Introducing World2XPlane...

[tonywob 4,769]

I noticed though, that their forest selctions are (of course) rather rough ... I wondered if it would be possible to write a script for your tool, which would make the borders a little bit "fuzzy"? So e.g. at the borders of forest selections trees are placed at a lower density and sometimes there is random tree a few meters outside of the actual boarder, just like in reality . This would get rid of these dense forest which just completly stop at a certain line, which is a bit unrealistic...

 

 

Where I live in Poland, forests indeed actually do look like this (and we have a lot of forests here). The boundaries are very well defined and just stop at the edge of a road, town or farm, and it looks very realistic. In the application I could add a fuzzy option which would fuzzy the boundaries a little bit, but then you would have to be careful as you'd get trees going into the middle of roads and it I guess it's a matter of taste. What you will find is people generally map the forest boundary including the grassy bits at the edge, so the forest line isn't always accurate. 

 

I've also added someting I call a "line rule" which will run objects along the perimeter of an area or along a road, in these shots you can see that it has placed a few odd trees around field boundaries (Although Andras AKA alpilotx tells me X-Plane has a much more efficient way of making standard forests to only show around the edge, so a new rule will be added just for this).

 

 

 

In regards to 3D modelling, the only way I can see texturing is possible is to take an image of what each face would look like on a shape, and put all of those into one texture and use that (I think the technical term is baking, but I could be wrong). The problem is mainly repeating textures, which can't easily be placed onto a single sheet along with non-repeating etc. Of course, I know very little about 3D modelling, so I'm hoping someone can find a way that works, and then I can add a simple CSV list into the application which will take a list of models and put them at exact coordinates. So you could, for example, generate Warsaw, but add the real model of the Pałac Kultury and exclude the fake OSM facade model out.

 

What I won't stress enough though, is that we really badly need hundreds of simple buildings such as basic houses, supermarkets and industrial buildings which match specific footprints. The more we have of these, the less generic the scenery will look. At the moment, there are too few buildings, and far too many red-roofed facade buildings. It works well in some areas, and looks a bit plastic in others.

[wolke85 150]

Tony: WOW - ... again!

 

All this is tremendously great and sounds most promising - really!

In regards to Your appeal/request for generating more simply houses and buildings all i can say for now is that i will keep my fingers crossed to really try hard whenever my time allows it to get used to the tools required to "create" such "3d objects" needed and sure hope that others will join in as well!

 

But for now again saying:

FANTATSIC work from Yours here so far Tony!

Keep it comming!

SUPER!

[tonywob 4,769]

Thank you very much Christoph. I tried modelling my local Lidl supermarket and my house, I can get the models done very quickly in Sketchup which is quite intuitive, I just can't do the textures (it's so time consuming). My house is now incidentally included in the scenery, and actually fits my real house, so it sits exactly where it should ;-)

Another good/useful finding I noticed is that lots of airports actually have buildings now, and some are really really well done. For example, some user in OSM has painstakingly mapped every building at EDDB and EDDI in Berlin, and because they added 3D information such as height, colour and shape, we get an airport thrown in for free. 

 

Of course, this also comes at a cost, firstly as a user pointed out here http://forum.avsim.net/topic/433968-simheaven-osm-frame-drain/#entry2920264, if payware/freeware airports don't include exclusions, the tool's generated buildings will leak through.

[wolke85 150]

 

 

I tried modelling my local Lidl supermarket and my house, I can get the models done very quickly in Sketchup which is quite intuitive, I just can't do the textures (it's so time consuming). My house is now incidentally included in the scenery, and actually fits my real house, so it sits exactly where it should ;-)

 

.. again - i know i am repeating, but ... - super, super great Tony!

 

I really hope and wish that Laminar recognizes and realizes the great things going on currently to really improve X-Plane dramatically to the better - and i hope that the poeple in charge there will use this "momentum" properly to - finally - gain sustainable success in letting X-Plane evolve and turn into a widly recognized, accepted and supported flightsimming platform!

 

I will start digging into X-Plane 10 again this week and start it all from the scretch so to speak (with AlpilotX, SkyMaxx and much more installed) to really show my support for this platform - and for people like You who contribute so much to it!

Simply great!

[MikeT707 1,181]

What I won't stress enough though, is that we really badly need hundreds of simple buildings such as basic houses, supermarkets and industrial buildings which match specific footprints. The more we have of these, the less generic the scenery will look. At the moment, there are too few buildings, and far too many red-roofed facade buildings. It works well in some areas, and looks a bit plastic in others.

I have extremely basic skills, but I would be more that willing to create structures(office buildings/houses/retail/apartments/whatever) if someone(s) could instruct me on what to do and how to do it.  I am sure I am not alone in my willingness to participate.

 

Anybody else with me?

 

So, is there anyone who could provide guidance and direction to move forward in creating structures?

[saed45 38]

I have extremely basic skills, but I would be more that willing to create structures(office buildings/houses/retail/apartments/whatever) if someone(s) could instruct me on what to do and how to do it.  I am sure I am not alone in my willingness to participate.

 

Anybody else with me?

 

So, is there anyone who could provide guidance and direction to move forward in creating structures?

 

 

agree with this guy. if there is a tutorial on how to do this we can all chip in and contribute a bit to help fix this issue

[CapnSplat 36]

The video tutorials at the SketchUp site are a good place to start learning the ropes.

[tonywob 4,769]

Have a look here

 

 

This shows exactly how to create models and get them into X-Plane, and helped me create a house :-)

 

Please remember to follow these guidelines (It's very important)

 

1) Make sure the centre point of the model is on the ground centre of the model, i.e. the origin. In sketchup, the Z line should cut straight through the centre of your building. This is so it can be rotated and placed properly by the application.

2) If designing models for mountain areas, make sure the model extends downwards as well, so it doesn't appear to be floating on a hill.

3) Measure it, and include the measurements in the filename, so we know what it is. e.g. 15x10_Residential_Germany.

 

I'm in the process of upload a test scenery at the moment of Brandenburg. I'll post the link when it's available.

[tonywob 4,769]

Thank you everybody for following along with this thread and getting involved. I've uploaded Brandenburg for testing available here:

 

http://tonywob.manuthie.de/brandenburg.7z

 

Please however, read the following carefully before using or downloading:

 

1) It requires the R2 (http://xplane.cz/en/category/down/vfr-cr-soucasti/) and FF (http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=12708) libraries for the European buildings, and X-Plane 10.25. Without these, the scenery will crash. If it does crash, open the X-Plane log file, and see if it tells you why, and post the reason here.

2) It isn't optimised and all LODs are the same, so you may see framerates go down around the centre of Berlin. This is something that still needs to be worked on. 

3) Some buildings will flicker, this is because many complex buildings are made up of parts. The program doesn't yet detect collisions, so I'm aware of these. 

4) Although not required, it looks best when used with photo sceneries. I use Simheaven's Berlin City area scenery. Without photoscenery, the buildings and forests won't fit the textures on the ground and it might look a bit odd. (I'd be interested in people's thoughts on this if they use it without photoscenery, I didn't like it)

5) It should sit on top of the photoscenery and HD mesh etc in your scenery order file, but below any custom airports. If you have Simheaven's OSM scenery available in this area, please temporarily remove it to avoid conflicts.

6) In my last development, the custom facades have been merged into individial sheets, which didn't turn out too well (so some of the custom facades might look weird close up). I will revert the change I did, and get it back to individual sheets (or fix the issue)

7) Disk space is being offered by a generous user Manuel on this forum. Please only download this file if you are willing to offer feedback and understand the basics of OSM and scenery. It's alpha/beta quality scenery, and should be treated as such. To install, just unzip the folder using 7zip, and place it into your custom scenery folder. Please don't shout at me if it blows up your computer :-)

8) If you notice an issue in the scenery, please first check the area in OSM. If a building is missing or forest, but it's present in OSM, I want to hear about this. If the building or forest also isn't in OSM, then you can add the building or forest, and it will be there in the next test ;-)

9) The buildings placed from the R2 and FF library aren't origin aligned, which means that large buildings sometimes cut into a road or each other. This is why we need our own buildings creating which are origin aligned. 

10) And finally, remember this is based on data available in OSM, so in some cases it looks good, others it doesn't. If you have suggestions on how to improve something, then please let me know

 

From the scenery, you should get an idea of how real objects are placed, and also get an idea of objects that are lacking. e.g. In villages, you'll see that there isn't a huge range of houses, and there are still many facade style buildings that need objects creating.

[Humpty 751]

Tony I am trying to make the google warehouse textures as a single file , I did manage making it as one but the placement of the textures is not coming out correctly, but will still try and let you know.

[Desaix 235]

I have extremely basic skills, but I would be more that willing to create structures(office buildings/houses/retail/apartments/whatever) if someone(s) could instruct me on what to do and how to do it.  I am sure I am not alone in my willingness to participate.

 

Anybody else with me?

 

So, is there anyone who could provide guidance and direction to move forward in creating structures?

 

 

Follow the link provided by tonywob above to learn his basic standard settings for buildings.

Like you I had little skills, I downloaded sketchup and I'm learning to 3D model simple structures. Of course the hard part is texturing and regarding this we should have a common guide to avoid duplications. I'm currently doing detached house for rural northern Italy.

 

We would really need a coordinator, maybe with decent skill with obj and facade to write down what is needed and allocate work among volunteers.

It must be add that LR as well wrote that new art work is on the pipeline but of course until 10.30 (that could be days or years away for what we know) there's little chance we can benefit of it.

[Humpty 751]

Follow the link provided by tonywob above to learn his basic standard settings for buildings.

Like you I had little skills, I downloaded sketchup and I'm learning to 3D model simple structures. Of course the hard part is texturing and regarding this we should have a common guide to avoid duplications. I'm currently doing detached house for rural northern Italy.

 

We would really need a coordinator, maybe with decent skill with obj and facade to write down what is needed and allocate work among volunteers.

It must be add that LR as well wrote that new art work is on the pipeline but of course until 10.30 (that could be days or years away for what we know) there's little chance we can benefit of it.

 

 

If you do get the texturing in a png please let me know how to do that, as I have tried but the textures are not placed correctly.

[tonywob 4,769]

I'm currently doing detached house for rural northern Italy.

 

This is super, I'm so happy people are getting stuck in :-)

 

Regarding a coordinator, if anyone is up for the task then please let me know. Once we have a coordinator, I can write a set of rules to follow and a CSV file importer, and hopefully we can start filling out the OSM world. As for hosting, I recommend initially we use something like github, where people who contribute can check files in and out. If anyone knows of a better way, then please let me know.

 

Also, a good initial goal I think is to concentrate on rural or suburban areas. Although regional buildings are good, we have so few buildings at the moment, that I think although it's good we group the objects into country/regions, we should concentrate on larger continents until the list of buildings expands and then we can begin restricting the generator to only inserting specific buildings into regions. So an Italian building will initially appear everywhere in Europe, and as more buildings are added, we will then restrict it to appear in Italy (If this makes sense).

 

 

Tony I am trying to make the google warehouse textures as a single file , I did manage making it as one but the placement of the textures is not coming out correctly, but will still try and let you know.

 

You're best bet is to actually just retexture the building. One trick maybe to take a screenshot of each wall, combine all the screenshots into one sheet, and then retexure the entire wall. It may work, I don't know :-)

 

Also, please be aware that another issue with the buildings on google warehouse is that some of them are hyper-detailed, and have hundreds of faces. This will kill performance in X-Plane, so in this case, it's best just creating it from scratch. Remember, that in most cases, people will be flying over the building from 1000ft or above, so seeing potruding window ledges or guttering on a house is over the top, and only hurts frame rates.

 

Pilotbalu and another user on the aerosoft German forum actually created landmark packs using the buildings from Google Warehouse. They used the gmaps utility to do it (which has been previously discussed). But, two downsides to this

1. The buildings were split into hundreds of objects, each with their own texture. This killed performance quite badly
2. The file size is huge, for central Berlin which contained about 100 buildings, it was 250MB. Also, it turned my X-Plane into a slide show.

[Humpty 751]

@Tony,

  

 

 Hey I do not know how to re- texture , i can only make the single texture file , but the the textures are completely misaligned on the object :(.  I will try some more.

[tonywob 4,769]

Watch the video linked earlier up the thread, it shows how to do texturing. It's not the easiest of things to do, but it's the only way I'm afraid.