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Can someone make a scenery for Dover Cliffs?

The fights were normally at over 10,000' as well, with the Spitfire pilots trying to peer through misted up windscreens to find an enemy that kept vanishing into the cloud. It's not until you hear about the ratio of fighters to bombers that the Luftwaffe hierarchy insisted on that you understand why so many German bomber stayed parked on their bases. Four fighters for every bomber? Fighters (Bf109) to protect fighters (Bf110) because they had proven so vulnerable when used incorrectly?

It's interesting to note that the most successful user of the Bf110, which when used correctly was absolutely devastating, was the United States... Only they called their Bf110s "P-38 Lightning". ;)

That's a very well done image, though, Bob. :)
 
IanP said:
It's interesting to note that the most successful user of the Bf110, which when used correctly was absolutely devastating, was the United States... Only they called their Bf110s "P-38 Lightning". ;)
Click to expand...

The Bf-110 was totally useless as a fighter, but rig it with bombs or a radar and it'll be well worth the production cost.

Also, bear in mind that the Bf-110 was conceived at a time at which military planners were drooling all over those new and fancy bombers which could outrun fighters and would "always get through".
Just like the RAF paid heavily for that attitude in their early raids on northern Germany, the Luftwaffe paid for their missed planning from Poland all to the BoB.
 
The Bf110 was not a bad fighter, it was an interceptor seriously misused as a dogfighter. Use it to "bounce" an enemy formation, or allow it to fly in, blast, then run, and it was lethal. Try and dogfight with it, it had lost before it started because it couldn't turn as tightly or change speed as quickly. In other words, exactly the same as the vast majority of WW2 twin engined fighters.

By the time the Lightning was in full scale production, that lesson had been learned and the US tactics reflected that - Lightnings used height to generate speed, blasted their opponent with a hard volley, then zoom climbed back to altitude. Had the Luftwaffe not tried to treat the Bf110 like a Bf109, then it would have been a lot more successful. The German High Command also made the very stupid mistake of trying to tie the fighters to the bombers, thus taking away every advantage they could get.

The same happened on both sides. Politics and power games between various branches and officers caused battles to be won or lost far more than the equipment and skill of the actual combatants did.
 
IanP said:
The same happened on both sides. Politics and power games between various branches and officers caused battles to be won or lost far more than the equipment and skill of the actual combatants did.
Click to expand...

Well, the Reich had the problem that the biggest idiots weren't in the officer ranks but right atop of the food and decision chain.

You can easily get rid of an idiotic general, but try getting rid of that idiot running the whole country and military...
 
We didn't get rid of the idiotic General (or Air Vice Marshal, anyway). We got rid of Park and Dowding, who knew what they were doing, instead, then replaced them with Leigh-Mallory who made every mistake that everyone else had avoided and continued to do so for the rest of the war. But he was friends with Bomber Command, who didn't like Dowding and Park because they had proven The Bomber Will Always Get Through to be false...

Argh! Politics! Or Argh! Politicians! for that matter.
 
I would have given anything to peeve Bomber Command off enough at that time, so that Butcherhouse Harris would've never ever gotten his way...

History really is a S.O.B. at times.
 
OK, I experimented making scenery of the White Cliffs of Dover using the best DEM and orthophotos I could lay my hands on. These resulted in a 1m mesh and 7cm textures (i.e. maximum for FSX). The results are shown here. They are an improvement on VFR GenX and work especially well anywhere the cliffs aren't near-vertical (first shot), but anywhere the cliff is near-vertical there is no substitute for a blended 3D object. No surprises there!!

Any thoughts/opinions/abuse...??

cheers

Andy

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I always thought it amazing that MS could get the Dover cliffs in CFS 1, but nothing else in the FS series.
 
Thanks for your appreciative comments guys. There is little doubt this is better than other existing scenery, but (besides the first shot) the screenshots highlight the inherent limitations of simply drapping imagery over terrain. You can increase the resolution as much as you like (with a big penalty in file size BTW, this short stretch of coast weighs in at ~250Mb, now multiply that for the whole of the UK!), but ultimately vertical cliffs require the 3D object approach...
 
Looking really good Airtrooper.
IMO it would be OK to use a bit of artistic licence at the spots where it has problems and make them a little less vertical than they should be IRL.
 
i have never seen them from the air untill yesterday
Andy they look great!
H:guinness:
 
Looking good! Once you color match with the surroundings and do the blend/water mask, I think it will look great! You should be able to do some manual retouching on the areas where the green is bleeding over the verticals.

I looked at the Asterdem mesh and made it into a 3dsMax model, but it wasn't too vertical at all and it looked like it would take a career to move all the points to look right.

Your work is outstanding!

Jim
 
Ah Jim, you win the prize for spotting I hadn't done any blending/masking!! :medals:

I did think about spending the extra time to do that at the start, but then I remembered the 80/20 rule and told myself "this is just an experiment". :stop: If I were going to take it any further I'd go back and do the blending/masking (and retouching)...

I've got to ask myself, is there enough demand to justify the work, vs other projects I have on the boil...?
 
Jim,

Wouldn't retouching still cause a problem....

I could retouch at 7cm sample spacing and make sure the green grass is dead-on the edge of the cliff, not drapped over it... but what about when others are flying with a 1m scenery setting (or another combination of mesh vs. texture resolution).... then green grass could still get drapped over the edge, I reckon. Am I correct???

Of course, I could recommend "this scenery is designed for 1m mesh and 7cm texture resolution", but then not everyone will have a PC capable of that and I'd like to be accomodating...

Many thanks

Andy
 
Willy said:
I always thought it amazing that MS could get the Dover cliffs in CFS 1, but nothing else in the FS series.
Click to expand...

I have to agree with Willy here. Why do the cliffs look so dam good in CFS and that was the last time they looked good?

LouP
 
Andy, it looks fantastic. On the texture resolution, you could probably get away with considerably lower res images. In fact, 30cm/px would be adequate, or even 60cm, given the fact that the cliffs are made to be flown over rather than rolled upon. Once you're even 1000' in the air, the 7cm res is wasted detail. The more important factor is the high-res mesh, which I think you've hit spot-on. It looks almost as though the waves breaking on the beach are forming a little ridge line in the mesh... do my eyes deceive me? You'll probably want to flatten that out. Once the blend and water masks are in place, this will be a very nice little addon. :ernae:
 
Andy,

When the sharp edges roll over, You'll still have a line defining verticality, which, from a distance will still look fine. Take a look at it on your machine with your mesh complexity lower. It really does look like it would only take a few tweaks to get where you want to be.

Cheers
 
It's an amazing piece of work.
Then you need to add Dover harbour, Dover castle, the radar station, heck, maybe even the Battle of Britain memorial ;-)

Cheers, Rob
 
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