Best scenery for Swiss/Austrian Alps for v3?

[OzWhitey 3,353]

Making photoscenery takes a lot of time.

I made the freeware Belgium 2012 and it took me 4 months.

 

It was not only dl the tiles but some area were summer, others were autumn...

Manually I modified lots of tiles to match the others.

Then applying watermask to the entire coastline and also cut out all harbours.

At the end with another flightsimmer we made custom ag for the whole country.

 

I have Swiss Pro and when flying at 2500 ft + it looks good enough for me.

MSE Switzerland is 50cm based and resampled to 1m .

It has lots of color differences...

Some people who had Swiss Pro too tried MSE Switzerland with Swiss Pro ag.

 

@Ozwhitey

Why do you not upload what you have made like I did ?

 

I'd really like to share it, but whether you can depends on the source data. To make it publicly available, I'd need to make sure that all the source imagery is licenced for general distribution - which is not necessarily the case.

 

Therefore, I'd suggest that anyone who like this sort of scenery considers getting a copy of FS Earth Tiles and generating their own versions.

 

I can provide a few tips:

 

• FS Earth Tiles is freeware, you should be able to find a copy by Googling the name. It comes with documentation.
• Choose a country that has no ocean border to start with - this avoids the need for the time-consuming watermasking step. Switzerland is a great choice! For this country, I initially brewed it without water masks. When I got a bit more serious, I recompiled some sections after drawing paths around the inland water bodies using Google Earth's tools - but you can worry about that later.
• I organise my tiles in 1 degree by 1 degree sections (by latitude and longitude).
• This line may sound confusing and you can ignore it: I set FSPreResampleingAllowShrinkTexture = No in the ini file, and use download resolution 1. This generates 0.5m per pixel files.
• To generate a 1 degree by 1 degree tile takes me about 24 hours to download and compile (on a decent-speed computer). FS Earthtiles automates this, so all you need really do is 'set and forget'. By the way, that's 207,389 tiles (approximately!)
• I much prefer 25cm per pixel resolution (download resolution 0 in the program) - but that takes quite a bit longer to make. A 1 degree by 1 degree section requires around 831417 tiles. I did some calculations a while back to work out how long it was going to take to cover the world at this resolution. Answer = a while. So I alternate between 0.25m and 0.5m depending on my mood and the area in question.
• The program saves the downloaded tiles in a cache. I always keep this so I can go back later if needed and recompile with different contrast, water masking etc wihtout having to re-download everything.

If you've never tried this, the above may not make a lot of sense. My advice - if this sounds like your cup of tea - would be to download FS Earth Tiles and give it a go for yourself.

 

The most important thing with photoscenery is not the absolute resolution, by the way. It's the quality of the source imagery. The megascenery earth products, for example, often have good resolution - but fake-looking colours and blurry imagery (I have a 60 megapixel camera - trust me, you can still take blurry pictures with it!)

 

For the custom autogen, as I mentioned earlier the Open VFR product is very cheap and saves the time of having to try and do this yourself (I haven't mastered this process yet).

 

I do add some auotgen to specific areas, using Instant Scenery for Flight 1. Unfortunately the P3D updates broke compatibility with this some time ago, so I haven't been doing much autogen placing in 2015. ADE is another great tool for fixing airports and I've done a little bit of that in Switzerland.

 

Here's a final thought - what would be great would be a collaborative process to fix all the Swiss airports and add autogen to the Open VFR base. I've often thought that LM should provide some tools - similar to those I've listed above - to enable crowd-sourced autogen to be collected.

 

Oh, and by the way. I've been making some scenery of Belgium and - when hunting for autogen to go with it I came across yours, Gerard. Downloaded it last week but haven't tried it out yet - look forward to doing so!

[OzWhitey 3,353]

One thing that does take a while - and requires manual input - is drawing paths around the water bodies.

 

I've done this for some of the lakes in the Alps - such as around Sion and Grindelwald.

 

You can do this in Google Earth, using the path tool and drawing two lines. The outer one is labelled 'Coast1' in the inner one is labelled 'DeepWater1' (though you'll use a different number of each water body, I've just used '1' as an example)

 

You save a .kml file from google earth, and place it in FS Earth tiles working folder (this is a folder you set from within the program when making scenery).

 

Here's my current KML file if you're interested in giving this a go and don't want to bother about drawing paths etc.

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3gv7xo34ds0zifa/Swiss.kml?dl=0

 

(as noted, just drop it into whichever folder you decide to select as your 'working' folder).

 

If anyone wants to add some more paths in the Alpine region and re-upload, feel free!

 

By the way, this method doesn't work for me for larger water bodies such as Lake Geneva. Not sure why this is the case.

[fscottee 10]

If using Bing as your source, I wouldn't imagine any issues making the scenery available, freely.  Afterall, it technically violates the rules simply downloading the tiles for your own use.  Bing would likely be happy as a lark to see you're using their service rather than Google.

 

In addition, for custom models, 3D Warehouse has an assortment available for free.

Ah, found the pics I posted of my swiss scenery.

 

http://imgur.com/Lrdru1m
http://imgur.com/rcrzy0Z
http://imgur.com/ozdBg4R
http://imgur.com/XauwhgR
http://imgur.com/GaSWMKS
http://imgur.com/q47K7bb
http://imgur.com/kSbL7oP
http://imgur.com/DNOUUYQ
http://imgur.com/G2ofElP
http://imgur.com/tokNd9w
http://imgur.com/epUVMoD
http://imgur.com/oSoaQxS
http://imgur.com/mhI2Ojx
http://imgur.com/O5KAsLj
http://imgur.com/fhnTAIV
http://imgur.com/yZrdAmT
http://imgur.com/Hk1MKB6
http://imgur.com/FY199vN
http://imgur.com/PS8lj3k
http://imgur.com/TnEsI4B
http://imgur.com/MKCeEmm
http://imgur.com/ri4TXGq

[OzWhitey 3,353]

Nice pics, FS Cottee.

 

re: 'Bing would be happy as a lark' - I'm sure you're right, but perhaps you'd just check that out with their legal team for me? I'm sure the 'but at least someone will be using Bing' argument will go down a treat.

 

Have you tried tried the 3D Warehouse models in P3D? Any issues?

P3D comes with plenty of tree models but I find the other autogen rather underwhelming.

 

I'd dearly love an extensive library of models - similar to what Orbx has - for placing in P3D over photoscenery. You can build a small town in not too long with the right tools, and with a group of flightsimmers working on it you could make Switzerland look great reasonably quickly. As I mentioned above, if Lockheed Martin could organise something like this then I and many other simmers would likely be willing to add a lot more detail to their world.

[fscottee 10]

3D warehouse has lots of models but you have to combine the textures so you don't have 99 drawcalls for one building.  It's spotty at best, but some places like Lowell, Massachusetts are awesome.  Check my screenies in screenshot forum.

 

As far as Bing, simply using them in fset is just as much against their use policy as distributing them.  And I know of one commercial scenery pack (east of Switz) that is using Bing maps for their products.  So, I wouldn't worry too much about it...

[Heathrow to Dublin 1]

Thanks, but unfortunately I don't have 4 months (daily work) of time to dedicate to this.  I guess I'll have to just suffer what ever is on the market.  

[fscottee 10]

Naw it doesn't take that long.  You can create a nice size region to enjoy in a few days.  Here's a shot of photoscenery + autogen trees and buildings +  256 custom buildings in downtown Lowell, Mass.   You're looking at 3d buildings there and lots of tree coverage.  Every house right where it's supposed to be.  I left out the large buildings because the autogen counterparts look awful.

 

This is all based on GIS data which is easy to find for Swiss.  You could create any place in Swiss within 4 hours just like this.

 

 

 

[fscottee 10]

BTW, here's a couple videos I posted a couple years ago after finishing my Swiss scenery.

 

 

[Poppet 703]

Great posts Rob and Fscotte.  Interesting stuff, a lot of work went into this 

My head was sore even reading Robs post  :smile:   So much detail.  Interesting 

[LB777 100]

Do you guys know of any good, up to date, tutorials on how to achieve something like what fscottee did?

 

Every time I tried making photoscenery I ended up getting frustrated because I would find a lot of different information on how to set up FSET, usually outdated information too.

The process of adding autogen using Simproc seems even more complicated to be honest, I couldn't even manage to get OSM data to work...

 

I'm sure once you're a pro at it you can make great stuff quite quickly but getting there seems (at least for me) too painful...

.. or maybe I'm just a lazy idiot ^_^

[Gabster 7]

Can someone tell me how to get my Austria Pro X from FSX into P3D V3.1?

[ampharoah 3]

Help!

Just change from FSX to P3d and I'm trying to install Switzerland professional X from DVD.

Gerard's comment earlier in this thread says:

"I have swiss Pro working in P3D.

Had it installed outside FSX and just added it in the P3D scenery.cfg file."

Would some kind soul please assist with instructions on how to do this please?

Thanks in hopeful anticipation

 

Andrew

[Clutch Cargo 384]

Gee Rob,

You get us all excited about your "kitbashing" process but only one screenie.  You're cruel!  

I work on photoreal scenery every day and luv to see other simmers work. Howz about posting some shots in the screenshot forum so we can all drool?

[pkruesi 0]

There is another commercial product available: Swiss VFR XI from Flight & Cockpit http://www.pcflight.ch/, details under http://www.pcflight.ch/swissvfrXI.htm. Due to the high costs of the legal pictures from Swiss Governement, not the newest but OK. They shall help with manual install into P3D, easy. We use it thru FS9, FSX up to P3D v4.