Well, I brought one MyBook (2TB) home from work.  So, I guess I'll work on that for a while.  :-) 

I'm eyeing a new WD Black 4TB internal though as well.  

The coasts do look rather good, don't they?  Almost done rebuilding the tiles.  We'll see if I did the settings right to get terrain elevations.  Keep your fingers crossed.

I didn't see a way to build mesh data in batches, so I built a mesh for each tile separately, pointing the program to the correct elevation data .hgt I found and downloaded.  It built the mesh with an acceptable number of triangles. 

Then I re-ran the batch with "use existing mesh" box ticked.  

I really appreciate your help.

Well, something went wrong.  It seemed to do the batch fine, but when I try to fly it, XP tells me I'm missing a library or something and won't load the Ortho Faroe Island tiles I built.  

Okay, I've tried rebuilding the tiles several different ways and it comes up with the same error and won't load in XP.  

I have no idea what to do at this point.

Should I delete everything in the custom folder (Faroe Islands) I made (except maybe the mesh files) and start from scratch?  I still have the orthoimagery of course, so nothing will have to download.

If I build individual tiles, can I create a custom folder later and just group all the +Lat-Long folders under an Earth nav data folder (and similarly for the terrain and textures folders) to sort of combine them and do a symbolic link to that?  It would make it cleaner in both my custom scenery directory and my .ini to do so.

Figured out the problem that was keeping the scenery from working after a rebuild with mesh (with Oscar's help).  

Much bumpier now:

In fact, there's a problematic bump at the end of the airport.  I guess I need to download GIMP again and learn how to edit.  Or is there another way to fix this?

There's some weirdness of the tiles around towns. And most of the towns don't have the autogen I'd like them to have.  

And then there's this!  I have no idea what this is about.  I don't remember this on the tiles when they were flat:

Too bad the FO images are from winter.  I'll see if BI or GO2 might have nicer summer images.  Grass is better green.  

Yep, that is a problem with the image tile:

There are two others with similar issues:

I guess this is an issue with the source imagery and not a download problem?

Is there a way to download a specific tile like this from another image source?

I did CT again, this time with GO2 and the settings Ses helped me work out.  This is more like it:

That's  LOT closer to what I saw when I was there last week than those shots above.  

Airports integrate well, also:

And the watermasks are a HUGE improvement.  Here's the mouth of the Black Hall river where I kayaked last week.  There's the little marina where we put in right by the bridge:

 

Pretty impressive.

I think ZL17 is the sweetspot. It's small enough that you can do entire states (or smaller countries) but high resolution enough that it looks good from takeoff to landing.

One thing that really helped my presentation was using HDmeshv3 for overlays instead of default XP11's overlays. At least where I fly in the SE US, the autogen data and variety is much better for cities, forests, and industrial areas. Have you also overlayed W2XP buildings on top of all your ortho + overlays? That's a big piece of the puzzle as well. Even though data is more sparse in the US, it still adds a lot of landmarks and gives variety to cities.

The only thing left to fix is for someone to come up with a better way for trees overlays so they are more complete and not showing sparse trees in concrete/building areas. Hopefully Tony's tool he's working on can rectify that somewhat. Then we'll really be golden.

14 hours ago, Griphos said:

I did CT again, this time with GO2 and the settings Ses helped me work out.  This is more like it:

That's  LOT closer to what I saw when I was there last week than those shots above.  

Airports integrate well, also:

And the watermasks are a HUGE improvement.  Here's the mouth of the Black Hall river where I kayaked last week.  There's the little marina where we put in right by the bridge:

 

Those shots and new tiles, look simply fantastic. WOW!  You are getting the hang of this.  Congrats!

Be sure to use the Clearn DDS and Ter box, if you have re-cut with a different service as you had, or those now unused jpg's and data will still be in their folder within that ROOT tile folder, wasting HD space.  

5 hours ago, bonchie said:

Pretty impressive.

I think ZL17 is the sweetspot. It's small enough that you can do entire states (or smaller countries) but high resolution enough that it looks good from takeoff to landing.

One thing that really helped my presentation was using HDmeshv3 for overlays instead of default XP11's overlays. At least where I fly in the SE US, the autogen data and variety is much better for cities, forests, and industrial areas. Have you also overlayed W2XP buildings on top of all your ortho + overlays? That's a big piece of the puzzle as well. Even though data is more sparse in the US, it still adds a lot of landmarks and gives variety to cities.

The only thing left to fix is for someone to come up with a better way for trees overlays so they are more complete and not showing sparse trees in concrete/building areas. Hopefully Tony's tool he's working on can rectify that somewhat. Then we'll really be golden.

I used ZL17 with ZL19/2 around airports.  I may back it down to 18/2.  

I tried the W2XP Enhanced autogen for a while, but I think I like the default autogen better.  That's what is in these pics.

I used Global Scenery for the mesh, but have quite a few of the HDmeshv3 tiles installed, and may try those overlays and see what difference it makes.  I can save the old overlays by renaming and compare them that way.  

@Sesquashtoo It was the clean DDS and ter box that got me in trouble.  It seems that checking that while batching tiles in a single folder will delete some needed files and keep the scenery from loading.  That's what Oscar told me when I couldn't get the scenery to load.  So I've been cleaning out the unused image files manually.  

Anyone know if it's markedly faster to generate tiles with no mesh, instead just using HDMeshv3 (which is already high resolution)? It seems like it's kind of redundant to produce my own mesh with each tile when I've already got all of the US/Carribean covered by HDMeshv3. 

You don't use the HDMesh for mesh, you use it for overlays.  Ortho4xp builds mesh from .hgt or other elevation data.  You can use the existing mesh, though.  

And, no, it won't be much faster.  Building mesh doesn't take any real time.  Neither does building overlays.  It's step three, downloading and converting to textures that takes the time.  

I'm really liking the shorelines with Ortho!  I'm tempted to just do tiles around the perimeter of the US to get this everywhere!  I'm using a water mask width of 25 now.  It seems to pick up most of the jetties and docks with the boats by them.  Really looks good.  I may try a width of 30 just to see if I get that last little bit.  

Take a look (this is near Richmond and flying out over Narragansett Bay): 

East of here it's a mess, though.  GO2 won't stop giving me those stupid blue tiles!  I've deleted and downloaded/rebuilt a couple of times.  

26 minutes ago, Griphos said:

I'm really liking the shorelines with Ortho!  I'm tempted to just do tiles around the perimeter of the US to get this everywhere!  I'm using a water mask width of 25 now.  It seems to pick up most of the jetties and docks with the boats by them.  Really looks good.  I may try a width of 30 just to see if I get that last little bit.  

Take a look (this is near Richmond and flying out over Narragansett Bay): 

East of here it's a mess, though.  GO2 won't stop giving me those stupid blue tiles!  I've deleted and downloaded/rebuilt a couple of times.  

Try BI(ing)....a good default stand by...:)

56 minutes ago, Griphos said:

I'm really liking the shorelines with Ortho!  I'm tempted to just do tiles around the perimeter of the US to get this everywhere!  I'm using a water mask width of 25 now.  It seems to pick up most of the jetties and docks with the boats by them.  Really looks good.  I may try a width of 30 just to see if I get that last little bit.  

Take a look (this is near Richmond and flying out over Narragansett Bay): 

East of here it's a mess, though.  GO2 won't stop giving me those stupid blue tiles!  I've deleted and downloaded/rebuilt a couple of times.  

I had my mask width set to 8, for my Myrtle Beach, SC tiles along the coast.  Because of your pics...I'm re-cutting them right now, with a Mask Width of 25, just to see the difference.  If they look too wide (the beaches) as per what I know them to be, then I will cut that in half to let's say 12 and re-cut that.  That's the fun of this all...the exploring, and total personal tailoring to what the User wants to see...

The beauty of already having downloaded the .jpg files for conversion, it's a matter of all of 90 seconds to cut new Mask Width's...

Cheers,

 

I was thinking I would try BI(ng).  It's just that the Google server makes such nice looking images!