Bringing FSX/ORBX landclass to X-Plane

[tonywob]

I've spent some time studying the scenery system in FSX and how it uses land-classes. Basically, it splits the world into 1.2km grids, and each grid contains an annotated texture with matching objects. The roads are then placed over these, and blending is basically done by clever texture tiling. As ugly as it might sound, it's very successful and is why we have ORBX and others making scenery people love. The hard part about reproducing this in X-Plane is that firstly the XP scenery system isn't a grid and is done in layers with blending layers in between, and secondly most of the textures aren't UV mapped (meaning I don't know how X-Plane is going to place a texture on a given triangle).
 
I've created my own mesh creator into W2XP so that it can mimic FSX's behaviour, but also mix it with X-Plane's flexibility. So you can now do annotated textures and you can also layer data over the top of it. The difference between FSX and X-Plane is that it is all burnt into the mesh/DSF as opposed to being generated on the fly as you fly.
 
Here's a very early example of the new scenery.


It uses a photoreal texture of farmland and the photoreal texture is annotated. The stream is real and from the mesh. (Which means I can tell it that whenever it uses this image, place a tree at point A, a forest or farm-building at point B and C, etc...

 
The textures will then tile, and as you add more texture types and annotations the scenery will become more varied. I'd imagine you'd need about 10 such tiles for areas like farmland so repeating is difficult to see, but W2XP will take care of making sure things don't repeat by assigning tiles based on land-usage and making sure they join correctly.
 
You can see tiling here (I've only made 2 tiles)

 
You can then take real data and layer it over the top of your generic landclass textures, e.g. In the below shots I've overlayed buildings and forests. The forests have their own texture overlayed onto the scenery (Which is ugly as I didn't take the time to make a decent forest texture)


 
The effect can be very nice, remembering that it isn't photoscenery, but a trick which makes you think it is. So we get the best of both worlds, FSX landclass and XP's terrain without GB's of photoimagery.

 

[mtaxp]

Great news Tony!

Thanks for you hardwork

 

 

IMO You can use default textures ,as a single art work each texture actually looks great , but as you mentioned it's the way they are placed.

You should check those textures , some of them you don't actually see in Xplane for some reason , but the files are there (for example there is a textures for olive fields , this could be great in greek islands)

but now that you have the option to control that , I think Xplane's default textures can show their full glory 

[hychewright]

Tony that is fantastic work!!

[manuthie]

It's about time Austin hires you for XP11 develpment :im Not Worthy:

[tonywob]

 

 

IMO You can use default textures ,as a single art work each texture actually looks great , but as you mentioned it's the way they are placed.

 

Of course, you can place whatever texture you like and annotate it with real objects if you like

[Phantom88]

WOW!! Amazing!! Will it be possible to add seasons this way? Thank You for all the great work you do for The XPlane Community.

[tonywob]

 

 

WOW!! Amazing!! Will it be possible to add seasons this way? Thank You for all the great work you do for The XPlane Community.

 

Yes, since the textures are just in the library system they could change based on seasons. 

[mtaxp]

Of course, you can place whatever texture you like and annotate it with real objects if you like

 

Yeah , so I understood correctly :-)

 

What Im suggesting is instead of creating your own textures , you can check the default ones , there are many of them that you barely see in the sim , and with many different variations.

[tonywob]

 

 

What Im suggesting is instead of creating your own textures , you can check the default ones , there are many of them that you barely see in the sim , and with many different variations.

 

Well, it's tricky to just use the textures like in the shots above, because they aren't meant to be placed the same way as they are in FSX. e.g. The farmland ones are large repeating textures which span a large area and have no defined objects on them to annotate. To use the same textures, you'd have to cut them into smaller 1km (or whatever you defined as your grid size) areas and photoshop in objects, which LR probably wouldn't allow.

[Anxu00]

Great works Tony, much appreciated. One question though, do you think this "mod" (if it becomes final product) will be usable by mortals like us? 

[pilot83]

What a creative solution Tony! Well done! Will this feature be part of the W2XP generator?  It really saves the GB's from photoscenery and look way better then mesh alone.

[tonywob]

Well, you'd be installing the end result, which is just scenery. So if for example I did a US state scenery, you'd just install it like any other scenery.

 

Actually generating the scenery yourself is not something users could do unless they had programming experience.

What a creative solution Tony! Well done! Will this feature be part of the W2XP generator?  It really saves the GB's from photoscenery and look way better then mesh alone.

 

It is in W2XP (in a sense that it uses W2XP as a library to place the objects). The issue is that the data in OSM is simply too patchy for this to work without plugging in other data, and that's where the complexity lies.

[alpilotx]

The issue is that the data in OSM is simply too patchy for this to work without plugging in other data, and that's where the complexity lies.

And whats why the "original" mesh generator of Laminar is such a beast ... and why it needed years to tune raw data, create appropriate interpretation rules to let it generate a halfway nice looking result.

 

Indeed, users have to understand (a few, like Tony might have already very well understood :wink: ) that getting nice / good looking (and even halfway accurate) scenery is about much, much more than just having a good toll (nevertheless, a good tool is important too ... its like a body without a brain or a heart or a lung .... none of them works alone). And thats why its not a simple process where pushing a few buttons gives great results ...

[Desaix]

It's about time Austin hires you for XP11 develpment :im Not Worthy:

 

I doubt Tony can adapt to LR development sleepy pace  :wink:

[FloB]

Wow, it's phantastic to see your creativity at work. I imagine this opens a whole new playground for large scale scenery design. One thought from a dummy:

Wouldn't the real world data based object collide with the objects that ship with the textures?

And one question: You are using XP's landclass data, alpilotx's/HDMesh, or is there even osm landclass data? Or is this question nonsense?

 

Best regards

Flo