Google Warehouse buildings in xplane..(scenery question)?

[Geofa 108]

I decided to take a new tack today which was very sucessful and then wasn't and is now puzzling.I really want to get buldings into this sim as soon as possible as that really is all it is lacking. I am able to get grey untextured buildings in in about 1 minute and 1/2-that is great but they are not the best looking. From what I understand the problem is xplane only wants a single texture for a building, and many of the google buildings have a large amount (our stadium in Detroit has over 100). I started thinking, there has to be an easier way-and came up with a compromise. Why not find a single texture that has already been done for the structure which represents it the best and perhaps covers it the most-and get rid of all the others. Maybe this would be a good compromise between reality and getting it fast...I loaded a building into sketchup-selected export to 3d model-and exported a kmz file which is really just a zipped file.Opening it a few folders down are all the textures in a neat folder. I found the one that covered most of the building and deleted the rest. I then converted the remaining texture to a multiple of two and saved it. I then imported the kmz file back into sketchup-got error messages about the missing files-and saw my building in all its majesty with only one texture file-which on many is good enough! I went to model info-purged unused, and fix problems and then exported to xplane. I noticed sometimes it did great and sometimes I got an error message from the xplane exporter that there were too many texture files.I then found that I needed to take that multiple of 2 texture file and place it in my custom scenery folder, and if there was an error message about the texture file manually edit the .obj file and change the texture file to the one I wanted.I then opened Overlayeditor with my object-and low and behold it appeared just as it should -with a single texture file covering it.I placed it in the scenery and as my shot shown earlier it seemed to work-I got a building in downtown Detroit that reflected reality and really doens't look all that bad.This whole process literally takes about 3 minutes per building.Now what I don't get is most of my buildings are still appearing grey in the sim-yet they show up perfectly with the single texture in sketchup and in overlayeditor? Any ideas on that one?Anyway-I am going to keep experimenting as I want quantity and if a little quality is lost that is fine.

[Muskoka 104]

I'm going to give your method a go Geof, let you know how I make out. May come across your issue?Glenedit: First thing I notice is that the exported file only has 4 of the original 22 textures from the model I'm using. Nothing there that would make the model look real enough....hmmm.

[Simmo W 24]

You're tenacious like me Geof!

• Make sure all your building .obj's are pointing to the correct texture file.
• Also, make sure the texture file has no spaces in its name (?????), and last, but not least;
• make sure the texture file is of a pixel size in the order of 2 - eg 512 by 512, 256 by 256, 1024 by 1024, can't be more than 2048 by 2048
• only do texturing every 2nd Tuesday

[Geofa 108]

I've done all that except Tuesday! :-)Why would they show up fine in Overlay editor but not in the sim?!

[Honnli 69]

Hmm, very interesting, Geof! However, some models from Google Warehouse use a bunch of small textures that make up the end product or are not just a rectangular tower, but with protrudings, so doing it your way with those models wouldn't work very well. But do keep trying. :)In the mean time, I'm going to give blender a go. This is gonna be fun...

[Geofa 108]

Meantime I've discovered the freeware is now working in the New Build-getting a lot of things that way-which is way easier! :-) Still doesn't make sense to me they show up perfectly in both programs with one texture only.

[Simmo W 24]

I've done all that except Tuesday! :-)Why would they show up fine in Overlay editor but not in the sim?!

Only God knows (or Ben Supnik/the same)

Thanks, I have all the time in the world, no worries.I just tried to pm you the sketchup file and the system won't let me. Can't post it here either?Glen

Glen, email it to ' xp10reviews(at)rocketmail.com', attention simon

[jasonX 24]

snipAh blender... There is a slight learning curve :-) worth it in the very long run. You'll see what I mean!

Blender is one awesome package, how they get so much power in a 40mb zip file beats me. Just unzip to folder of your choice, job done.Pete

[jasonX 24]

Just an afterthought.Blender can be really tough when starting off. There are a number of sites for learning Blender though. Probably one of the best to start with is the main blender site itself but there is a some excellent learning material at "Katbits". Just google for katbits and it should be the first search that comes up or thereabouts anyway.PetePS I'm still a beginner myself.

[Honnli 69]

Ok, so I've been playing around a bit with Blender, and I can say, that texture mapping is more accurate in Blender as you can move the vertex "pins" by pixel amounts. But it works (the way I'm doing it) by positioning all the faces on one side at a time, so there can be lots of "pins" to adjust even after I have positioned the outer "pins". Due to this, it isn't really much faster than texturing in SketchUp. This got me thinking. Some of the models from Google Warehouse are probably more complex than needs to be for a flight sim (some have protruding and indented bits and pieces here and there and various unnecessary polygons like short brick walls, etc), and this makes texturing all the more difficult and probably eats resources as well. So I was thinking, would it be a good idea to trim models from Google Warehouse before texturing/importing them into XP10? It doesn't make the whole process any faster though (the trimming process alone can take more than 30 mins). I'm currently experimenting with this.Geof, how is your custom "Google Warehouse" city performance wise?Anyway, I gotta agree with Geof and Glen. Texturing a whole city's worth of buildings with the currently available method (SketchUp/Blender) is just not feasible.. It takes way to much effort and time. Though it's pretty good for getting major landmark/buildings into XP10.

[Simmo W 24]

Honnli, you haven't explored Blender enough, I'm now using it exclusively after a yr of sketchup and it's far quicker and superior to sketchup, you can apply a photo texture across dozens of faces at a time if needed, even curved.

[Geofa 108]

I agree-to much to do and too little time. I am still experimenting with the making the buildings simpler, whole process simpler. I still don't get why they show properly in this fashion in Overlay editor and then don't display the single texture. There has to be a way to "point" all to a single texture in the .obj file...

[Muskoka 104]

Anyway, I gotta agree with Geof and Glen. Texturing a whole city's worth of buildings with the currently available method (SketchUp/Blender) is just not feasible.. It takes way to much effort and time.

Honnli, sadly I have to agree 100%. These tools in the hands of a "professional" can make all the difference in the world. The problem is, most end users of any flight simulation software are not professional scenery designers, and hence the majority of the XPlane world sits bare and cold. Although, to me the rural areas are fine and need no further enhancement, just the core areas of towns / cities need a little "sprucing" up.This is the reason for the great majority of the frustration you see from users when they first start up XPlane and go to their favourite city / airport and find nothing there, it's up to them to populate it, "the community", and quite frankly it isn't going to happen. They don't posses the skills or time to make it happen. It's been like this for years. I hope we / they can find some way to streamline the process, so even the casual flier can populate their favorite flying area with some realistic and accurately placed buildings. They tools still don't exist, without a fairly complex and timely learning curve.

Honnli, you haven't explored Blender enough

Simon, with respect, the average user just doesn't have the time. They are never going to catch on to Sketchup, let alone Blender. There needs to be a better way to get accurate placed / looking scenery into XPlane. Sadly, with the way things currently are, it's not going to come from your average community user, and as a matter of fact, it hasn't come from 3rd parties either. I would gladly give someone some money for a scenery package that represented a city well. Can I get something like that now for any large Canadian city, not as far as I know. Will it happen, perhaps, but not from your "average community user", like most of us are.Glen

[Benny_ 3]

Modeling a whole city in 3D is a very bad approach in my opinion.It would need hundred of hours of texturing, scenery positioning, and performance would be bad.The only thing that should be modeled are skycrapers and well known buildings, i think that for an average city that should do 10-50 buildings, that should take a few days.For the rest of the city, facades are the best solution.You can draw them with a scenery tool like overlay editor, it will took a few seconds per building.You can also add buildings in openStreetMap, it's also very easy and fast, then you can use some tools to import them into xplane.Sure you won't be able to add a full city in OSM by yourself, but the collaborative tools are already there, you just need a browser and some patience, and you're good.You can start adding your house, then a larger area, find some people willing to help.... then one day the full city is done.Once again it's my opinion, but i really think that osm is the future for flight simulation.I'm not saying that because i made a tool that generate scenery from osm, it's just that we have the possibility to add everything we want to see in a flight sim into a FREE public database.Today you have the possibility to generate xplane scenery with osm2xp (which is far from perfect in my opinion), tomorrow you'll have better tools for greater generated scenery, so add data into osm!Flight simulation community has lot of people willing to spend lots of time working on improving our sims.Let's imagine a big city, with something like 200'000 buildings.How many time to draw a building into open street map? maybe a average of 5s .200'000 x 5 - > 1'000'000s -> 277 hours.So with 10 people, you could make a full big city in one month , just by doing one hour of osm each day...

[Honnli 69]

Well, I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so it'll probably take me three time longer than the average Joe to do one building in OSM. But I hear ya. Facades and OSM does seem like the way to go (impressive tool btw, Benny!). Yeah, doing only the major skyscrapers/landmarks is feasible (though it'll still take some time), and that's what I'm planning to do. I'm not an expert in SketchUp, but I have used it quite a bit in the past so I know my way around it. So yeah, I'll keep trying.@Simmo, I did "Project From View" with the faces on one side of the building selected to get the UV map, which I then map to my textures. I then repeat for the other sides. I assume that's what you mean by applying textures to multiple faces?