Posts by Ian C

Quote from daguru

Hi guys,

This all looks great !!

I’m new to all this and finding it very rewarding.

So far I’ve added some photorealistic scenery of the uk to the game and was blown away that it worked, so to my questions.

1. Is it possible to do the whole of the uk with photorealistic scenery (big project I know) so many tiles at a time ?

If so what programs would be the best to use ?

2. At what stage do you add the buildings trees etc and what programs are used ?

Thanks in advance

Kind Regards

Ray

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Hi Ray - I've been following Phil's instructions for buildings and trees and it really does bring the photo-scenery to life. I've laid down level 9 and 11 scenery tiles for the whole of the south of England and I've completed levels 12 to 15 for just over half that area (over a period of several weeks). 120 GB so far - but you could roughly divide that by 4 if you only went up to level 14, and reduce the time quite a bit as well. Adding cultivation (buildings and trees) is much quicker than doing the scenery, so I've actually done the cultivation for a very large area where I don't even have any of my own scenery yet. It doesn't matter what order you do it in.

Quote from Gooseno1

Here is a video of the scenery I am working on: Moruya

Nice!

Indeed it is a very absorbing hobby, and the results can be quite staggering. My computer is on 24/7 processing one thing or another. My only enemies are the occasional internet outage or random Windows 10 restart! (Though I think I've now reduced the latter to a minimum.)

This all sounds very promising - and interesting.

Quote from Gooseno1

Install JOSM , open a shape or OSM file and have a play with it.

OK thanks, I'll give it a go!

The possibility of creating cultivation from the aerial images is also intriguing.

Quote from Gooseno1

You can change the tags in JOSM to: key = landuse & Value = forest

Also it's very easy to manually add forests, roads, suburban trees and houses using JOSM.

I might consider creating a tutorial if I get enough interest.

In the image below I created the forest and houses and it took about 45 min.

I'd be interested, if you have time - though I have plenty to be going on with at the moment with my UK Ordnance Survey cultivation. I did think of extending my UK scenery into northern France, however - or maybe even doing somewhere totally random, like New Zealand. I did a test area around Calais, and the OSM building density isn't too bad there - but the building and tree placement isn't as accurate as the UK Ordnance Survey (OS) and there are clearly wooded areas missing. (Unfortunately the aerial images were rather low res too.) I notice that there is a French equivalent (IGN) of the British OS, and that some of their data is in the form of SHP files - but I think it would take me quite a while to figure out how to use them!

Quote from HiFlyer

Prescription lenses for VR:

https://vr-lens.eu/

https://vr-lens.eu/oculus-rift-lens-inserts.html

I use these inserts and they do help. (I can't fit my glasses inside the Rift without forcing them.) My prescription is quite weak (mostly astigmatism) but there is a noticeable difference in clarity. I've certainly gained more from the inserts than I've ever done by adjusting render scale factor, which seems to do nothing for me (even on 2.0). They don't stay quite as firmly in place as I would like - but that's a minor quibble.

Higher resolution mesh would be great. 99% of the time the current mesh is perfectly adequate, but it fails badly on vertical sea-cliffs. Unfortunately there are a lot of sea-cliffs around the British Isles so it disproportionately affects my home-made scenery. It has one data point on the sea surface and another, maybe 100 metres (?) further inland, on the cliff-top. The software draws a 45 degree (ish) slope between the two. So you get a band of sloping sea followed by a narrow band of sloping rock, followed by a band of sloping cliff-top green. This must often happen inland too - in mountainous areas - but the eye is more forgiving there since few people will know exactly what a mountain is meant to look like. Everybody knows that the sea isn't meant to slope, and that sea-cliffs are vertical!

Quote from Spit40

Hold the front page...

Arno has pointed me in the direction of this new feature and will put some sample code together.

https://www.scenerydesign.org/2016/08/filtering-features

Sounds promising!

Quote from Spit40

Regarding duplication of buildings in importantbuildings, i've checked in Qgis and that is definitely the issue, but i don't think Scenproc can help. I found this thread:

http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/threads/…eatures.430766/

For now then we have 2 options:

1. Don't load important buildings, just buildings. We lose the church designation and any other special treatment, which at the moment isn't much anyway other than height
2. Do the exclusion in Qgis. Right now i don't know how that is done

Many thanks for looking into this Phil. It's swings and roundabouts with "important buildings" anyway at the moment. It improves large towns and cities, adding a scattering of high rise buildings - but it can also give incongruous results in villages and rural areas.

Quote from DGW

Phil, Steve, Ian,

I think the flickering might be because you are 'importing' both buildings and 'importantbuildings' - from QGIS important buildings seem to be a subset of buildings and so perhaps AF2 is drawing both in one location - possibly causing the flickering? (I recall just using buildings solved some flickering issues for me a couple of weeks ago when I was trying this approach).

cheers, d.

Yes - it does look as though the "important buildings" are also "buildings" - so we're seeing 2 buildings in one place.

Phil and Steve

I've just had another look and you're right Phil - it is the lower part of the taller buildings that's flickering. My impression is that the taller flat-roofed building is sitting on top of a lower building. I say that because I can often see the gable-end of a lower pitched-roof building flickering on the side of the taller building.

And yes - the buidings are too bright in VR. I find they look better (and quite realistic, even for the UK) when the sun is behind them. I used to set the time to late afternoon, but I avoid that time now so as not to get a strong sun reflection. In a way we're a bit unlucky in this part of the world, because they would look more realistic in almost any other region outside the UK and NW Europe. I think a big part of the problem is that they're bright relative to the aerial images. I guess one workaround would be to increase cloud cover? I haven't tried and, in any case, I like the sunshine.

Human nature is odd though, isn't it? The more we get, the more we want. Even as they are, they're way better than uncultivated land. And VR is indescribably better than 2D. Everything has progressed to a degree that would have been unimaginable a few years ago.

Ian

Quote from Spit40

it's all a bit of a guess, but line 84 makes certain buildings 4 storeys high. I think these were the 'important' ones. The next step would be to draw polygons in google earth around city areas to make kml files that could be used to be more specific about what buildings are of what type, with some randomness thrown in.

Do your tall buildings flicker on lower floors? It seems to me they swap between different colours

Yes - they do flicker - but I just noticed it as a general flickering. I'll have a look again to see if it's confined to certain floors. It definitely makes towns and cities look more realistic, but some kind of differentiation would be great. Differentiation is probably also needed in some smaller places too. I get the impression that the village church is being rendered as an office block in some cases! It would also be great to be able to single out historic houses, castles and the like.

Ian

I tried the direct importation of SHP files into ScenProc for square TQ, and it works! So many thanks Phil. It took just under 2 hours, which is less time than I expected.

I've noticed that I now have taller non-domestic buildings. I assume this is the effect of "ImportantBuilding.shp" which I don't have in my other squares?

Quote from Spit40

That strikes me as a tidy solution for OS cultivation. Presumably there is a way to hide the "airfield" from the map that we may stumble upon at some point.

Maybe bury them all deep underground!? Height = -1000m. Half joking - but I suspect that may be why one of mine doesn't appear. I need to experiment.

Excellent Phil - I'll try it tomorrow on the dreaded square TQ!

Quote from Spit40

Just wondering, if we haven't got an airfield near the centre what is best?

1. Make a dummy one as KJKsimmer 's approach

2. Set a much bigger 'size' parameter. With uk grid square cultivation it could easily be 100,000m or so. Are there any complications here other than performance, as it means loading in autogen unnecessarily on occasion?

Hi Phil

I've basically run with Kenneth's idea of a dummy airport bang in the centre - except that I wasn't able to get it to work exactly as Kenneth described. I do literally have a stripped down airport there with a runway of zero length and zero width - i.e. I have the same co-ordinates for the airport and each end of the runway. I also place the airport at sea level. My airport name is the name of the OS grid square - so I have airport "TQ" at the dead centre of square TQ etc. The dummy airport names appear on the Aerofly location map, but that doesn't really bother me - in fact I find it quite useful as an indicator of where the grid squares are. (Actually I tell a lie - one of my airport names doesn't appear on the map. Maybe it's buried too far underground - not sure!)

So the size parameter strictly speaking only needs to be (root 2 x 50,000) m - but I've set it to 80,000 for good measure. Everything seems to work fine so far in terms of cultivation loading.

Ian

Quote from Spit40

I would use image magick. It has the power of photoshop but runs with command line instructions.

https://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php

There's loads of example scripts and tutorials explaining how to adjust images. Here is something on Colour

http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/color_basics/

I think you can even run it on *.bmp

http://www.imagemagick.org/discourse-serv…pic.php?t=11959

If you can precisely describe what you are trying to achieve then just try googling that and somebody has probably already done it and written the script.

Phil

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Thanks for the advice Phil - I'll have a look at the links.

Quote from larrylynx

HI Ian

Some photo editing programs allow you to make a macro that will carry out a series of instructions.

ie....open file...do what ever you want it to...save file...move on to next file and repeat

Nope...don't ask me how I just know Photoshop will do it as my daughter is a photographer and takes great delight in showing me all the tricks of the trade

Thanks Steve - automation would be great, but I've just noticed that I can save my saturation, brightness etc settings in Gimp, so that'll do if all else fails. I tried improving a brown image but I think I just made it worse, so I obviously need to work on that!

Quote from whitav8

Yes, look at the BMP that is generated and maybe consider improving the color with Irfanview or GIMP or equivalent before running GeoConvert. If you are using an image for an airport, you can fix up some issues like aircraft on the images using the clone feature to get a similar area with the correct color but without the aircraft - or maybe fix up an area that has clouds on it.

Dave W

Yes thanks. Improving the colour was probably going to be my next question to the forum. I guess I've been more concerned with poor resolution up until recently - but over the last few days I've seen too many images with an ugly brownish cast. I've tended only to look at the BMPs when I know there's coastline involved, but I ought to get into the habit of inspecting them every time - and doing a BMP comparison test first, before I even start.

I think what put me off trying to improve the colour was the thought that I would have to make sure I applied the same correction to them all - otherwise I would end up with noticeable boundaries every few miles. But that's just me being mentally lazy - I'm sure it's perfectly do-able.

1. Is there typically any difference between the options in the FSET menu (Virtual Earth, Google Earth, etc) in terms of image quality?

2. Can I assume that, where the Google Earth images are good on the normal desktop Google Earth, they will be good on FSET? i.e. Is there any quck way of finding out without geoconverting a small area at level 15 - which takes some time?

EDIT: Actually it's just occurred to me that I could simply create and compare BMPs using both GE and VE for a test area (say 0.01 x 0.01 degrees) somewhere in the middle of the area I wanted to geoconvert. It would take a bit of extra time but it might be worth it. However, if anybody has any thoughts or experience I'd still be interested.