Don't they just look like regular screenshots?
Yep, they do. If you look at any of the screenshots I've posted here, they were all taken in VR with a button bound to 'take screenshot w/o overlays'. The only issue you may run into taking screenshots in VR is the 'zoom' setting. It has no effect in the VR view, but does still affect the 2D screenshots, so it needs to be set to where you want it first.
I agree, I especially love flying in the Pitts in VR. It's a handful for sure, especially keeping it straight on takeoff and landing and preventing ground-loops, but the real plane is challenging in this way too. Do you have a set of rudder pedals? If not you should get some, they really enhance that sense of reality and immersion in VR 
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!
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.
Display MoreI did a quick calculation to get an idea of the link: Level <-> meters / pixel
Calculation details:
! Warning value can vary according to the distance from the equator but it already gives an idea ....
at around 15 ° latitude a Level 11 cell is about 18.4 km wide (see on a grid generated by AFS2 Grid generator) knowing that in the .png files generated to make .ttc and .tth files are a size of 2048x2048 pixels, I deduce (rounded values):
Level 7 -> 147.26 m / pixel
Level 8 -> 73.63 m / pixel
Level 9 -> 36.8 m / pixel
Level 10 -> 18.4 m / pixel
Level 11 -> 9.2m / pixel
Level 12 -> 4.6 m / pixel
Level 13 -> 2.3 m / pixel
Level 14 -> 1.15 m / pixel
Level 15 -> 0.6 m / pixel
correct me if im wrong...
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.
An enormous thanks and a big hug to you qwerty42 and of course IPACS team for this master piece of simulator
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
Awww, I love hugs! Thanks my friend. That looks fantastic
Well done!
It is really amazing how much of a difference it makes to the visuals. Something else that I didn't expect is that it actually makes the orthophotos look better too, because when the terrain mesh is inaccurate, it also distorts the mapping of the images over their surfaces. It's definitely a worthwhile enhancement, I think.
Have you mapped a control to the steering tiller? Rudder alone won't get you much when taxiing a 747.
Finally, it took me in a little more time than expected because I had to review my code which was not very well thought for implement support of another type of file.
So now it should be possible (without bug?) with las t revision. still going in the "Folder Grid" tab. have fun...
Thank you for this update to your tool vogel69! Much appreciated.
Thank you again Qwerty42 for your great work and tutorial !
I followed them more closely and noticed that I did not put my .tth files in the right place so it explain what it did not work ...
After a few new quick tests on a small area it seems to work perfectly. Superb ! Thank you !
A small question in passing before embarking on a larger scale, may be have you already answered it before and I was still not giving enough attention to it
my ask: to avoid height aberrations between mesh, in which height unit should the geotiff be generated? meter or feet. ?
Yay! Congrats and I'm glad to hear you were successful I'm fairly certain the internal geotiff tagging is in meters, but I haven't tried creating one manually to be sure.
Also, at least between the default Aerofly mesh and the outer edges of your custom mesh, you possibly still will have those short invisible 'walls' I mentioned in an earlier post. I think this is a combination of small mismatch in terrain height & resolution combined with the stitching algorithm Aerofly uses to merge them, which creates artifacts right where they meet.
Yes, it appears so. Geoconvert automatically makes masked elevation tiles if needed. However I would avoid using them for the same reasons I avoid using them for aerial images -- they create gaps (either in imagery or elevation data) if you add adjacent regions, unless you delete the masked files and re-convert them to a full tile.
GeoTIFF has all geographic Information inside, so I really wonder why we have to deal with .tfw files.
It's a good point, and honestly I'm not sure if you do... I can't remember if I tested it without them first actually I will look into it. I'm going to feel really dumb if they aren't necessary, but I suspect you might be right!
Edit: Just tested it, you do indeed need the .tfw files. However, the creation of those is definitely something that could be automated/scripted instead of doing it manually.
Hi Ed, sorry, I wasn't very clear on that. By 'monitor zoom level', I meant only the 2D image you see on the monitor. In vr the only zoom is by moving your head closer to things 
Here's a demo video I made of some of my converted scenery, airports/airstrips, plus the new topo meshes. I somehow messed up and only recorded in 720p and also forgot to enable audio recording -- sorry about that 
But, still gives a good demo of what you can get with high res orthophotos + AC3D + USGS elevation, and also shows how effective the VR hands can be! There's 4 different backcountry airstrips in the video for those who like that sort of thing too.
Credit to Jet-Pack (IPACS) and his awesome Cessna 172 mod which I fly in most of the video with the windows open 
If you go into the controller settings, I think it's under "View", there is a key mapping for zoom. If you use that it will adjust the monitor zoom level, whether you're in VR or just using it 2D. I have it mapped to a key on my flight stick so I can adjust zoom levels for screenshots while in VR.
Odd... I have that same throttle, but I am not having this issue. Just tested to be sure. What I do see is that if I move the throttle via some other means, like using the touch controller, and then move my HOTAS throttle, the movement is damped until the HOTAS 'catches up' to the position of where I moved it with the touch controller. Then it responds normally again.
Is it possible that you have multiple axes mapped to the throttle in AeroFly? If I remember correctly, it is possible to have overlapping axis assignments from two different controllers (e.g. your flight stick and your throttle) and it's not very easy to see in the controller setup screens. After a recent update that reset all our controller mappings, I think that the slider on my flight stick was mapped by default to throttle, in addition to the throttle itself. So check that and see if it is the case. Just click on that throttle axis setting, press delete, and then repeat this a few times to make sure you've cleared anything else from being mapped to it.
Appreciate the leg work! Pulling down some IMGs now.
Are these screen shots the result of 1/3 or 1/9 arc second meshes?
Thanx
Thanks, and good luck with your conversions! All my preview images in the beginning of the post were with the 1/3 arc second meshes, with the one exception of the San Francisco coastline before/after. That was done with the 1/9 arc second data. The default AeroFly mesh already appears to be pretty good right around San Francisco (and maybe other portions of the coast), so you likely won't see drastic improvement there with the 1/3 arc second data.
There are two reasons why doing this improves the default mesh in AeroFly: the first is that we are potentially using a data source with better resolution (though I can't be sure of that, it's entirely possible the IPACS crew is using this exact same data for the US ), but the other big reason is that the default mesh only covers level 7 in most areas and goes to level 10 in some of the more detailed areas. From my testing, it appears that converting the terrain through level 14 adds a significant amount of detail instead of those flat triangular facets we see with levels 7-10.
Let's do a fast calculation:
earth circumference divided by arc second:
40.000.000 meters / 1296000 (360 degrees*60 minutes*60 seconds) ~~ 31 meters/second.
So 1/3 arc second gives us approximately a 10 meters elevation grid. Right?
Rodeo
I think that is indeed correct Rodeo. That's the x-y resolution, but then there is also the vertical resolution. Since these geotiff files are 32-bit linear grayscale tiffs, and if we assume a single file contains elevations from sea level to the top of Mt. Everest (0m to ~8500m), that gives us 2^32 steps of resolution over 8500m, which is sub-millimeter vertical precision. Now I really doubt that all 32bits are going into the elevation info, because that kind of resolution is just absurd... but perhaps this really is the elevation resolution that a geotiff could potentially store, assuming it wasn't limited by the measurement source.
Also, another reason this seems to improve the default AeroFly mesh so much is that the default mesh only goes to level 10, and in many areas that don't have default scenery it only goes to level 7. So adding those extra levels alone helps quite a bit, and is probably where most of the improvement I saw with my mountainous regions came from.
Display MoreExcellent job, congratulations!!!
I already have a request vogel69 :
Could you please add .tth file extensions to your FolderGrid function?
Then we could check the extension of our heightmaps as we can do for the ttc files.
Thanks to you guys!
Rodeo
This would indeed be really nice to have! As you may have seen in my tutorial video, these tiles work like the image tiles in that they will create mask tiles if you're not careful about the coordinate limits (except the 'disable mask' line appears to have no effect for the terrain mesh, it always produces masks if your tmc coordinates only partially cover the aerofly grid cells).
I'm sure the same issues of mask tiles that we have with the orthophotos applies to the terrain mesh as well, so it's best to again use vogel69's Google Earth tool or my Excel tool to find coordinate boundaries snapped to the aerofly grid, and then use those in the tmc file. I considered covering this in the tutorial, but thought it might over-complicate things for those doing this for the first time. But, it's absolutely best to geoconvert in a way that doesn't give you masked elevation tiles.
great ! thank you qwerty42 !
I've done a quick test with LIDAR data converted to geotiff but with no success at that time
.tth files are generated by geoconverter but I don't see any difference in sim...
Have you an idea of what type of Geotiff are supported by geoconvert: 16 bit or 32 bit Geotiff ? Raster Geotiff ? Elevation Grid Geotiff ?
here a screen of .png file generated with .ttc files:https://tof.cx/images/2018/03…878c1833d0e.jpg
Hi vogel69! I'm not sure if there are other formats that geoconvert works with, but I can say that the output of the tutorial demo is a 32-bit linear grayscale tiff file if you open it in Photoshop. Because of this, if you just try to open one of the output tiffs with something like Windows photo viewer, you probably shouldn't be able to see anything in the file.
All those stripes in your png files, if that really is elevation info, looks a lot like the same issues I was having at first when I was trying to use the "Rendered image" save option in QGIS. This writes out an RGB file instead of the 32bit grayscale file and will give you a huge number of 30,000ft tall spikes in AeroFly.
Also I'm reading up on the geotiff spec--it looks like with libgeotiff we can embed geotiff tags into any appropriate tiff image that doesn't already have them. For those new to geotiff, they are a special kind of tiff file that are tagged with embedded metadata, which is how geoconvert gets the elevation data out of them.
If you can point me to your data source, I can try converting them to a working geotiff too and let you know if I find a working method.
Here is the tutorial for how to do this, finally.
Prerequisites you'll need:
- geoconvert from AeroFly SDK
- QGIS (get it from here: https://www.qgis.org/en/site/forusers/download.html)
- These files: mesh convert files.zip
If you follow the video exactly, you shouldn't have any issues. Sorry for how long it is and my incredibly boring delivery, but there's always double-speed button in YouTube if you can't handle my rambling 
Outline of what you'll be doing (this is all covered in detail in the video):
(1) Read the disclaimer in this post here first! : Creating terrain heightmaps
(2) Go to USGS site and get your terrain data files
(3) Open the terrain data files in QGIS and re-save them as geotif files
(4) Create a .tfw file for each of your geotifs (you'll do this at the same time as step 3)
(5) Edit the .tmc file that geoconvert uses
(6) Move the input files into the geoconvert folders and start the conversion
(7) Move the output files into your \Documents\Aerofly FS 2\scenery\elevation folder
How to reverse this if it breaks something in the sim:
All you have to do is move or delete the converted files back out of the \Documents\Aerofly FS 2\scenery\elevation folder.
Tutorial video is here:
Good luck!
