Mesh overkill?

[birdguy 3,943]

With P3Dv4 I bought and installed Pilot's Next Generation FS Global Ultimate Mesh (1 meter resolution) .  I wanted the best.

Now that I have all of the Orbx sceneries installed I began installing my Aerosoft sceneries, most of which work well with P3Dv4.

Cuzco in Peru has floating runways and Lukla (Mt Everest) has a mountain slope covering half the airport and the village.

I ran the Orbx Vector airport elevation tool but that didn't solve the problem.

So I dumped the Ultimate Mesh and went back to my Pilots FS Global 2010 mesh (9 meter resolution) and both Cuzco and Lukla fit perfectly.

I'm wondering if we aren't going too far with mesh resolution.  Flying even at 7,000ft AGL can we really see the difference between 1 meter and 9 meters?  9 Meters is less than half the length of the lot my house is built on.  What am I missing by not having 1 meter mesh?

Of course maybe I'm all wet.  It might be my system's fault.  I don't know much about how these things work and I'm not a tinkerer.  I just go by recommended settings..

 

Noel

 

[niyoko 7]

At first read I wonder if Orbx's scenery texture was designed with a specific mesh resolution in mind that is causing the mountain slope to show in the village and airport. 

Sounds like a silly question, but when you ran the airport elevation tool in Orbx Vector, did you confirm that Cuzco was in the list of airports who's elevation was to be fixed? I've had some issues with airports where I ran the tool and it didn't pick up the airport at first.

[ppo 67]

Also, did you check the AFM configurator tool that Pilot has. It is a flattening utility for their very detailed mesh. It is available from their web site in the download section of your account.

It works pretty well.

Cheers,

[officercrockey 196]

I just landed a few days ago in Cuzco. I saw that the runway was floating. But in the AFM tool was a fix for that. Wish I would have checked it before ;)

[AviatorMoser 353]

When a developer advertises a 1 m mesh, it's usually the case that only a few spots in the world are that resolution. It's more of a marketing ploy. What is more likely is that most of the world is somewhere around 19 or 38 m with the USA at 9.5 m, and a few mountain regions at 1 m. I can tell you that a 1 m global mesh wouldn't fit on any HDD -- and I don't think even the Department of Defense has 1 m terrain data for the globe. The changes from FS Global 2010 could just be simply due to a change in source data and not because it's actually at 1 m now.

[birdguy 3,943]

Thanks for the replies guys.  I'm sticking with Pilots FSGlobal 2010X mesh.  I really can't tell the difference between the two but then I don't have the eyes of eagle anymore.

Noel

[Indy511 686]

On ‎8‎/‎21‎/‎2017 at 9:32 PM, birdguy said:

I ran the Orbx Vector airport elevation tool but that didn't solve the problem.

I had a few addon airports that I ended up adding manually and it fixed the problem. You might check and see if your airport in question was added automatically by vector.

[JasonW 32]

There is a post somewhere on orbx forums about this.  If I remember correctly holger says to keep your mesh at 5m, even if you have 1m mesh you will still see the detail just in a lower resolution.

[Chock 17,769]

To be honest, the only time a vastly increased mesh resolution will have a significant impact on your sim experience, is if you are landing on the terrain, and since unlike XPlane 11 and one of its more likable features, P3D doesn't have contoured main runways, it hardly matters most of the time unless you are the kind of sim flyer who likes taking a chopper through mountainous terrain, then you might indeed want to see sharp peaks on mountains and stuff like that. 

[mtrainer 136]

It's the economic principle of diminished marginal utility.  You reach a point where you really aren't gaining any perceptible advantage by going higher (or in mesh terms....lower....), and yet may be adversely affecting performance to boot.

I have purchased high terrain meshes for certain areas in the past, but am determined to keep my Preapr3D V4 installation down to the bare essentials - I made a pact with myself that mid-2017 forward would be doing more flying and less fiddling.  No more 3rd party add-on mesh for V4 and things seem to be lining up great.  I only have ORBX add-ons and a few Fly-Tampa airports so my experience is limited but keeping it simple seems best.

Mark Trainer

 

 

 

[newtie 533]

I have purchased high terrain meshes for certain areas in the past, but am determined to keep my Prepar3D V4 installation down to the bare essentials - I made a pact with myself that mid-2017 forward would be doing more flying and less fiddling.

You can add me to this list 

[por930 51]

On 9/7/2017 at 10:59 PM, newtie said:

I have purchased high terrain meshes for certain areas in the past, but am determined to keep my Prepar3D V4 installation down to the bare essentials - I made a pact with myself that mid-2017 forward would be doing more flying and less fiddling.

You can add me to this list 

Liked the "pact" newtie...Me too.......I seem to spend my entire time fiddling and getting things 'just' right, only for some hing else to pop its head up etc. Now, "fiddling" is down to one session per month. 

[pinepix62 63]

In the documentation for Lukla they state that you must set your mesh to 17m in config. Then it works fine, it must be something do do with the way the developer placed the airport, maybe his own custom DEM. I have however not tried Lukla in P3DV4 yet