Community standard for releasing streetlight auto gen?

  • Not sure how this will be perceived. First of all I want to say that if you contribute, plan to, you are awesome and I thank you for your efforts. Greatly appreciated. It's wonderful to have a community help and contribute autogen for everyone to simply download and install. Now i'm not the biggest fan of having streetlights all over areas that they would not be. This would require some touch up work but I feel it would benefit everyone. Also using the updated lighting script would help make lights look alot better. My two cents..

    Examples. Old Script and Not Edited

    Example: Updated Script and Edited ( Random lights placed in rural area to mimic house lights)

    In the end it's about time. Most of this cultivation business involves time and alot of it.

  • Hi,

    thanks for addressing this topic.

    I completely agree with you and find a continuous lighting of all streets very disturbing.

    But as you mentioned, changing this means a lot of manual work.

    My current workflow:

    1. Download a certain area from openstreetmap.org

    2. Open this file with JOSM

    3. Delete just all content between populated areas.

    4. Run scenProc on the remaining streets in cities and towns.

    I don't have separate light spots with this method, but the houses have a slight night lighting texture.

    If someone has a less time consuming workflow, feel free to publish it. ;)

  • I have the same workflow however, my area has zero building data so I have to map out buildings before your step 4.^^ As for the separate light spots, I just make a random short "Key - Highway/ Value - Residental" in JOSM. I find placing very few with a lower height and brightness value helps fill the voids between cities/towns. Thank you for your reply. I'm glad to hear your opinion on the matter.

  • A good argument!

    It would be nice to have a ScenProc script which erases (or inhibits) the streetlights, if the density of houses is falling below a given limit.

    Especially for areas with good OSM data this could be a big help. So maybe an attribute which is automated set, when the house density is big enough and then allows the street light to be generated. Also some (but only few) random lights at house positions could be generated outside of this high density areas.

    Maybe crispy136 has an idea, how this can be realized?

    Cheers,

    Thomas

    Cheers, Thomas


  • I've actually thought it might be good for Ipacs to establish a "base" streetlight scheme for at least the (entire) United States. Right now, as 3d party sceneries are created, everyone is just doing their own thing, which means as you jump from place to place, lighting quality varies widely, from very varied, to simple mono-colored grids and everything in between.

    Eventually, it might be good to see at least a baseline standard emerge.

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  • ZoSoChile

    Ok, got your workflow.

    I do no longer use OSM buildings, I completely rely on the USBuildingFootprints.

    I have a workflow to extract the desired area from the Microsoft data and process them with scenProc.

    TomSimMuc

    Yeah, would be good to have a kind of attribute for scenProc. I think about a polygon around areas with a certain building density, like the city borders. So we could add a value to the streetlines, like 'in locality/outside locality'.

    HiFlyer

    I'm afraid this will not happen. Think about the enormous dimension of the USA and about the possibility, that aerofly will never cover the entire USA in a higher ground level resolution. We'll have to live with different approaches, but this makes it even interesting. :)

    Rodeo

  • Rodeo

    exactly. But the clou in my approach is, that this area should be generated automatically, based on building density.

    Of cause as source also the USBuildingFootprint could be possible for this and affect the "lights based on OSM streets" generation.

    Having an automated algorithm could help to get similar light distribution results from all cultivations.

    Cheers, Thomas


    Edited once, last by TomSimMuc (November 16, 2018 at 3:31 PM).

  • Nice thoughts and thank you for inspirations. :) Automatism is good for huge areas and help to reduce manual worktime.

    Wish for Aerofly FS 2/4:

    - Flightpath recording on hard drive and replay in sim from different view points

    - Smoke for aerobatic planes

    - Multiplayer or at least watching other people flying sitting on ground or inside tower

  • Nick's AeroScenery tool may be the vehicle to help drive some kind of lighting standards - I think Nick is trying to tackle the auto-cultivation stuff in 2019.

    I think IPACS default lighting is too bright and too white (needs more "warm" light colors) and needs more space between the lights. We've got to remember the graphics engine currently does not create any illumination from these light points so our goal for street lights is to add to the realism without adding anything unrealistic (too many lights, too bright, too white, etc) that breaks the immersion.

    Check out this actual Denver night video from the air -

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    The major streets are brighter than the neighborhood streets but the default ScenProc examples have them all at max brightness. I made a post back in Sept about how to fine tune the ScenProc lights ( Creating Street Lights with Traffic Signals from OSM data )

    I tried to replicate the Denver look by making the freeways the brightest and then gradually dimming each street type - I also adjusted the light colors (more warm lights less pure white) and I increased the distance between the lights. Here's the resulting lights template for ScenProc ...

    # enter the path and file name of the osm file to use to generate lights

    ImportOGR|C:\(USER)\Documents\Aerofly Tools\ScenProc Cultivation Tool\Map Downloads\mapKTKI.osm|*|highway|NOREPROJ

    #

    # Interstates, tollways, freeways

    PlacePointsAlongLine|highway="motorway"|SINGLE|200;250|6;6|0|String;point|mlight|hdg

    CreateAF2Light|point="mlight"|1.0;0.6;0.0|100|0;0;1|20

    # Major city roads

    PlacePointsAlongLine|highway="primary"|SINGLE|300;350|0;0|0|String;point|plight|hdg

    CreateAF2Light|point="plight"|0.8;0.5;0.0|50|0;0;1|15

    # Minor city roads

    PlacePointsAlongLine|highway="secondary"|SINGLE|300;350|0;0|0|String;point|slight|hdg

    CreateAF2Light|point="slight"|0.7;0.6;0.5|30|0;0;1|10

    # Minor city roads

    PlacePointsAlongLine|highway="tertiary"|SINGLE|300;350|0;0|0|String;point|tlight|hdg

    CreateAF2Light|point="tlight"|0.6;0.36;0.0|20|0;0;1|7

    # Residential roads

    PlacePointsAlongLine|highway="residential"|SINGLE|50;100|0;0|0|String;point|rlight|hdg

    CreateAF2Light|point="rlight"|0.4;0.24;0.0|10|0;0;1|5

    # Residential roads

    PlacePointsAlongLine|highway="living_street"|SINGLE|50;100|0;0|0|String;point|llight|hdg

    CreateAF2Light|point="llight"|0.4;0.24;0.0|10|0;0;1|5

    # Traffic signals

    CreateAF2Light|highway="traffic_signals" And FRAND<=0.5 |1.0;0.0;0.0|2|0;0;1|5

    CreateAF2Light|highway="traffic_signals" And FRAND>0.5 |0.0;1.0;0.0|2|0;0;1|5

    # enter the path and file name of the resulting lights toc file

    ExportTOC|C:\(USER)\Documents\Aerofly Tools\ScenProc Cultivation Tool\Output|KTKI-lights

    I don't know if the script above solves the small town issue and even big cities can have different color mixes if some have upgraded to the whiter looking LED street lights. I do agree a lighting standards template would be helpful so newcomers don't have to go through the fine-tuning that many of us have spent hours doing. Maybe Nick will comment on his lights cultivation plan.

  • VR adds even more complications. In VR, the brightness, and even the color of the lights can change depending on your AA and Supersampling settings.

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  • Good point HiFlyer.

    Ideally Nick's 2019 AeroScenery would have a VR or Monitor-only checkbox so that the appropriate script is run. Light diameter makes a big difference - for VR, it needs to be as small as possible so each light isn't a big blurry blob (due to the lower VR screen resolutions) but those same lights look undersized / too dim on a monitor.

  • I do no longer use OSM buildings, I completely rely on the USBuildingFootprints.

    I have a workflow to extract the desired area from the Microsoft data and process them with scenProc.

    Rodeo, I plan to give USBuildingFootprints a try. Any tips for extracting an area and getting it into osm format for scenProc?

  • kenventions

    yes, please try it. I'm very pleased with the overall quality of the data.

    Since the original Microsoft files are too big for direct processing, I found a site with smaller data portions.

    But this requires some preparing steps.

    Follow my script here to define the area of interest.

    _info.pdf

    This is my area of Washington North (WaN) with 130.000 buildings.

    The accuracy and completeness is really good.

    It would be so great to have more attributes with these data, like height, roof shape etc.

    Regards

    Rodeo

  • I could have sworn that I saw a program that reconciled the Microsoft and osm data and apparently combined them.

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