Help for a Geoconvert beginner

May I suggest waiting for a couple of weeks? Aeroscenery

Help Creating AeroScenery (aka Ortho4FS2)

should make GeoConverting a children's game.

Kind regards, Michael

Quote from pmb

May I suggest waiting for a couple of weeks? Aeroscenery

Help Creating AeroScenery (aka Ortho4FS2)

should make GeoConverting a children's game.

Kind regards, Michael

I'm afraid not. Hervé doesn't want to make a square carpet of aerial pictures in the middle of nowhere : he wants to make the junction between 2 existing sceneries.

Therefore the big challenge is to tailor cut masks according to the existing sceneries and then edit the colors of the aerial photo textures he can gather to both match the Swiss DLC and Orbx's LOWI. No automated tool can do that for him unfortunately.

For the junction with the Swiss DLC, the best would be if IPACS would be neat enough to generate a simple mask outside their scenery. Hervé would just need to invert it and use it as a mask layer for his orthophotos => they would fit exactly to the Swiss DLC border without overlap.

Without getting such a mask from IPACS, Hervé can spend days hand tailoring the border of his scenery to match the Swiss DLC.

Afterwards, editing the color will be tricky. I did that zone by the past for P3D, based on Virtual Earth material : the junction with Switzerland was quite good, but quickly you get patches of winterish aerial photos.

Flugwerk made a beautiful scenery for Austria - I wish they would publish it for AFS2 too... LOWI keeps otherwise quite useless unfortunately, being isolated in the middle of nothing. There's no place to fly to and from.

Cheers

Antoine

Quote from Trespassers

Therefore the big challenge is to tailor cut masks according to the existing sceneries and then edit the colors of the aerial photo textures he can gather to both match the Swiss DLC and Orbx's LOWI. No automated tool can do that for him unfortunately.

In that case (when AeroScenery is released) select the grid squares between Switzerland and Innsbruck and let AeroSecenrery generate some 12k px PNGs from your chosen image source.

Edit the PNGs, make the bits you don't need transparent, tweak the colours as required.

Run AeroScenery again and let it run GeoConvert.

It can't fully automate the process but it will be much easier than with FS Earth Tiles.

Quote from Trespassers

I'm afraid not. Hervé doesn't want to make a square carpet of aerial pictures in the middle of nowhere : he wants to make the junction between 2 existing sceneries.

Therefore the big challenge is to tailor cut masks according to the existing sceneries and then edit the colors of the aerial photo textures he can gather to both match the Swiss DLC and Orbx's LOWI. No automated tool can do that for him unfortunately.

For the junction with the Swiss DLC, the best would be if IPACS would be neat enough to generate a simple mask outside their scenery. Hervé would just need to invert it and use it as a mask layer for his orthophotos => they would fit exactly to the Swiss DLC border without overlap.

Without getting such a mask from IPACS, Hervé can spend days hand tailoring the border of his scenery to match the Swiss DLC.

I don't think this will work either unfortunately. Since AeroFly's imagery is broken into discrete tiles, you can't have two of the same tile in order to overlap them with masks. The only way I think this would work is if the scenery you want to 'blend' with is only converted up to a low-res level, say like level 12, and then you add your overlapping scenery at levels 13-15, for example. But even then you will not see what you want when you are far away and only the level 12 tiles are shown.

Quote from qwerty42

I don't think this will work either unfortunately. Since AeroFly's imagery is broken into discrete tiles, you can't have two of the same tile in order to overlap them with masks. The only way I think this would work is if the scenery you want to 'blend' with is only converted up to a low-res level, say like level 12, and then you add your overlapping scenery at levels 13-15, for example. But even then you will not see what you want when you are far away and only the level 12 tiles are shown.

For the Swiss DLC it works quite nicely on the French Border in Geneva, provided that you compile your aerial pictures up to level 14, but I used a self-made mask (_blend pictures) following the Franco-Swiss border and overlap the Swiss DLC whenever a texture reaches beyond the official border. Note : at that time Geoconvert used aic instead of aid config file, but thye're similar.

https://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2017/…ture-source.jpg

On LOWI side, the key will be to overlap their low res scenery with higher res pictures.

Another "piece of cake" will be the Bodensee (lake of Constance) that features electric blue hand painted colors on the Swiss side and low res satellite pixel jam on German and Austrian sides.

Same issue on for the lac Léman (lake Geneva).

In other words, Aeroscenery may only help getting source material, which FSET already does in a couple of clicks. The generated inf file contains all data you need for editing the AID and TMC files, this is the easy part of the job.

The real tough part is to manually tailor cut an enjoyable scenery out of it.

Cheers

Antoine

If I'm undestanding this problem correctly, there is a color balance issue with existing and new imagery. I'm thinking of processing the color of the downloaded tiles with 2D linear interpolation between the color balances of the bounding areas. Then the new tiles should no longer 'stick out', no 'steps' in color balance of neighboring tiles of different sets.

Just give me some time, I have a ton of things to read/comprehend about the workflow/tools.

nickhod, I can try to lend a hand in some smaller tasks if you are interested. I'm not a pro at C# but I've worked with some GUI programming before.

I've just bought Orbx Innsbruck (been meaning to for a while) so I'll use this "fill in the gaps" scenario as a test case for AeroScenery.

If I can create some pleasing results without a major amount of work I'll stick up a YouTube video showing the process.

I'm still not clear how Aerofly decides what to show on top if it has multiple scenery files for the same grid square, for the same level. I believe it does load all of them. (?)

Assuming it does (I might be wrong) if you could get things to layer in this order

OrbX Lowi

Swiss DLC

AeroScenery Austria download

There would be no need to create transparency, since the transparency of OrbX Lowi and Swiss DLC would blend into the downloaded scenery "underneath".

Quote from nickhod

I'm still not clear how Aerofly decides what to show on top if it has multiple scenery files for the same grid square, for the same level.

This is still unclear to me and yet undocumented.

Cheers

Antoine

Quote from Kisvakond

I can try to lend a hand in some smaller tasks if you are interested. I'm not a pro at C# but I've worked with some GUI programming before.

Happy to have any help. The source is here...

https://github.com/nickhod/aeroscenery

I'm probably OK with the image part of things, but I'd like for the tool to do higher resolution terrain / elevation data also, in the way that Ortho4XP does.

If you wanted to research what Ortho4XP grabs for elevation (if you speak Python) and document it, maybe write some test code that would all help.

Code for OrthoXP is here (well, a fork) https://github.com/voyageur/Ortho4XP

When AeroScenery is out in a week or so, there will be some documentation work to do also.

Quote from Trespassers

This is still unclear to me and yet undocumented.

Cheers

Antoine

drhotwing1 (IPACS)

Could you shed any light on this?

Quote from nickhod

...

If you wanted to research what Ortho4XP grabs for elevation (if you speak Python) and document it, maybe write some test code that would all help.

Code for OrthoXP is here (well, a fork) https://github.com/voyageur/Ortho4XP

When AeroScenery is out in a week or so, there will be some documentation work to do also.

Sure, I'll hop on the Ortho4XP topic and I can also help in the documentation.

Quote from Kisvakond

Sure, I'll hop on the Ortho4XP topic and I can also help in the documentation.

Great! I should say, it doesn't have to follow Ortho4XP at all. The general questions are:

- Where can we get high res elevation data for each country

- How can we download that in an automated way

- Per source above, how can it be imported into Aerofly in an automated way

I just haven't had time to look at it.

Quote from Kisvakond

If I'm undestanding this problem correctly, there is a color balance issue with existing and new imagery. I'm thinking of processing the color of the downloaded tiles with 2D linear interpolation between the color balances of the bounding areas. Then the new tiles should no longer 'stick out', no 'steps' in color balance of neighboring tiles of different sets.

Just give me some time, I have a ton of things to read/comprehend about the workflow/tools.

Balancing colors on grabbed sources like google or bing is the major problem!

Here are the results of my research on "How to" to follow if you wish to automate all this. it may not be the best solution but it could work..

for more info, do some search on google: "segmentation", "Color Matching", "Computer Vision", "OpenCV library"

Here is a simple example where the delimitation between the different colorimetry is obvious to the eye, it is very schematic and simplified:

Source image:

[Blocked Image: https://tof.cx/images/2018/05/02/8e29c8c2d63bc834ece921791bee160e.jpg]

first step: "Segmentation"

[Blocked Image: https://tof.cx/images/2018/05/02/6c296b169ae975eb668468571a9ff67a.jpg]

[Blocked Image: https://tof.cx/images/2018/05/02/60e7e56bd6e068735aad9de19e579e47.jpg]

Second step: "Color Matching"

[Blocked Image: https://tof.cx/images/2018/05/02/31610cff0e5523b0aaa0a2bef11e6d32.jpg]

[Blocked Image: https://tof.cx/images/2018/05/02/6eac839649f96f11f23bb4689781e77a.jpg]

[Blocked Image: https://tof.cx/images/2018/05/02/8ded261919f7e5d78e9c65bd58535a59.jpg]

The hardest part is defining the problem areas. They don't fall neatly into image tile boundaries and often have blended edges.

Once you know that the rest is relatively straightforward:

1) Create an image with the problem areas removed, transparency in their place

2) Create a transparent background image with just the problem areas

3) Measure the RBG / HSL of image (1)

4) Adjust RGB / HSL of image (2)

5) Put the images back together

This library would do all those steps, http://www.aforgenet.com/framework/features/

Maybe its edge recognition classes can find the problem areas too, we'll have to give it a try.

Quote from vogel69

...

Here are the results of my research on "How to" to follow if you wish to automate all this. it may not be the best solution but it could work..

Great input as always!

Quote from nickhod

The hardest part is defining the problem areas. They don't fall neatly into image tile boundaries and often have blended edges.

You got it exactly. And that's for the raw photos you grab from the net.

In case you have to match the colors with an existing neighbouring DLC (e.g. Switzerland DLC or Orbx LOWI in this case), then you don't have those sources

Cheers

Antoine

Quote from Trespassers

You got it exactly. And that's for the raw photos you grab from the net.

In case you have to match the colors with an existing neighbouring DLC (e.g. Switzerland DLC or Orbx LOWI in this case), then you don't have those sources

Cheers

Antoine

Let this be our next problem after we solved what we can on our plate, ok?

I assume one can first do a test run with just one tile to import, which will go fast and the difference becomes apparent. Then we can have a manual adjustment option that can be applied to all tiles or e.g. color correction values for the N/S/E/W side of the bounding box can be given and applying them as a linear interpolation so the imported tiles would blend between their bounding sides or edges gradually so the new tiles will 'blend' the color diff between the sorrounding tile sets. Thoughts?