aereal imagery (coverage in my country is not good), for other parts they are and I would like to experiment with it.

How do you determine that your aereal image is 10 or 12 cm??? Will have to look into that annotation thing.

One thing I wanted to start with, was to have real-looking grass in the airport strip, that would be my first step. I don't like the FSX default grass or the grass texture coming out of Sketchup (I use it for buildings).

As for the "flattening" I meant that while you are up it looks good but as you go down (say in a Cessna) and are nearing the runway head for landing, the surrounding photoreal scenery has al lbuildings "flattened" because they are just an image rather than a 3D object.

 

[hcornea]

As for the "flattening" I meant that while you are up it looks good but as you go down (say in a Cessna) and are nearing the runway head for landing, the surrounding photoreal scenery has al lbuildings "flattened" because they are just an image rather than a 3D object.

Put a custom 3D building on top of the footprint.

As for the imagery ... the resolution correlates with the LOD level.

I tend to resample the imagery using Globalmapper to get rid of redundant resolution.

 

[lordofwings]

Finally I managed to get some photoreal stuff done albeit HORRIBLE. I watched JCLR excellent tutorial (in Spanish) about creating photoreal scenery with SBuilderX.

I got a few problems though. I followed his example and used the Add Map | From Background and selected the 7x5 Zoom Level 14 option and did 3 tiles like that. Not enough but just for trying.

Then I compiled and this time the photoreal stuff is in the Beagle (BGL) but the result is horrible compared to your excellent sceneries. See these two screenshots in the vicinity of a grass airstrip.

In the first screenshot from the air you can appreciate the grass airstrip and the photoreal tile. Problem with this one is that it doesn't have a blend mask but more importantly there is a GREAT contrast in the quality of the green. The photoreal looks pale compared to FSX's green vegetation.

In the 2nd exhibit we see the trike on finals to the grass airstrip and that patch of green trees on the near end of the runway. My problem here being that perhaps at this height I would like that patch replaced with some 3D trees. If I define a Landclass polygon it wipes out a LARGE stretch of land (had that in another scenery I was working on). Also, when I land the road next to the runway (defined as a road line in SBuilderX) kind of disappears underneath the photoscenery and everything at that level looks just horrible.

How can I improve this?

 

[LCSims]

Level 14 in SBuilderX is about equal to FS9 textures. Level 16 will get you down to around 1m, if the area has that coverage. It always help to try the different services to see which has the better coverage.

Autogen follows the textures shown by FSX. If you have photo based textures in use you cannot ask the sim to apply autogen from on of the default land classes that will not display. If you want autogen, be it trees or building on the photo scenery, then you need to use the autogen annotator to assign autogen to the textures.

Note that as you go to higher resolution in SBX the ability to cover a large area diminishes. Thus you'll have to work an area in smaller sections, but can still use all the source to generate (manually) a single BGL file.

Even if you find a high level of source (level 16 and up), still be prepared to spend some quality time enhancing the source and playing around with the color levels to get it to match to FSX. Or even come close to matching FSX.

 

[lordofwings]

Tried with that higher level, in fact the two highest zoom levels but got new problems with it. WIth the highest it downloads about half but at some point it says "Cannot make image" and refuses to do anything else.

With the next lowest level it downloads everything and I see the "big" photoreal background tile there. I use Select | Select All and subsequently "File |Compile BGL" but then the dialog only enables the [x] Vector data checkbox and the Photoreal scenery checkbox is disabled. So, now even with the background map on it, I cannot generate the photoreal scenery.

Any quirk I may be missing?

 

[hcornea]

Unfortunately Sbuilder seems to run out of memory with very large hi-resolution backgrounds.

I try to work in Geotiff files initially
After aligning these, extracting the metadata
From that you can create an inf file manually,

The rest is done in Photoshop.