Creating terrain heightmaps

  • I attempted calculating this once as well and from what I recall my results were pretty similar (except I did it at 45 deg latitude). The one thing I wasn't sure of was if the effective resolution really does change with latitude, or if there was something in how Aerofly handles it that somehow makes it more uniform for all latitudes. I suppose this makes sense though, because orthoimagery is going to be artificially stretched at higher latitudes anyway, which reduces its effective resolution, so maybe the two effects cancel each other out.

    Now you've piqued my curiosity again... I might have to calculate this as a function of latitude and see how much it really varies. It is definitely useful knowledge to have, because there's no use in spending a ton of time downloading orthoimages at 1m/pixel resolution if you're only planning to convert them at level 13, for example.

  • Merci Antoine :)

    Toutes les sources utilisés sont de l'open data (IGN 50cm/pixels pour les photos Et IGN et Shom pour le MNT 1m/pixel).

    Les textures photos étaient déjà très homogènes au niveau colorimetrie, j'ai juste fait quelques retouches sur la couleur, effacé quelques nuages et j'ai un peu plus galéré sur les côtes.. . J'ai essayé d'atténuer les jonctions assez visible sur la mer, j'ai opté pour creer une large bande de mer profonde artificiellement autour des cotes, car avec le système de masque de AFS2 la transition était trop abrute. Je suis assez satisfait du résultat même si ce n'est pas parfais, c'est relativement propre. Cela m'a demandé un peu de travail mais l'avantage comme c'est du open source je pourrais partager avec les copains ;) ça vaux donc la peine de se donner un peu plus de mal sachant qu'en plus la surface traité est pas très grande donc cela reste raisonnable.

    Reste encore à bosser un peu sur l'autogen maintenant...

    -----------------------------------

    All sources used are open data (IGN 50cm / pixels for photos And IGN and Shom for DTM 1m / pixel).

    texture's colorimetry were already very homogeneous, I just did some touch-ups on color, cleared some clouds and I have a little more difficult on the coast ...

    I tried to blend junctions quite visible on the sea, & I opted to create a wide band of deep sea artificially around the coast, because with the AFS2 mask system the transition was too abrupt. I am quite satisfied with the result even if it is not perfect, it is relatively clean. It took me a bit of work but the advantage as it's "open data" I could share with friends ;) it's worth it to give a little more trouble knowing that in addition the treated surface is not very big so it is reasonable.

    let's work on autogen now...

    Edited once, last by vogel69 (March 24, 2018 at 6:54 PM).

  • Merci pour ces précisions !

    La Martinique, just like Corsica or Guadeloupe are excellent targets for starting a scenery since being rather small islands they live stand alone as a whole. The main issue is the lack of water texture in AFS2, making it very difficult to blend the deep sea pictures into the dark ocean.

    But what you did looks just gorgeous, congratulations! I wish you could post some screenshots with a better light, taken between 10h and 14h LT...

    And the fact it's all open source is... how to say... quite awesome news (understatement) ;)

    Salutations

    Antoine

    Config : i7 6900K - 20MB currently set at 3.20GHz, Cooling Noctua NH-U14S, Motherboard ASUS Rampage V Extreme U3.1, RAM HyperX Savage Black Edition 16GB DDR4 3000 MHz, Graphic Card Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 8GB, Power supply Corsair RM Series 850W, Windows 10 64 bit.

  • Merci ! very promising indeed ! Do I understand properly : you set your own "deep water texture" in the zone (like where the green aircraft is located in the upper screen) between coastal shallow water (fonds marins) and the default AF2 water texture ?

    What texture did you use then ? I need to develop such a texture for the French side of the Leman.

    For the rest, there are sure here and there little things to try improving, but it's already beautiful.

    Keep up the good work

    Antoine

    Config : i7 6900K - 20MB currently set at 3.20GHz, Cooling Noctua NH-U14S, Motherboard ASUS Rampage V Extreme U3.1, RAM HyperX Savage Black Edition 16GB DDR4 3000 MHz, Graphic Card Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 8GB, Power supply Corsair RM Series 850W, Windows 10 64 bit.

  • An enormous thanks and a big hug to you qwerty42 and of course IPACS team for this master piece of simulator :D Your tutorial is excellent and the result is amazing !

    My first tests on a French island of the Caribbean: Martinique ... From data of elevations of 1 meter! it's just huge !! a real pleasure for the eyes in VR

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    Super boulot vogel69

    Edited once, last by Maxime (March 26, 2018 at 12:47 AM).

  • Merci ! very promising indeed ! Do I understand properly : you set your own "deep water texture" in the zone (like where the green aircraft is located in the upper screen) between coastal shallow water (fonds marins) and the default AF2 water texture ?

    What texture did you use then ? I need to develop such a texture for the French side of the Leman.

    For the rest, there are sure here and there little things to try improving, but it's already beautiful.

    Keep up the good work

    Antoine

    Hi Antoine,

    You understood very well. I created my own deepwater ... Initially, I thought to create my deepwater texture by recovering a large sea area somewhere on the planet with FSearthTile. But finally I simply opted to fill my high seas with a plain color. It was simpler and finally closer to AFS2 deepwater. I made screenshot on AFS2's map to choose the color but as you can see the difference is clearly visible on the screenshot upper. On the other hand, in the simulator it jumps less to the eyes even if it is visible of course.

  • Good thinking. I haven't tried it out yet, but this way I could maybe get a start point that's close enough from the original Swiss DLC's lake color (ugly light blue).

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  • Hi vogel69

    I'm really and sincerely impressed by the graphic results you obtain flysimming over Martinique ! That's exactly the results each simmer would be pleased to play with, particularly in France (je ne parle pas de "cultivation" (!) pour l'instant...)

    And I'm glad too to know that you can use without any legal restriction IGN open data : that's a very big ang good surprise for me (meanwhile, on some French forums, people loudly claim that's this is completely illegal to do so in France).

    That's why, concerning French hexagonal & Corsica sceneries, I would be sure that we speak the same language : as far as I understand, you load raw IGN open data from IGN BD ORTHO 50 cm , including all French departments (see attachment) ? That's correct ? Without having to pay taxes or royalties as we "love" so much to do in our "cher" country ?

    By the way, what does mean "Shom for DTM 1m/pixel" ?

    Best regards,

    Pierre

  • This MESH thing is very interesting, however the gov servers are so dammed slow and right now not even accessible from here. I just wanted to try with one tile (region of Mammoth airport CA) which was about 250MB and I started the download. Indicated download time changed steadily between 11 hours and one day (!).

    Regards,

    Thomas

    i7-14700KF @ 5.6 GHz, Geforce RTX 4090, 32MB RAM, 1TB SSD M.2, 1TB SSD M.2, 2TB SSD M.2, 32" Monitor 4K, Pimax Crystal

  • This MESH thing is very interesting, however the gov servers are so dammed slow and right now not even accessible from here. I just wanted to try with one tile (region of Mammoth airport CA) which was about 250MB and I started the download. Indicated download time changed steadily between 11 hours and one day (!).

    That's strange... You're downloading from the USGS NED data I used in the tutorial? Are you located in the U.S.? For me it takes <1hr to download 4 of the 0.3 arc-second tiles, usually. It's not blazing fast but it's definitely not 11 hours either. Maybe give it a try at a different time, they might have limited bandwidth and others may be using it too at peak hours.

  • I tried again tonight swiss time and it took only a couple of minutes to download two files each 342 mb. So everything ok now, thanks. Thomas

    Regards,

    Thomas

    i7-14700KF @ 5.6 GHz, Geforce RTX 4090, 32MB RAM, 1TB SSD M.2, 1TB SSD M.2, 2TB SSD M.2, 32" Monitor 4K, Pimax Crystal

  • And I'm glad too to know that you can use without any legal restriction IGN open data : that's a very big ang good surprise for me (meanwhile, on some French forums, people loudly claim that's this is completely illegal to do so in France).

    It depends what we're talking about. Regarding orthophotos, only the 5m resolution is in free access for all usage. The 50cm resolution is in free access for "missions de service public".

    .


    If your're asking whether you may download and use them without any legal restriction, i'm not sure you could convince anybody that AFS2 is a "mission de service public", even if it does good four our souls... ;)

    Cheers

    Antoine

    Config : i7 6900K - 20MB currently set at 3.20GHz, Cooling Noctua NH-U14S, Motherboard ASUS Rampage V Extreme U3.1, RAM HyperX Savage Black Edition 16GB DDR4 3000 MHz, Graphic Card Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 8GB, Power supply Corsair RM Series 850W, Windows 10 64 bit.

  • Note: as pointed out by Vogel69, some "départements" are accessible under an "open licence" (licence ouverte).

    I'm no lawyer, but my interpretation for this licence ouverte is pretty much similar to the USGS data usage terms, i.e. we may use them for scenery making and free sharing, provided that we give proper source credits.

    https://www.data.gouv.fr/fr/datasets/bd-ortho-r-50-cm

    https://www.etalab.gouv.fr/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Licence_Ouverte

    http://professionnels.ign.fr/bdortho-50cm-par-departements

    My reading is, for areas that aren't covered with such an open licence, we must stick to the 5m/pixel resolution for the "tous usage" application...

    Cheers

    Antoine

    Config : i7 6900K - 20MB currently set at 3.20GHz, Cooling Noctua NH-U14S, Motherboard ASUS Rampage V Extreme U3.1, RAM HyperX Savage Black Edition 16GB DDR4 3000 MHz, Graphic Card Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 8GB, Power supply Corsair RM Series 850W, Windows 10 64 bit.

  • Maybe this might be useful: http://vterrain.org/Elevation/global.html

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  • Big thanks to querty42 for the tutorial. Particularly the part on .tfw (which does seem redundant)

    With new knowledge in hand and armed with some open source 1" height maps for the Alps I was able to turn this moto-cross course

    into this

    A great improvement!!

    There were some NotANumber pixels in the data that turned into space elevators when geoConverted, but QGIS has a Raster menu function that interpolates over those pixels and that fixed the problem.

    cheers

    /Stu

    i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz | ASUS Z170-A | 16Gb DDR4 | Samsung SSD 950 PRO NVME M.2 256GB | Samsung SSD 850 EVO 1TB | GeForce GTX 1080 Ti on GP102-A GPU | Oculus CV1 | Windows 10

  • I had asked that someone take a look at Norway for possible elevation improvements. TomSimMuc used the last few minutes he had prior to a vacation to send me an area around Bergen, Norway. The elevation file was simple enough to add to my scenry/elevation folder and make an astounding improvement over the pancake flat default Norway. I can't wait to see some more detailed and sharper meshes but this will keep me going for some time. Thanks Tom.

    I used the new FSCloudPort airport maker to add the Bergen and Stavanger airports and FSET to create a small area from Bergen to Stavanger. I also added FSET for the Oslo upper fjord, city and airport area. The quality of the city and the airport area is quite good, except some of the fjord water is a bit crappy.

    Here are some screenshots showing some elevations over and east of Bergen. I think Tom said this was 25m, saved as level 12.

    Regards,

    Ray

    Looking east over Bergen, Norway

    About 40 miles east of Bergen - see map below for exact area

  • I really enjoy seeing the results everyone is posting here!

    lenidcamper 'Moto-cross course' LOL ^^ That valley and the streets in it look much better now!

    The Norway shots look great too! It seems that anywhere with mountains and flat valley floors benefits a lot by refining the mesh. And it has a twofold effect by improving the appearance of the imagery too!