Autogen scenery question...

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rdaniell

rdaniell

SOH-CM-2013
Is there any way to get more trees and less buildings all over the place. I'm working on a scenery right now that in real life has trees all around the grass strip but, in FS9 it looks like a desert.....I even tried planting some one at a time but, I'm not too good with a dibble stick.

Romeo-Delta
 
rdaniell said:
Is there any way to get more trees and less buildings all over the place. I'm working on a scenery right now that in real life has trees all around the grass strip but, in FS9 it looks like a desert.....I even tried planting some one at a time but, I'm not too good with a dibble stick.
Click to expand...
rdaniell said:
Romeo-Delta
Click to expand...

hey there Romeo Delta! :wavey:

Good to see you getting your teeth into scenery!

No easy solution I'm afraid! If you want to increase the number of trees in areas containing them, there's the fast and dirty trick of reducing your trees bitmaps to half size. They'll look more realistic, improve performance and look more foresty (you get twice as many trees for any given area)!

If you want to change landclass areas, get hold of good old 'EZ-Landclass' no planting, just really fast changes in area values.

Take a look in the 'tweaks' thread, that Obio started sometime ago, you'll find plenty of useful tips on these things.
 
Thanks Nigel...RD

Edit: Nigel, I tried the smaller BMPs and indeed the autogen trees appear to be improved. But! Still NO JOY to my original concern.There are NO autogen trees anywhere close to the airstrip. Don't know if it will show very well but, I'm attaching an aerial view of the actual airstrip.
 
Aha! Now I'm with you! Click!...I'm getting a little rusty;

Airstrips, fields and airports in fs often have autogen excluded.

You may have to tackle the problem with Scenery Builder or similar, and plant!

First, try a Scenery Builder ground poly and specify a landclass value with trees.

If that wont work, you'll know there's an exclude. So either plant some trees with RWY12 or similar or;

Do what I did; get 'ObjectManager' a very useful program to have anyway, make a poly, choose some trees and presto. Object Manager is neat, beacause it allows you to specify how many tree or other objects you want in the area, and their size variations.
It also allows you to extract objects from other scenery you may have, store them, and use them wherever you like.

You can also place effects in your scenery, exactly where you want them. Smoke from chimneys or ships etc., etc.
 
Well Nigel, looks like it's back to the "ole dibble stick" planting three trees at a time. I did find a tree library for RW12 that will put out a 3 row line of trees 100 meters long. I'm going to try that next. But for right now, I've fixing to turn this computer off and watch NCIS on t.v.

Romeo-Delta
 
I planted a few pines around the airstrip. To begin with, I must have had too many because FS9 would not load. Kept getting an error message telling me that there was not enought memory left....Anyway, I sawed down several rows.

Romeo-Delta
 
Hey thats looking great Romeo-Delta! :applause:

Nothing adds more immediate life to scenery better than greenery.

Spoil yourself and download scruffyduck's Object Manager - it's free! and will let you plant rows or areas of trees - even the memory-friendly autogen ones you have.

But they wont be autogen, it turns them into scenery objects!
 
nigel richards said:
Hey thats looking great Romeo-Delta! :applause:Nothing adds more immediate life to scenery better than greenery.

Spoil yourself and download scruffyduck's Object Manager - it's free! and will let you plant rows or areas of trees - even the memory-friendly autogen ones you have. But they wont be autogen, it turns them into scenery objects!
Click to expand...

I think I have downloaded everything from scruffyduck. Just haven't learned how to use any of them but ADE( I think it was from his site.)

While there is a lot of really good scenery downloads available from various sources, I like to tweak or build scenery that reflects airports or airstrips that I have actually flown from in reality. Kinda hard to find those on the web. What kinda sucks is that before I lost my hard drive last year, I had most of them completely done for two or three years. Now I'm having to relearn how to use the various programs since I don't have any of my source files. In the past I mostly used FSSC and AFCAD. As a matter of fact the strip in the above attachment was one that I had on a cd that I found. But it did not include the source files. I really wish that I still had some of those objects. I especially like the old tin hanger.


Romeo-Delta
 
looking good Romeo-Delta...

i too like to model places i've been, this is a place i'm working on slowly, Charity Farm... about 7 miles from here, check the runway... it has a dogleg in it, difficult choise is "do you land the chute and boot the rudder" or "do you land at the bend on longest straight bit"... latter is fine with a good headwind, prior is fine with a slight crosswind element from the south... :icon_lol:

be good when i finally complete it, issue is i'm having to make hedgerows from scratch :icon_lol: once you've mastered placement RD the next logical step is making things... and thats where the real headaches start :icon_lol:
 
Matt Wynn said:
looking good Romeo-Delta...check the runway... it has a dogleg in it, difficult choise is "do you land the chute and boot the rudder" or "do you land at the bend on longest straight bit"... latter is fine with a good headwind, prior is fine with a slight crosswind element from the south... :icon_lol: be good when i finally complete it, issue is i'm having to make hedgerows from scratch :icon_lol: once you've mastered placement RD the next logical step is making things... and thats where the real headaches start :icon_lol:
Click to expand...

Matt, I used to land my Aeronca 7AC in a hay field behind my house. You had to land in one direction and shortly after touchdown make a right turn to finish the roll-out. On take-off you had to get it rolling and up on the main gear then make a left turn to finish the take-off. Why I did that I'll never really understand as the paved runway airport was only about 2 miles from my house...

Oh! yeah I really need more headaches...

Romeo-Delta
 
No Headache

Romeo-Delta,
I believe you will be plesantly surprised with ole' Bill Lyons's 'Silverwings' scenery (autogen around airports especially). It's a 40 Mb download, and available at FltSimCom, Simviation, etc. I installed that years ago and sort of been taking it for granted (until now). Here are 2 pics.
Chuck B
Napamule
 
napamule said:
Romeo-Delta,
I believe you will be plesantly surprised with ole' Bill Lyons's 'Silverwings' scenery (autogen around airports especially). It's a 40 Mb download, and available at FltSimCom, Simviation, etc. I installed that years ago and sort of been taking it for granted (until now). Here are 2 pics.
Chuck B Napamule
Click to expand...

That's one of the downloads I actually put on a cd. I had forgotten about it. Thanks...

Romeo-Delta
 
I didn't know that trick of reducing the bitmap size of the trees! Sounds good. I'll try it. Aren't the trees a bit too large in FS9? Can that also be fixed?

Cees
 
Cees Donker said:
I didn't know that trick of reducing the bitmap size of the trees! Sounds good. I'll try it. Aren't the trees a bit too large in FS9? Can that also be fixed?

Cees
Click to expand...

A lot of people use Feng's Tree Generator. It reduces the size and increases the number of trees.
 
Cees Donker said:
I didn't know that trick of reducing the bitmap size of the trees! Sounds good. I'll try it. Aren't the trees a bit too large in FS9? Can that also be fixed?

Cees
Click to expand...

Exactly Cees, that is what you will be fixing too!

You already know this, but for others trying the trick; always remember to reduce by halving or they wont show- that means reducing the ALPHA too!

So if the default are 1024 x 1024 bitmaps, you will reduce to 512 x 512 bitmaps or even 256 x 256 bitmaps.

Our tree size will be halved in the sim, with each reduction (I'm with 512 x 512 bitmaps mostly) but have tried smaller with good results for some fs places.

The results will be;

1. tree areas have far denser, better coverage (fs is putting double the trees everywhere cos it thinks 1024 x 1024).

2. Trees will look far more natural in size even when right next to your aircraft.

3. The optical reduction actually has a sharpennig effect making trees more delicate in appearance, more 'leafy' instead of 'blobs'.

4. You can now set for less dense autogen settings and still have excellent coverage.

5. You'll get better computer performance as a result of the smaller bitmaps.

Green-up your sims guys! Enjoy!


Edit: If anyone is not familiar with bitmaps, PM your email and I'll send a set of mine, ready-reduced.
 
that's correct Cees...

Cees Donker said:
Nigel,

There are only five bitmaps to reduce, correct?



Cees
Click to expand...


treesFA, treeshw, treesSP, treesSU, treeswi

Make sure you make back-ups of the originals before replacing anything...in case you don't like the results.

For those just wanting to take a quick look at the difference, Terry is right about Feng's Tree Generator (thanks Terry!).

It has the default files already reduced. its a tiny freeware download available at all the main sites. I got mine a few years ago at Simviation and never looked back. It was just the beginning!
 
Hey thanks guys this worked great! I have way more trees. I like to fly in the mountainous regions of Western Canada, the ratio of deciduous trees to coniferous trees is like 10:1. How can I have more fir trees instead of leafy trees for that region? Any ideas?

Doug
 
Two basic ways Doug:

1. Use the freeware 'EZ-Landclass' editor. You will be able to edit the areas of interest, changing the landclass values to something more suitable; 'Mountainous Conifer Forest' for example. Its pretty fast, BUT...Canada goes waaaay up to Alaska. And that's a lot of real-estate to edit!
I mention EZ-Landclass because of its great simplicity. If you are familiar with SBuilder, that's an even better option; you can edit even larger areas.

Just begin with a few areas you like flying in, then take it from there (Athens wasn't built in a day).

2.Find the landclass value mostly used in your areas to be forested, then using the annotator tool found within the Autogen_SDK, edit the tile set with the trees you wish.
A word of caution with this method; other areas using the same tiles globally will also be affected.
 
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