Been trying to figure out how do you get a texture background from say GoogleEarth, I assume it's geotagged and you can place objects on it. Is this how its suppose to work?

Hi Vincent,

 

Lately I have been using this program, NonimapView http://aeguerre.free...=EN&ctx=accueil to get Orthophotos, it actually works really well. After that I just line up the runways in Wed with the photo and start from there. I like the fact that you can "Display" and then "Download" at different zoom levels. It also gives you the lat/lon coordinates of the box you just created. When you make your bounding box make sure it's a power of 2, 512x512, 1024x1024, and so on. In the upper right it tells you the size of the bounding box as your creating it. It's a lot easier than alternate methods.

 

Here's a screen shot of the program in use.

 

 

 

Glen

Wow thanks for info, still a noob at this, so is the orthophoto texture visible in the sim or is it only helpful for accurate object placement?

Vincent, here is a link http://forums.x-plan...showtopic=58022 to a great thread over at the org that explains how to do this a lot better than I could. What your essentially doing is creating a draped polygon in WED. Again, as far as lining everything up I basically just use some visual reference points like the runway, unless it's not close to where it should be.

 

Glen

 

Edit: Sorry, to answer your question, yes it's visible in the sim. Here's a pic of the same area above in the sim. As you can see it needs a lot of work to look correct. One problem is the default colors of Xplane are way too green and every photo needs it's color adjusted to better match the surrounding scenery. This should give you some idea.

 

 

Here is my home airport with the edges of the orthophoto feathered in with transparency, and the color corrected to match the surrounding area. It's way too green and I would need a lot of time to correct it, again you see what can be done. It's actually hard to tell where the photo meets the default scenery.

 

 

 

Glen

Wow, thanks for the link!

How did You do that Muskoka?

Hi Tom,

 

Check the link in post #4, it explains everything better than I can. It's really not very difficult. The hard part is finding good images to use. I'm using Photoshop to do the transparency, and it takes about a minute. Here's the tutorial I use.

 

http://www.wikihow.c...sk-in-Photoshop

 

Glen

Thanks