Project Lofoten_8, Norway

  • First time Aerofly FS2 pilot here - I purchased the sim a couple days ago because of VR and it was on sale, and I'm quite interested in seeing more of my home country Norway grow in the simulator.

    Is there any way I can help to get more of Norway going? Be it modeling and texturing assets or raw processing power to crunch through pixels and other data.

  • Hi OlaHaldor,

    I could do further extended cultivation.

    The critical and time consuming part however is to have a

    well photoshopped ortho scenery,

    Similar colors as the existing one,

    2.3m resolution and

    no clouds.

    Keeping the AFS2 raster to prevent masks.

    Mixing of Bing and Google is OK.

    Cheers, Thomas


  • I made these for use in X-Plane last year, if it's of any interest.
    The ferry is more typical for the western part of Norway, but the idea is it's not too hard to make a more Norwegian flare to these kind of vessels. :)

    I don't know if you're familiar with Hurtigruten; it's a fleet of ships that go all the way from Kirkenes in north to Bergen in south. Along the route is Honningsvåg which is part of Lofoten.

  • Hello Ola Haldor,

    you made some very nice professional looking models.

    This link to all the tools might be useful for you.

    Aerofly FS2 Cultivation data, apps, & tutorials links.

    Aeroscenery is the one tool to mass download ortho files.

    The stitched files then can be edited with photoshop or Gimp. Choose "40" to minimize the number of tiles to be edited


    This tutorial to edit coastlines also might be interesting:

    Editing the Coastlines Tutorial

    Cheers, Thomas


  • Just out of interest: Project Lofoten_11, Norway is the latest upload: will there be any more or has the project been finished?

  • Just out of interest: Project Lofoten_11, Norway is the latest upload: will there be any more or has the project been finished?

    At the end of last year (2019) I was unfortunately injured in my right shoulder. Therefore, it takes time with the last part of the Project Lofoten. I've finished 2 tiles - and I'm still slowly getting started on the third tile. There are some bad orthos in this area -

    so it will be some slow work. ;(

  • Take the time you need ... no stress ... when you say it will be uploadet ...sometime ...everything is ok, and we can wait :)

    mfg, Jens ... Flight-Sim.org

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  • The absolute best source is Here We Go maps. Very few clouds and hardly no color variation at all!

    Really good news. :thumbup:

    Getting access to good ortho is basically the biggest challenge. But perhaps another challenge is just as demanding: How can we combine "Here We Go maps" with the excellent AeroScenery tool? :?:

    Edit:

    Have researched more closely - and this orthos looks amazing. It can really speed up the production of great scenery.

  • Really good news. :thumbup:

    Getting access to good ortho is basically the biggest challenge. But perhaps another challenge is just as demanding: How can we combine "Here We Go maps" with the excellent AeroScenery tool? :?:

    Yep, I can add HereWeGo maps as an image provider for AeroScenery.

    What I can't figure out is how to get rid of the road network overlay on the aerial view. Maybe mikced knows?

    AeroScenery - Easily create photoreal scenery for Aerofly

  • Just an update on the editing process I was exploring for scenery. I was using my amateur background in image manipulation to try out image stacking of the imagery from 3 sources. The idea being that the average of each scene is used to form the final image. For those not familiar, this means if one source has clouds in one specific place and the others don't, these clouds will be removed from the final image leaving the consistent ground scenery in place. It also means, if there is a colour variation between the sources, this can be averaged out or you can opt to use the darker pixels from each image as a way of providing a more consistent final image. This is all done by simply loading the 3 sources into a capable image editor and effectively clicking an icon without the need for hours of manual editing. The trade off with this approach is the need to download and process 3 or more different sources in the first place.

    I did this on a sample region yesterday and it is very effective for removing watermarks, clouds, cars on roads etc.

    There is one caveat though and probably a deal breaker for a lot of situations and that is the variance within the tiles from a single source. While the approach is great for removing non consistent elements of an image, you are still effectively merging the content from multiple sources - warts and all. So if we have a nice consistent source which has artefacts like clouds etc and the other sources are free from artefacts but have patches of season variance, we will introduce these patches to the final image - albeit reduced in strength from the original source.

    The take away from this experiment for me is that this method can be practical for some tricky sceneries but should be considered an alternative and not the norm when creating sceneries. It's probably best used as a quick and dirty method for providing 'clean' and relatively consistent imagery for large areas without the need for any editing. The perfectionist in me would prefer to devote the extra time to manual editing for a better end product where possible.

  • Thank you very much. :thumbup:

    Hope there is a solution regarding the road network overlay.

    Okay I figured it out.. you just change part of the url.

    Give me a few days and I'll (hopefully) have a new beta of AeroScenery out.

    https://2.aerial.maps.api.here.com/maptile/2.1/maptile/c98407140a/hybrid.day/16/36210/14831/512/png8?app_id=VgTVFr1a0ft1qGcLCVJ6&app_code=LJXqQ8ErW71UsRUK3R33Ow&lg=eng&ppi=72

    https://2.aerial.maps.api.here.com/maptile/2.1/maptile/c98407140a/satellite.day/16/36210/14831/512/png8?app_id=VgTVFr1a0ft1qGcLCVJ6&app_code=LJXqQ8ErW71UsRUK3R33Ow&lg=eng&ppi=72

    AeroScenery - Easily create photoreal scenery for Aerofly

  • Could you name the editor and the icon to click please?

    I was using Affinity Photo for this but you should be able to do the same in Photoshop. Not sure on Gimp.

    In Affinity Photo, you use File > New Stack. Select your images and load them.

    On the stack panel on the right, you have the operator used - it defaults to Median but you can click this to change to another like Minimum which will only use the darkest pixels from the source images. Median or Minimum are probably the two operators you would want to use. The stack panel can also be expanded so you can select or deselect the original source images much like working with layers.

    If happy with the result, simply save as a new PNG for use during Geoconvert process.

    Check out from Step 08 in the following link for the method of object removal with Affinity Photo and stacking:

    https://camerajabber.com/sponsored-how-…affinity-photo/


    Did a quick search and photoshop has it's own stack mode too so should work the same.