Photoreal scenery?

[rich12545]

I have some mega and other photoreal sceneries. However I don't use them because they don't look all that real to me. Kind of blurry and a light green tinge. Flying between them and regular scenery produces a harsh border.

Anyhow, I was just wondering what others think of photoreal scenery.

 

[Daube]

The limited ground texture resolution of FS9 is a big problem for photoreal scenery. 5m/pixel is blurry.
Nevertheless, when the author adds a good autogen on top of those photoreal sceneries, the result can be really pleasing to the eye. Only thing is: photoreal sceneries have almost never any autogen at all, so you get only this big flat and blurry area.
It still looks really cool for high mountains and deserts, however.

When it comes to the colors, don't forget that those pictures are taken from an airplane or sattellite. The colors will be impacted by the weather at that time. Normally, the photoscenery creators try to limit this impact by modifying the pictures prior to use them in sceneries, to ensure that all the concerned zones blend correctly together.

The problem is exactely the same in FSX. Although FSX allows a much greater ground texture resolution (up to 7cm/pixel), if you have no autogen or if the original pictures were not modified/arranged by the creators, it will not look so good, at least not a low altitude...

 

[sandar]

I fly mostly VFR over the UK and have Just Flights photo scenery installed with lots and lots of autogen added, not just trees, but buildings, shipping, vehicles etc. I mainly fly low and slow and am very satisfied with what I have.

It is true there can be an attack of the blurries, although these can be minimised by editing the FS9 CFG file, but are more of a nuisance when flying at speed faster that about 180 kts. Detail is lost at altitudes lower than 1000'. All in all, I prefer to fly over photo scenery than the default scenery, but only with scenery and autogen added.

 

[rich12545]

I'm trying to understand about the scenery and autogen added. Is this something that's done in the scenery program? Or is it something I add? Or do I just slide the autogen all the way to the right?

I like to fly at about 100 kts, give or take and at about 3-4000 ft. My favorite plane is the Aerosoft Super Cub.

 

[sandar]

As far as I understand how autogen works with photo real scenery, it all depends how the developer built the scenery. I have everything maxed out which make no difference to frame rates etc because there is much less of it than in the default scenery. It may become an issue if you leave an area with photo real scenery and fly into a default area, where you will find buildings all over the place.

If you add a photo real scenery and want to add a scenery package (airfield, city, landmark etc) you add it in the normal way in the add-on scenery folder. Any autogen files go into the photo real scenery, scenery and texture folders. Most of the files are texture files that you simply overwrite. It is up to you if you want to back up the original files first, but be warned, there could be thousands of them. I found it better to reinstall the original files if I wanted to, although I have only done that once and that was because there were some missing texture files that greyed out a few square miles of countryside. Once the error had been rectified, I overwrote the files again and have been using them since.

I have a program called UKVFR which allows the user to place autogen where it is wanted. I also downloaded a lot of VFR sceneries and made my own with EZ-scenery. I spent hundreds of hours doing it which is one of the reasons why I still have FS9 (that and my PC probably won't run FSX as I would want it to run).

As I fly mainly in the UK and Europe, I do not know much about photo real sceneries available for other parts of the globe other than I am aware they exist.

I first downloaded a trial package to try and was hooked fairly quickly.


http://walhalla.mine.nu/fs2004.php

 

[Tom Clayton]

Photo-real stuff looks OK from FL200, but when I land at an airport done that way, it just looks like a poor imitation of some Julian Beever sidewalk art. I prefer something with 3D static objects.

 

[rich12545]

It looks like it's just personal taste. I think, on the whole, I prefer it without for now.

Sandar, thanks very much for that link. What a bunch of gems.

 

[FengZ]

i dont like the megascenery stuff, because they are super blurry. The only one that's ok is the Hawaii set.

however, the FranceVFR series are really good! But you have to get the autogen addons for it to look nice. Their photos are sharp and color adjusted to fit the sim and autogen (whereas megascenery just use stock satellite photos without touch ups....the color palettes are nasty).

Some of the Godzone stuff is nice too...

Godzone:

FranceVFR:

and there's always TileProxy:

-feng

 

[adhockey]

Incredible screenshots, Feng.