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Bald Mountain Posted

Falcon,

If I were to attempt to create a relatively small area of photoscenery with some autogen, and ran into problems, would you be able to 'mentor' me sir?

I am completely new to FSX scenery creation and anticipate one or two problems. I wonder if you'd be kind enough to answer a brief question or two when I undoubtedly faulter! Even the simple tutorials confuse me!

Thank you.
 
TheOptimist said:
Falcon,

If I were to attempt to create a relatively small area of photoscenery with some autogen, and ran into problems, would you be able to 'mentor' me sir?

I am completely new to FSX scenery creation and anticipate one or two problems. I wonder if you'd be kind enough to answer a brief question or two when I undoubtedly falter! Even the simple tutorials confuse me!

Thank you.
Click to expand...
No problem. Do you have a basic program you plan to use? I'm using SBuilderX which allows me to do almost everything from within one program, that includes locating and saving the photoscenery, exludes, flattens, water & night maps, adding roads, adding autogen buildings, landclass additions and a ton more that I haven't even gotten into yet.

Good program. Let me know when you need some help.:salute:
 
I've had a good luck at SBuilderX so I'll go with that. I've spent most of the evening looking at tutorials etc, I will give it a good go soon and see how I get on.

Cheers.
 
Ok. I've been having a good play about for a few hours and have got a basic idea of how to make a little chunk of photoreal scenery. So far I havn't learnt how to 'shape' it so it sits in with default scenery, but I have just lumped it in there and it looks decent! I'll get better with the tutorials, but I do have a question if you'd be kind enough to answer (or anyone else that knows)?

Do you have a method of getting images from google earth/maps? They have by far the best resolution of anything out there but I'm always running out of tiles and I just get a blank screen when I try and select 'show background.'

I only want to create a relatively small part, so I can actually just go into google earth, take a screenshot, and patch them all together in GIMP, but it's a fair bit of hassle. I've looked at (and installed) numerous 'downloaders' which integrate with Google earth but they all seem out of date and don't work. Have you got any better ideas than my 'pathwork' idea?
 
When you download the area you want for your airport in SBX, those tiles come with Latitude and longitude points attached, this way the program know where in the world they need to be placed. If you just take a bunch of tiles and paste them all together in GIMP, unless you can specify the exact lattitude and longitude, all you have is a nice montage of tiles and no where to put them.

That's why I use SBuilderX to import the tiles and save as a map. If you locate a spot you want to save and let's be certain you're in the right spot first:
You've opened SBuilderX and opened a "New Project"
You've loaded FSX and placed your aircraft on the airport you want to do in photo scenery
You've clicked on "Show Background" (this brings up the satellite map)
You've clicked on "Show Aircraft" (this locks the satellite to the position of your aircraft

***********************************************************
Now, the screen will be blank, with your scroll wheel, zoom in and allow the screen to rewrite until the area comes into focus.
Continue to zoom in until you have the area almost full screen (leave a little edge buffer)
At this point, either the screen has gone white again telling you there are no tiles available, or you have the image you want.
Now you go to the file drop down menu. . .choose "Add Map", then choose "from background"
Now, if everything to this point has gone your way, there'll be a smaller window with the background image in it and to the right 4 or 5 resolution options. Just for grins, from the bottom up, choose the second or third option and choose ok to start.
Still going well? If so it should begin downloading the tiles, it does this twice. After the first round is complete (wait until they are all downloaded first) click ok again.
IF (and this is a big IF), there is sufficient resolution to provide you with what you requested, it will download the final hi-res tiles, the menu's will close and on your screen will be the area you selected in high resolution.

Don't hold yer breath, lol. . .getting to this point and winning is 90% of doing photoscenery, lol. More often than not you won't get it, but without writing a book on the forum here, that's the beginnings of it in a nutshell.:salute:
 
Anneke said:
Also you might wanna take a look here: http://aussiex.org/forum/index.php?showforum=51. Tutorials made by johhno of OZx fame
Cheers,
Anneke
Click to expand...
I was hoping maybe there was something new there, however, it's basically a pictorial representation of what I posted above. The one area I will retain and try some time is their description of doing seasonal ground textures. Of course they can't go into every little glitch that would come up but I know for a fact that doing a "winter" texture is not easy at all, at least not as easy as that tutorial makes it sound. The other two tutorials are pretty basic stuff, I think one is a listing of software programs you can use and the other is a quick reference for doing flattens. Six or 8 months ago I would have loved to have had that to go by, lol. . .now. . .not so much, lol.

Thanks for the link though!:salute:
 
Falcon thank you very much for typing out that description.

I have managed to get it working brilliantly, with a few exceptions!

Firstly, I do not have FSUIPC so I cannot use the 'show aircraft' buttons etc since the programs cannot interface. However this is not a problem. Using google maps I can simply find the precise coordinates and use the 'go to position' in FSBuilderX to get in exactly the right position.

Using this method (and the steps you described afterwards) I managed to put in a photoreal airport to a good level of detail - albeit on a pretty crappy satellite image. I had a quick fly around it and it was in the perfect position etc, so that is not a problem.

My problem comes when I want to use a decent server. For whatever reason the google satellite (the only map that gives acceptable resolution for me) will not show anything at all above zoom factor 5/6 (which is of course completely useless). The second problem is that the zoom level I want to use is 20. I get superb resolution on google earth at this zoom level to the point of seeing the tyre treads in the grass. This is my home airport and I want it magnificent!

The combination of the two issues (as well as the fact that even if I could get them off google satellite, SBuilder cannot do anything that big) means that as far as I can tell, I might have to do it manually (the patchwork concept I mentioned).

This would involve taking screenshots at 20x zoom in google earth, pasting them into GIMP then matching them. This is not practically difficult, in fact the process is fairly quick. The main problem is the sheer number of times I'd need to do that for the area I want to be covered to be covered. I estimate in the region of 15,000 images will need to be taken and 'stitched.' To be honest I can do that, over a period of a few months, but hopefully I can figure out some tricks to get stuff from the google satellites.

Do you know if you can combine maps? I.e. if I make several small maps of a small area in SbuilderX using google images at their highest resolution possible (has to be small because the program can't do massive files can it...), can they all be put together in one giant map?

I'm a bit stumped as to how to progress. Clearly I'm not going to start the hand stitching process until I've exhausted all of the other options.
 
I really think you'll be hard pressed to find imagery at Level 20, as that works out to about 7cm. Level 16 is 1m, Level 18 is 30cm. While you might find it enticing to throw it into FSX, the ability for many systems to adequately render such a level is limited. And even if GE has such coverage, having all those watermarks on the scenery is a turn-off to me.

And while SBX is somewhat limited in working with very large file setups, it's not that difficult to manually transfer the data from many SBX Maps to become one BGL file.

And then there are other sources of imagery besides the sat servers. Where do you think they get their stuff? Getting it prepared for FSX is the fun part. Anyone want 7cm statewide imagery, coupled with 2 feet laser measured mesh? :jump:
 
LCSims said:
I really think you'll be hard pressed to find imagery at Level 20, as that works out to about 7cm. Level 16 is 1m, Level 18 is 30cm. While you might find it enticing to throw it into FSX, the ability for many systems to adequately render such a level is limited. And even if GE has such coverage, having all those watermarks on the scenery is a turn-off to me.

And while SBX is somewhat limited in working with very large file setups, it's not that difficult to manually transfer the data from many SBX Maps to become one BGL file.

And then there are other sources of imagery besides the sat servers. Where do you think they get their stuff? Getting it prepared for FSX is the fun part. Anyone want 7cm statewide imagery, coupled with 2 feet laser measured mesh? :jump:
Click to expand...

It wouldn't have any watermarks on it.

To be perfectly honest I'd forgotten about the toll on the system! Although level 20 in this case is perfectly good. Let me put together a quick sample.

The attached image is level 19.

I cocked it up a little (so much white space) but that's just because I knocked it up in paint. The watermarks wouldn't be there in the final thing.

What are these other sources of images? Which can be used with SBuilderX? I take it I have to install addons?
 
LCSims said:
I really think you'll be hard pressed to find imagery at Level 20, as that works out to about 7cm. Level 16 is 1m, Level 18 is 30cm. While you might find it enticing to throw it into FSX, the ability for many systems to adequately render such a level is limited. And even if GE has such coverage, having all those watermarks on the scenery is a turn-off to me.

And while SBX is somewhat limited in working with very large file setups, it's not that difficult to manually transfer the data from many SBX Maps to become one BGL file.

And then there are other sources of imagery besides the sat servers. Where do you think they get their stuff? Getting it prepared for FSX is the fun part. Anyone want 7cm statewide imagery, coupled with 2 feet laser measured mesh? :jump:
Click to expand...

Interesting input there LC, I always wondered what the conversion was from zoom level to cm/pixel. I am spolied now, don't use anything under 16 if I can help it and would love to find imagery at a 20 zoom, although the file size would be huge! I have some BMPs saved for future projects/personal use that are almost a gig just for one airport, but the detail is amazing!.
As for performance, I really don't notice any extra hit on larger image/resolution files. for instance, I get a nice hit at FTX Tamworth and experimented to see if it was the 7 cm/pixel that was the cause. On my machine, it was the objects more than the imagery.

As for watermarks, I agree, but I try to edit them out.

Anyone want 7cm statewide imagery, coupled with 2 feet laser measured mesh?
Click to expand...

YES PLEASE!! I tell ya, after figuring out the photoreal part, it has opened up the FS world to me and greatly improved the experience.
 
Also I am in the UK, and that seemingly limits the amount of satellite imagery available.

If I did it at level 19, the scenery for about 1sq mile would come at a cost of perhaps 1.5gb, which is a huge chunk when you're talking about 1 airport and a few fields surrounding it.
 
TO. the stock install of SBX has the compression setting at 100, IIRC. That's just a good way to eat up HD space. The SBuilderX.ini file has a line that reads; CompressionQuality=100 If you change this to 85 you will save a ton of file size, with little to no degradation in the finished file's quality.

Mr. Carr, a glutton for punishment are you? There are 2000+ image files to download and they need something to convert them into GeoTiffs, ie. Global Mapper. And then there's all that water waiting to be masked. I'll give you the link, iffin you promise to have it done in a couple of months. I was / am *slowly* downloading the source, just because I wanted to see what could be done with it. But it sure looks pretty and will eat up a lot of HD space!!!
 
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