Venting, lol (Autogen drives me nuts)

falcon409

falcon409

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Staff member
I like using the Autogen Annotator. . .it's relatively easy, quick and it affords me seasonal foliage rather than using scenery object foliage which never changes. There is a description either in the Annotator documentation or in the SDK that says that using the "polygon Region" function is a good way to fill large expanses of terrain with trees but you have less control over placement. It also says if you want to be "more precise", then the "Vegetation" function is what you want because you can place individual trees and have much better control over where they are placed and so on and so forth.

Not really. . .I am trying to finish up the Old Rhinebeck Scenery. It has a lot of scenery objects (roughly 60), all placed with Instant Scenery Ver3. All objects have been flagged in the IS3 menu to "allow autogen". I have placed the trees using the annotator, being careful to not overrun the walking paths, rwy, spectator bleachers and various hangars and buildings. . .there's a lot to work around. When I load the scenery, looks great, a little sparse in some areas, but otherwise pretty well matches the default scenery outside the Aerodrome. Then I load IS3 to move a building, add a building, add a static airplane and suddenly there are trees everywhere. . .sitting inside hangars, in the middle of the rwy, covering the bleachers and obliterating the walking paths. Yet you look at the annotator layout that is used for placement and there are no trees where these new trees are showing up.

I've been down this road before with other sceneries and have been told that the boundary boxes are what is keeping the autogen from showing under normal circumstances and that as soon as I load IS3, it disregards the boundary boxes and the actual coverage becomes visible. Well, if I've tagged every one of the 60+ objects to "allow Autogen". . . .then why don't they? It makes being "precise" more like guesswork than precision as I never know where the trees are gonna show up next. Also, with as many different settings as folks use to control autogen while in the sim. . .I have no way of knowing what is going to show and what isn't until people start complaining that there's a 80ft Oak tree in the middle of the runway. Other than a few more small buildings, this is all that's keeping this from being ready to send to Paul. :isadizzy:
 
I am no expert but why not load the BGLs in ADE to move the buildings, bit of backward and forwards as cannot see exactly until moved, does the problem occur if you do that? (or have I missed the point as what you are saying is above my head?!)

I have just started using Annotator myself, with photo-realistic scenery it rocks for placement.
 
P38man said:
I am no expert but why not load the BGLs in ADE to move the buildings, does the problem occur if you do that?
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Currently the scenery folder is close to 1gig with 11 different bgl "libraries", each one containing anywhere from 20 individual objects to just a few for various parts of the Aerodrome.:salute:
 
P38man said:
. . . . . .I have just started using Annotator myself, with photo-realistic scenery it rocks for placement.
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It rocks in so far as being able to place large amounts of various foliage over a wide area, but getting precise placement of single trees or bushes has not been the case for me.
 
falcon409 said:
Currently the scenery folder is close to 1gig with 11 different bgl "libraries", each one containing anywhere from 20 individual objects to just a few for various parts of the Aerodrome.:salute:
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Wow.

So I guess you have all the scenery done and now have tons of objects to place? Is that the situation?

Re: Annotator - same here. I use ADE for that (but am making "Summer only" scenery - hides bashfully..)<hides bashfully="">

I lay out a whole bunch of objects as markers in ADE so that when I put the big stuff in I will be close. Later I delete the markers. Funny I know, time-consuming I know but easy enough...(hides again). I have a 3 screen setup on the flight sim PC (1 screen showing FSX, 1 showing ADE and 1 showing modelconverterx and another PC showing google earth/map...lots of back and forth lol)
</hides>
 
falcon409 said:
I like using the Autogen Annotator. . .it's relatively easy, quick and it affords me seasonal foliage rather than using scenery object foliage which never changes. There is a description either in the Annotator documentation or in the SDK that says that using the "polygon Region" function is a good way to fill large expanses of terrain with trees
Click to expand...
I have now covered a few hundred thousand maybe its a million square miles by now in hand placed Autogen covering most now nearly every part and place in New Zealand - both payware and freeware and currently have my home city Christchurch, now a freeware 1GB file (this is available via PM), now have a team put together to shear the load , another scenery incoming being Whanganui and a few others in the pipeline .

You can do the quick method but my recommendation is create a template with the tree type required , select copy and paste and away you go, each placing is personal and your own signature , once the bulk is complete , obviously you no that already.




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It could be the default autogen poking through the background .bgl because the scenery doesn't refresh exclusion rectangles properly when tinkering with IS3.
 
Ed, I feel your pain, I go thru this everytime I place autogen around objects. I get so mad at MS when they didn't inculded seasonal changes with objects like we had in earlier versions, would have made life so much easier for us. What is even worse, but also helps in a way is to realize every user has different autogen settings so even though you try your best to create the perfect visual scenario with objects and vegetation in your scenery, that vision will change for the end user depending on their settings. So even though you may bet the perfect placement of that tree next to that building it will probably be gone in the users scenery, just design on max autogen, zone in close and get the placement the best you can
 
MCDesigns said:
Ed, I feel your pain, I go thru this everytime I place autogen around objects. I get so mad at MS when they didn't inculded seasonal changes with objects like we had in earlier versions, would have made life so much easier for us. What is even worse, but also helps in a way is to realize every user has different autogen settings so even though you try your best to create the perfect visual scenario with objects and vegetation in your scenery, that vision will change for the end user depending on their settings. So even though you may bet the perfect placement of that tree next to that building it will probably be gone in the users scenery, just design on max autogen, zone in close and get the placement the best you can
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Yea, the autogen I place will likely see untold numbers of variations by the time everyone applies their own personal settings, lol. I'm just going to attempt to at least keep the foliage away from walking paths, roads and along the showline at the Aerodrome. Thanks Michael.
 
Just an example of what I'm talking about. The first pic shows the Annotator screen, zoomed in to show where I placed individual trees. The sim screen next to it is what actually shows up with my autogen slider to max. The second pic shows what I get once I open Instant Scenery and load the scenery object file for Old Rhinebeck. Quite a difference! So the Objects, placed by Instant Scenery are blocking the autogen. . .which in turn only shows the actual autogen in it's entirety once I load the IS3 Program.
 
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