India Mesh.

[Humpty 751]

Hi,

 

 I am making a mesh for India but mostly would be the state of Maharashtra as this is my home state.  May extend to the South. Won't be doing the Northern region because that is already covered by Alpilotx's Himalaya Mesh.

 

 I am using .hgt files from viewfinderpanorama which to my knowledge is a 30 DEM tile which should be good enough, though there is government data but the .tiff from there has a lot of spikes and I don't have any idea how to rectify it. 

 

 I have made four tiles :

 

 +19+072  - Bombay - this tile has some issues hence I may remove it  or look for other data.

 

 +18+072  - South Bombay  - covers Butchers Island and the Elephanta Caves (still needs some editing in openstreetmap) but you won't see the caves

 

 +18+073 -  SE of Bombay heading towards Pune and Aamby Valley. Aamby Valley OSM data is almost NIL atm. But many are editing so in time it should be   populated.  

 

 +17+073    This is the area of the western ghats and the Sahyadri Mountain Range.  The area looks pretty good. But I am not able to locate the Mountain called as   Table Land in Panchgani , which is a flat mountain and almost hollow. So may need some editing again here in openstreetmap .

 

 To me the changes are noticeable.

 

  The objects like buildings and other stuff is derived from openstreetmap and the coverage is very good for the island of Bombay heading East .  For this I am using World2Xplane to generate them.  There are quite a few National Parks in and around Bombay. The one in Bombay is the Sanjay Gandhi National Park which has two lakes with crocs.  But these two lakes are not showing up in the +19+072 tile atm.

 

     I shall also be uploading the .pbf file so if users want to fly in this area can generate the objects using W2XP.   

 

   The airports and the helipads are in the thread "Juhu Aerodrome" which has VAJJ Juhu Airport and three Helipads (Actually there are four around Bombay but i haven't yet made the fourth one as yet which is the Naval Radar Station ) which shall be uploaded with this package once I am satisfied. 

 

This is my first effort and to be honest Xplane scenery development is quite easy even for a layman a little searching and advice from Tony has helped. At least now I can fly around in a replica of Bombay which was never like this in any sim i have used.   Xplane needs a a few more objects to make it look better and hope the devs who make them do go further.

 

  I am also using custom water textures and scripts which to my sight looks very nice. I have not made these textures and scripts , got them from .org. I am not a developer or a graphics guy it's beyond me.

 

    I hope you rascal pilots like it.   

[tonywob 4,769]

+1, great to see more people getting into large scale scenery development

[Humpty 751]

+1, great to see more people getting into large scale scenery development

 

That's how Xplane progresses  

This is Aamby Valley airport VAAV (not there in Xplane)

 

Default Mesh

 

Don't get worried looking at the fps counter , that is due to the clouds.

 

The mesh I made same airport

 

[jozeff 93]

Hello humpty,

 

Wow thats realy cool. Would be great to use some tiles that people created. Made some tiles covering the Netherlands myself and also the south of florida which is absolutely flat... Where would you like to upload your tiles?

Have a nice day!

Jozeff

[Humpty 751]

Hello humpty,

 

Wow thats realy cool. Would be great to use some tiles that people created. Made some tiles covering the Netherlands myself and also the south of florida which is absolutely flat... Where would you like to upload your tiles?

Have a nice day!

Jozeff

 

Hi Jozeff,

 

 I will be uploading it to dropbox but not this week as I still need to figure out that one tile which is not showing the water like the lakes.

 

 I thought Florida was covered by the HD Mesh.

[Humpty 751]

I will use the Cartosat 1-R2 data and check if the terrain comes out right, there is also data called as "Land and Terrain" on the government site and don't know what it contains.

[Humpty 751]

Well the DEM for India are a mess, certain .hgt have missing points so it does not create and the .tiff from the government site is also a mess.

 

I am mixing working .hgt and working .tiff and will see how it shows up.

[Humpty 751]

Damn 3:30 a.m. and tomorrow work but can't help it , my mesh is going good and again thanks to Tony.

 

Just checking out the Sahyadri mountain range Yes to me it looks different now.

[tonywob 4,769]

What's the resolution of the mesh, you can make it more detailed using the mesh_specs command?

[Humpty 751]

What's the resolution of the mesh, you can make it more detailed using the mesh_specs command?

 

I have no idea about the resolution, The data from the government site which contains the shape and the tif file , well the tiff file has very bad problem especially near the coast or where the lat long meet. So I have to use .hgt from viewfinder and to my knowledge that is 30 m.

 

Is mesh_specs a new tool ?

 

going for lunch now be back in 30.

[tonywob 4,769]

It's an option in mesh tool to increase the density of the mesh

[Humpty 751]

Ok I just saw it @.org as I am using that same command, I will try the mesh_specs but I what I would not know are the numbers that I need to assign.

I am trying this now

 

mesh_specs 200000 4 in the text file.

[jcomm 5,926]

India's Mesh is a Mess :-) ( said Zulfi.... not me! )

[Humpty 751]

India's Mesh is a Mess :-) ( said Zulfi.... not me! )

 

India is sorting itself now

[alpilotx 505]

Important correction: Viewfinderpanoramas.org does mostly only provide 90m (3sec) mesh for the entire planet. Only a few areas (which I already all covered with UHD Mesh Scenery v1) have 30m (1sec) elevation data ... You can see those few on this download map:

• http://www.viewfinderpanoramas.org/Coverage%20map%20viewfinderpanoramas_org1.htm

Instead you might try to use 30m (1sec) data from NASA SRTM (which has been released in the mean time) ... but even there, you can expect some "holes" and other mess etc. .

 

Let me give you a short explanation on DEM problems:

 

Elevation data is a bit more complicated science than many imagine. Especially with higher res data, you can experience a lot of strange data "errors", like for example spikes in cities (this was a big problem for the UHD Mesh coverage in Japan for example). Those spikes - especially in cities - are a result of the way this data is collected. Most of the time - especially with all large scale projects like SRTM etc. - they rely on some kind of aerial (most of the time satellite) based measurements (usually radar or laser / lidar). And those measurements do reflect from the surface(!!) ... what ever the surface is at a given point! In cities, that surface is mostly defined by human infrastructure like buildings, roads etc. With high skyscraper or big highways you can easily get some "nice" bumps in those surfaces. Thus, in big cities, you can get "big" spikes (with easily having 100m offset to the ground) due to many high rising buildings. And those spikes can ruin any mesh scenery.

 

But this is usually the nature of most freely available elevation data. If you want real terrain model, where the ground elevation is in the DEM, you - usually - very quickly enter an area of very expensive products (simply for the reason, that its far from trivial and usually very labor / cost intensive to create them). You only alternative might be to do some kind of smoothing on yourself (and realize the complexity of this topic) ... In Japan for example I used the landclass data to determine where the cities are, and only there did I apply some smoothing (which gave a usable result ... but for sure isn't a scientifically perfect solution).

 

Add to this all the holes in the landscape. They are usually a result of measurement errors. For example having bad weather in the way or more often (and very commonly in mountainous regions) depending on the angle of the radar beams hitting ground, some parts of the landscape are shaded by others (the radar not always sees the deep valleys etc.) ... And without correct data, the data processing (because even the "raw" data you get on the net is not really raw ... it is already a complex interpretation of "really raw" radar / lidar measurements) either introduces nasty errors (another reason for spikes) or rather decides to stay with "no data" (resulting in holes). Over the time, some agencies or project groups introduce their own hole filling (if you ar lucky) ... or you can try to do it - again - yourself by back filling the holes from other source. Again, for japan - as an example - I had to back fill the fantastic (but full of holes) Japanese AW3D 1sec elevation data with a bit less detailed SRTM 1sec data AND even had to back fill SRTM 1sec data (because it sill has holes too) with SRTM 3sec data.

 

By the way, Wikipedia has a nice page about elevation data (and the implications I noted above):

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_elevation_model

So you see ... even though we nowadays are very very lucky to have access to fantastic (and a few years ago unimaginably detailed) data on the internet, we should never expect (even if we wish ) it to be perfect and often need to find ways around those problems (or accept them to some extent if the work needed would not be justifiable). And yes, I really mean this to be true for ALL types of data (as ana example ... whoever worked more deeply with Openstreetmap data will immediately understand what I mean)!