Photo Real

[Lbell 0]

I have seen more and more scenery that has been released as "Photo Real". Though the ground scenery is a photo of a satelite image; it looks very blury and washed out. It almost looks like the autogen or ground textures didn't load.

 

For me this takes away from realism. I have seen this in cockpits as well. There are quite a number of developers that create textures and scenery that model the real thing and they are very sharp crisp and clear.

 

What is everyones opinion on this?

[Gregg_Seipp 573]

Myself, I don't necessarily *mind* the blurriness of the photo-real scenery. I'd *rather* have it sharper but since I'm just flying over most of it at 7000-12000 feet or more, it's...sigh...ok. (I have seen where it's improving, though. :) ) What bugs me about some of it is the color which can get very odd on old satellite imagery. Megascenery Earth around Monterrey, CA (a beautiful area!) looks like it has had a giant oil spill or forest fire. It's also almost flat with very little autogen. I had to turn it back off because I found it almost depressing to fly with it on. Now I use UTX...at least the colors are better and there's signs of life. Still, I almost never fly there anymore. I only fly over MegasceneryX SoCal which I love...vibrant colors, traffic, buildings (even if poorly placed)...it looks real. I also have Orbx PNW and I don't fly over it either...my mind just doesn't connect to it the way it does photoreal.

 

I mentioned this on another message: If Flight1 Instant Object Studio and Instant Scenery allows you to package up autogen that you create so that you can use it on photoreal scenery (BlueSky, SimSavvy, etc.), I'd probably pick an airport and start filling it out. If others did the same we'd see the photoreal world start to fill in. I still haven't been able to figure out if those products would do the trick or not. I think they're an amazingly cool idea...I just don't have enough info about them yet.

 

If there's one thing I'd hope they'd 'fix' in Prepare3D is to have the ability to use photoreal and make it easier for folks to add autogen on top of it...even mix someone else's land class autogen on top of a photoreal scenery. Might be a tall order but it would give me a reason to fly out of SoCal.

[1mikel151 71]

It depends on many variables, good source data mostly, whether the developer wants to take the time to place autogen which is tedious, especially for large areas and the file size which can be very lartge depending on resolution and coverage. There is also color correction,.for large areas it is harder and depending on whether you are doing it under one of the many texture replacments, it's near impossible to match up. Then you have to create the various season texture variations and set up the ini file to process them all.

 

With autogen, you can load up any photoscenery BGL in the annotator and as long as you have a texture folder attached to the scenery, make your own autogen for it.

 

The main reason we don't see as much photoscenery offered is file size and the bandwidth associated with it.

 

I LOVE photoreal, I have gigs of areas and airports I have done myself so i am well aware of all the things involved..

[Manny 1,293]

Photosceneries are awesome in mountaneous (Rocky or snowy) terrirory or desert areas.

 

But for mountaineous areas that has lots of trees like in the NW pacific areas, Its nice to have Orbx like scenery where there are selective phototextures with lots and lots of trees and well placed autogens.

 

City area, well done default autogens is prefereable to phototextures (Chicago area) unless photosceneries come with good autogens. Mega scenery has done a pretty good job of autogens for their so cal..and the sol cal photosceneries on those rocky hills is spectaculour.

 

France VFR has some good photoscenery for the ALPS along with some decent autogens and trees which is also very good.

 

NL2000 scenery photo textures with well placed autogens and stuff is spectaculour...in spite of NL being a very flat area.

 

It all depeneds on the area and how well its done, autogens or photoscenery or a combination.

 

But pure photo textures on a flat area of urban scenery is not good at all (UK VFR)..unless you are flying over 10,000 feet and never landing in those areas.

 

MAnny

 

Another good thing about photoscenery...its good for Frames.. performance.

[Gregg_Seipp 573]

I LOVE photoreal, I have gigs of areas and airports I have done myself so i am well aware of all the things involved..

 

I'd love to get going on that myself. I tried to find out how to create some with some free software but didn't really get clear enough answers to be able to do anything. I think it'd be fun and somewhat rewarding to fill out an area so others could use it. Like I said, the Flight1 stuff is interesting...very simple and intuitive. Just...the packaging and integrating with different photoreal has me holding back.

[klamal 283]

Myself, I don't necessarily *mind* the blurriness of the photo-real scenery. I'd *rather* have it sharper but since I'm just flying over most of it at 7000-12000 feet or more, it's...sigh...ok. (I have seen where it's improving, though. :) ) What bugs me about some of it is the color which can get very odd on old satellite imagery. Megascenery Earth around Monterrey, CA (a beautiful area!) looks like it has had a giant oil spill or forest fire. It's also almost flat with very little autogen. I had to turn it back off because I found it almost depressing to fly with it on. Now I use UTX...at least the colors are better and there's signs of life. Still, I almost never fly there anymore. I only fly over MegasceneryX SoCal which I love...vibrant colors, traffic, buildings (even if poorly placed)...it looks real. I also have Orbx PNW and I don't fly over it either...my mind just doesn't connect to it the way it does photoreal.

 

I mentioned this on another message: If Flight1 Instant Object Studio and Instant Scenery allows you to package up autogen that you create so that you can use it on photoreal scenery (BlueSky, SimSavvy, etc.), I'd probably pick an airport and start filling it out. If others did the same we'd see the photoreal world start to fill in. I still haven't been able to figure out if those products would do the trick or not. I think they're an amazingly cool idea...I just don't have enough info about them yet.

 

If there's one thing I'd hope they'd 'fix' in Prepare3D is to have the ability to use photoreal and make it easier for folks to add autogen on top of it...even mix someone else's land class autogen on top of a photoreal scenery. Might be a tall order but it would give me a reason to fly out of SoCal.

 

Gregg,

 

I'd love to do the same or see the same thing happen. I just bought SimSavvy and plan to add autogen to the 70 or so airports that I fly to all the time(Southwest routes). At the moment, I think I'm just going to give the Annotator tool a try from FSX SDK and see what I can do. For me, I think even just adding autogen to the 5 mile radius around an airport will be good enough. When outside of that radius, things either look good enough to GREAT w/ photo scenery or you're not paying attention outside anyway such as when on final. It's just that taxi and at the gate moments where it would be nice to have some 3D objects to make it feel more real while on the ground. I don't need autogen everywhere, IMO. Just around the airports.

 

Due to real life constraints, I probably won't get my first airport done until next week. Assuming it works and looks good, I can definitely share what I've done. I've heard mention in the forums of users saying SimSavvy should have a forum or repository where SimSavvy users could upload autogen. That would be nice. With the number of photo real users out there, it wouldn't take us long to cover most areas.

[Gregg_Seipp 573]

Due to real life constraints, I probably won't get my first airport done until next week. Assuming it works and looks good, I can definitely share what I've done. I've heard mention in the forums of users saying SimSavvy should have a forum or repository where SimSavvy users could upload autogen. That would be nice. With the number of photo real users out there, it wouldn't take us long to cover most areas.

 

Take your time. I'd love to see if I could make it work on another photoreal set like BlueSky as well. I wish I knew how many of us there were. A repository would be good that had a couple of screenshots of the airport. I could easily see myself doing the area around Santa Barbara as a start. I think it would take some trial and error to see what is the right tradeoff between detail and framerate but that's a detail.

[klamal 283]

Have you ever heard of looked at this tool? http://www.fsdeveloper.com/wiki/index.php?title=ScenProc

 

I just found it late last week and have been looking into it. The hardest thing about it though seems to be finding building footprint data for the US in the shapefiles that this needs or even to generate the shapefiles from the OSM files off of openstreetmaps. Some major cities have it, but most do not. At least it would work for trees. So, it's a start anyway. Just thought I'd mention it to you. I'm not sure yet which will be easier, finding data for this tool or just annotating it myself with the SDK.

[Gregg_Seipp 573]

Never heard of it.

[Manny 1,293]

The F1 Instant scenery etc does not do autogens.. it requires you hand plant every thing one by one.

 

Manny

[Gregg_Seipp 573]

The F1 Instant scenery etc does not do autogens.. it requires you hand plant every thing one by one.

 

Ya...that's pretty much what I thought and it's fine. Question is, if I give someone my file from Instant Scenery, can they plant it on their photogen scenery?

[Manny 1,293]

Ya...that's pretty much what I thought and it's fine. Question is, if I give someone my file from Instant Scenery, can they plant it on their photogen scenery?

 

Yes...just e-mail the bgl files and they should be fine.

 

I built some scenery of my own for hawaii. Check out AVISM library under "Manny Mahadevan". I used Instant scenery. It was what prompted me to learn GMAX and I ended up doing 52F airport scenery.

 

:)

[klamal 283]

Can the autogen that's created with the annotator tool be used for any photo real scenery? If I just generate an agn file for PHX let's say, can I pass around the agn file and have that show up for anyone in there version of photo real scenery(bluesky, simsavvy, etc)? Or, would it be tied to that specific scenery?

[Manny 1,293]

Can the autogen that's created with the annotator tool be used for any photo real scenery? If I just generate an agn file for PHX let's say, can I pass around the agn file and have that show up for anyone in there version of photo real scenery(bluesky, simsavvy, etc)? Or, would it be tied to that specific scenery?

 

I believe it can be used with different sceneries provided you put them in the same texture folders.

 

Manny

[altstiff 71]

It depends on many variables, good source data mostly, whether the developer wants to take the time to place autogen which is tedious, especially for large areas and the file size which can be very lartge depending on resolution and coverage. There is also color correction,.for large areas it is harder and depending on whether you are doing it under one of the many texture replacments, it's near impossible to match up. Then you have to create the various season texture variations and set up the ini file to process them all.

 

With autogen, you can load up any photoscenery BGL in the annotator and as long as you have a texture folder attached to the scenery, make your own autogen for it.

 

The main reason we don't see as much photoscenery offered is file size and the bandwidth associated with it.

 

I LOVE photoreal, I have gigs of areas and airports I have done myself so i am well aware of all the things involved..

 

The annoiter always CTD's on me!!