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Tile Servers for Photoreal Scenery mapping

falcon409

falcon409

SOH-CM-2025
Ok, I seemed to have hit a wall here with the basic tile servers available with SBuilderX (GoogleEarth, YahooMaps, VirtualEarth). Google is about the only one with decent color and resolution, but areas I can zoom into with the standalone Google Earth on my desktop are not available if I use the tile server. Yahoo Maps allows me to get closer but the resolution is terrible and everything has a weird green look to it and Virtual Earth shows normal color mapping until you zoom in and then everything goes to grayscale.

I was doing pretty well in Maine, but now that I've moved outside that region, nothing is working well enough to use for photoreal. Anyone else have any other tile server dll's that I can look into that will plug into SBuilderX or some other way of securing highres aerial tiles for this use?
 
OzX forims might be able to help you. While there mission is Oz they also have a world scenery section. They use SbuilderX for almost all there scenery.
 
The USGS server has lots of orthoimagery. They won't load automatically in SbuilderX and typically need to be reprojected, but it isn't hard to do. Some of the areas are huge. The Tucson scenery I did used the USGS Pima County images. I only used about half of it and the scenery is 5500 square miles. Most of the images are 1m/pixel or better.
 
I guess that's the way to go. I'm looking for a reliable source for photoscenery and the few that are available within SBuilderX are not. I do have a question as well. . .the autogen vegetation that you add to your scenery. . .how is that done? I've been using Instant Scenery vegetation, which looks very good but isn't seasonal. It was suggested that I use the Autogen Annotator inside the SDK, but I have had no luck understanding how that works, even with the tutorial, it seems very vague about intermediate steps.

Just wondering.
 
The Annotator is a strange bird, no doubt. You start the annotator and in the second window, open autogendescriptions.xml. Load the photo BGL in the main window. To place vegetation, click on the type in the second window, then assign that type in the small window that sits on top of the main window. From there you can draw rectangles or polys to place the vegetation. I like to draw a small square for a tree, copy it, then paste it with the A key. It comes out a lot more natural than drawing large rectangles or polys that end up too dense. For a forest, I'll copy a group of small squares, then paste them based on the density in the photo. It's a LOT faster than placing models :)

Shoot me a PM with your phone number and I can give you a call tomorrow to walk you through it. I'm semi-retired, so I'm generally here all day.
 
kjb said:
The USGS server has lots of orthoimagery. They won't load automatically in SbuilderX and typically need to be reprojected, but it isn't hard to do. Some of the areas are huge. The Tucson scenery I did used the USGS Pima County images. I only used about half of it and the scenery is 5500 square miles. Most of the images are 1m/pixel or better.
Click to expand...
Ok, I've been to the USGS site and for a first timer on that site it's a maze with thousands of links and none very well explained. How do I get to the area that will contain the types of satellite imagery I'm looking for and then also, how do I convert what I find there to use for SBuilderX?

Thanks
 
I'm uploading a little tutorial and all the files for 0B2. I'll post links when it's finished.
 
kjb said:
. . . . .If you don't have Global Mapper, you can upload files to my site and I can reproject them and send them back.
Click to expand...

lol, I can tell ya. . .at $390 for Global Mapper, I won't ever be that serious about photoreal scenery, lol.
 
kjb i have created a .inf file but no matter how much i drag it onto the resample nothing is happening, any ideas why? or do you have a working .inf that you can post here and we copy into notepad and save as .inf....... just asking as i really want to try this method out as opposed to the Sbuilder method :ernae: any help would be great, and thanks.
 
Make sure you've created the "output" subdirectory in the directory containing the inf. A copy of the inf file should be in the zip file, in the USGS directory. The "output" subdirectory should already be there too.

After creating the bgl, it should be in the output directory. Then you can move it to the scenery directory.
 
ok what files do you need to drag onto the resample tool? as again dragging the inf onto it is producing nothing in the output:kilroy: it's got me stumped
 
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