GeoConvert Tool coming soon

No, all details about the orthophotos coordinates for compilation. Orthophotos are no vectors...
Cheers
Antoine

Quote from drhotwing1

Let me further clarify something. Being a government CIO has it's advantages of having access to a host of solicitors and lawyers, and i took the liberty to have the use of FSET vetted to see how it could be used in conjunction with the IPACS GeoConvery tool, and some of what was said is in fact true; you can't use any scenery derived by FSET for profit nor host for advantageous trade (meaning that you can't host data on webservers for the use or potential use of trade for profit). With that said, most aerial imagery of the USA is in fact public accessible and free for download, therefor it is perfectly legal to use this service for creating personal scenery areas for Aerofly FS 2. On the other hand, there are some countries that do provide this data but only for a cost, these are the sceneries that you should be mindful of (those such sceneries are not available in FSET anyway).

Now, for ease of use; FSET makes larger BMP files as well as inf files and smaller thumbnail files. All you need to make scenery for FS2 is those larger BMP files and the inf files that goes with them. The GeoConvert tool does all of the heavy lifting here. You will simply need to run a small program called inf2tfw and this tool makes the tfw file with all of the coordinates needed (from the inf file), you then take the BMP files and those created tfw files and place them into a specific folder inside the GeoConvert tool, define your total scenery area in the TMC file and run it. That's all, you will have the files for your scenery. You can't get much easier than that. It takes around 15 minutes of actual work to make large areas with this tool. Most of the time it takes comes from the time for FSET to make those BMP files and the time it takes for the GeoConvert tool to do its job. There is no piecing together tiles, no trying to align tiles, and no guess work here.

Jeff,
This is the best news in weeks. Thanks for taking those extra steps for us. So by extension, and for us Not For Profit users, will we be able to download another users work provided they upload it to the Users Scenery Area? Like Key West for instance.

Regards,
Ray

Quote from J van E

Of course it is nice if you can create stuff yourselvew but I don't mind paying Orbx if they can do this for me: they always deliver quality so no oddly colors area's and lots of details.

I look forward to what they come up with! Elsewhere I posted things are going too slow but it seems things are suddenly coming up speed.

I completely agree!
My dream becomes true if Orbx primarily focuses on large areas. While we wait - we can soon (at least) create small areas ourselves.

One of my favorites in Aerofly FS2 is the A320.

It's not so inspiring to make airports when the area has low photo resolution. Therefore, the new tool is absolutely crucial.

And with the new tool in place - I plan to make a "high-res" area around my airports. 3d objects (buildings, etc.) are most important in this area as this is where we are closest to the ground.

The airports with the surrounding "high-res" area will then appear as islands we travel to and from. In the areas between the airports - where there is low resolution - we should have a setting for cloudy weather over a chosen altitude. Then the low resolution would not be so important.

Jeff, thanks to you for all useful info !!!

john,
Sorry, but the FSET .inf is simply about lon-lat corners and pixel scaling. What would be great is to develop a connection to OpenStreet mapping for buildings and possibly a tool that finds where trees( or buildings?) should be placed by pattern recognition of the aerial image.

Quote from whitav8

john,
Sorry, but the FSET .inf is simply about lon-lat corners and pixel scaling. What would be great is to develop a connection to OpenStreet mapping for buildings and possibly a tool that finds where trees( or buildings?) should be placed by pattern recognition of the aerial image.

You're mixing up topics. This first tool is only about making the photo ground carpet. For this, all you need technically is aerial orthophotos and a set of coordinates.
Orthophotos are very expensive, they are taken from aircraft (usually Beech King Airs) for cartography duties by local countries' geographic institutes. So does Google also for Google Earth.

FSET is a tool developped some 10 years ago for FS9 and FSX, allowing to automatically (and illegally) grab orthophotos from web services and compile them by feeding FSX's resample tool with the area picture and the set of corresponding coordinates.
The idea here is users may feed AeroflyFS 2's upcoming converter with the area picture and set of coordinates from FSET.

Another tool is expected later to compile an elevation mesh, which is the layer below the aerial picture.

Autogen is a next layer above aerial picture and we really hope some tools come soon also to generate houses and vegetation coverage from databases.
OSM is a quite good and very convenient free database in many countries for buildings layer generation.
CORINE is the most used vegetation free database, pretty nice.

Add-on scenery providers do purchase aerial photo licenses, cadastral databases, vegetation databases, elevation databases and rework the whole to create sceneries.

This converter tool is an important first step, we hope the rest will follow soon, but they definitely need to remain separated tools for separated layers.

Cheers
Antoine

OK, this all sounds great. so how does the IPACS model library work in with this?

Quote from drhotwing1

@Trespassers- the elevation model already exists within FS2 but there may be an updated mash that one can use in the future. For now, all you need is the image(s) and the GeoConvert tool to make really nice looking scenery.

Indeed, but I don't know the accuracy of the existing mesh. It is pretty good yet in DLC, but I'd assume it's not worldwide so good.
High accuracy 4.75m resolution mesh is available for western Europe. Paradoxally, this resolution doesn't bring much in mountainous terrain, but is a real plus in rather flat areas where the featured details like road banks in hills or coastal shorelines make it wonderful.

Thus depending on the area it might be great to compile a layer too, which is of course another tool...

Cheers
Antoine

I asked Orbx (JV)about whether the new tech he referred to was GeoConvert. He had not heard of it and suggested it was only for private use according to the EULA. I know nothing about this at all but thought I would let you know the Orbx response
ID:141 on this link
http://www.orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/13…comment-1201590

Quote from whitav8

john,
Sorry, but the FSET .inf is simply about lon-lat corners and pixel scaling. What would be great is to develop a connection to OpenStreet mapping for buildings and possibly a tool that finds where trees( or buildings?) should be placed by pattern recognition of the aerial image.

Ah, thanks for the clarification, I was thinking along the lines of what Ortho4XP does, as it creates a mesh from the OSM data I think. I only partly understand all this stuff, but I'm enthusiastic to learn more, so apologies for the slightly clumsy questions.

As mentioned above, the ability to customise some terrain that might be dear to ones heart, but otherwise of little interest to anyone else and have little commercial clout, would be a great feature.

Every sim has a crack at Manhattan or London, but to get convincing versions of some of the small towns near where I live would be great (but obviously of zero interest to anyone else). XP11+Ortho4XP does a pretty good job of replicating my home town area, and I can recognise all the roads, rivers and railway lines clearly at 1000ft and the autogen does a good job of inserting roughly the right type of buildings in the right places. If there is a chance to go beyond that it would be very attractive to many people to have their own little high detail mini regions.

BTW, I really wish we had a like button on this forum, there is some great stuff in here, but you can only show your appreciation by posting a reply, which tends to clog the thread a bit IMO.

Quote from John Hargreaves

Ah, thanks for the clarification, I was thinking along the lines of what Ortho4XP does, as it creates a mesh from the OSM data I think. I only partly understand all this stuff, but I'm enthusiastic to learn more, so apologies for the slightly clumsy questions.

As mentioned above, the ability to customise some terrain that might be dear to ones heart, but otherwise of little interest to anyone else and have little commercial clout, would be a great feature.

Every sim has a crack at Manhattan or London, but to get convincing versions of some of the small towns near where I live would be great (but obviously of zero interest to anyone else). XP11+Ortho4XP does a pretty good job of replicating my home town area, and I can recognise all the roads, rivers and railway lines clearly at 1000ft and the autogen does a good job of inserting roughly the right type of buildings in the right places. If there is a chance to go beyond that it would be very attractive to many people to have their own little high detail mini regions.

That's exactly the idea John. The key of a good SDK is to provide easy access enabling tools.

Eventually, users can do what they want :
- build themselves their own local place,
- purchase ready-to-fly third party add-ons,
- or keep enjoying default sceneries maybe adding some features

Cheers
Antoine

Do I use bmp image and inf file generated by Sbuilderx?

@Max-Lea,
The Geo_Convert tool was expecting the inf file from FS Earth Tiles which looks like the following - if you can provide the same data from SbuilderX images, then it will be fine. Instead of using the two corners (NW and SE), the TFW input file for Geo_Convert wants the NW corner and the CellXdimensionDeg term which is essentially how many degrees per pixel.

Example FSET inf file:
================================================================================================
[Destination]
DestDir = E:\FlyitClientScenery\SourceMaterial\Whidbey_Updates\0.25mpp\scenery
DestBaseFileName = Area_Lm1_SnapOff_N048214749_N048195372_W122381354_W122352359
BuildSeasons = 0
UseSourceDimensions = 1
CompressionQuality = 100

[Source]
Type = Custom
SourceDir = E:\FlyitClientScenery\SourceMaterial\Whidbey_Updates\0.25mpp
SourceFile = Area_Lm1_SnapOff_N048214749_N048195372_W122381354_W122352359.bmp
Lon = -122.637097835541 ;for top left and bottom right is: -122.589883804321
Lat = 48.3631923794746 ;for top left and bottom right is: 48.3315879106522
NumOfCellsPerLine = 13202 ;Pixel is not used in FSX
NumOfLines = 11783 ;Pixel is not used in FSX
CellXdimensionDeg = 3.57627868652344E-06 <<<<==============
CellYdimensionDeg = 2.68220901489258E-06 <<<<===============
PixelIsPoint = 0
SamplingMethod = Point

Quote from whitav8

Example FSET inf file:
================================================================================================
[Destination]
Cut..

They are not the same but can use the value.

Sbuilderx313 inf example

[Source1]
Type = BMP
Layer = Imagery
SourceDir = "."
SourceFile = "L18X274011X274042Y197382Y197417.BMP"
Variation = Day
Channel_BlendMask = 3.0
NullValue = 255,255,255
SamplingMethod = Gaussian
ulyMap = 40.5774555833333
ulxMap = 8.14842225
xDim = 2.68220689561625E-06
yDim = 2.03749819155154E-06

[Destination]
DestDir = "."
DestBaseFileName = "Photo01"
DestFileType = BGL
LOD = Auto
UseSourceDimensions = 1
CompressionQuality = 85

Thank you for reply

Bye

Create a textfile with the name L18X274011X274042Y197382Y197417.tfw

Your file needs 6 lines:
0.00000268220689561625
0
0
-0.00000203749819155154
8.14842225
40.5774555833333

That's all you need to run Geoconvert.

Rodeo

OK, I'm ready. An extra TB of SSD now on board. Bring it on! Any update on timing of this tool?