Best photo scenery options for P3D

[WebMaximus 372]

10 minutes ago, klamal said:

Yes, for the most part.  Sometimes I think photoreal can create a better illusion of elevation because of the shadows that are part of the image.  So, even though an area would be flatter without better mesh, it can still appear to have more depth.  So maybe that would be good enough for some people?  For me, I'd still use quality mesh too.

Got it, thanks for the input!

[WebMaximus 372]

Thought I would give FSEarthTile a go but apparently you need to manually get resample.exe from FSX SP2 SDK.

Does someone know if you can get this file from somewhere?

Would have been sweet rather than having to find, download and install complete FSX SDKs only to get a single file.

[klamal 282]

40 minutes ago, WebMaximus said:

Thought I would give FSEarthTile a go but apparently you need to manually get resample.exe from FSX SP2 SDK.

Does someone know if you can get this file from somewhere?

Would have been sweet rather than having to find, download and install complete FSX SDKs only to get a single file.

I forget what edition it is now(Acceleration or Gold or both maybe) of FSX, but they should include it in the install media.  I know with P3D, you can download the SDK straight from Lockheed website.  It's been so long now that I've been on FSX I don't know if it's possible to download the SDK?  But I'd check the install media you have for FSX first, assuming you have a version that contains the SDK on it.

[WebMaximus 372]

Already found the RTM SDK on my old FSX CD and downloaded the other required versions (SP1a and SP2) so I'm all good but thanks anyway!

[TurboTomato 90]

Watching this topic with interest.

I used FSEarthTiles to create photoscenery of Austria as there were no full commercially available products (or freeware) at the time. I didn't bother with any watermasks for lakes, and obviously it being a landlocked country it was pretty straightforward to do - iirc I used the Google Earth desktop application to get the coordinates to create and specify grids for input into FSET, and then I'd leave it creating the scenery overnight.

I have a ton of photoscenery for Europe gathered over the years but the link that really interests me is the one that has the whole of Northern Europe at 2m, along with basic seasons and autogen. I'm trying to decide whether to start downloading it as a) it's massive so it will take a long time even though I'm on unlimited fibre and b) it's massive and I'd need to delete some of my current photoscenery as I simply don't have the space. Hmmmm....

[WebMaximus 372]

2 minutes ago, TurboTomato said:

the link that really interests me is the one that has the whole of Northern Europe at 2m, along with basic seasons and autogen.

What link is that?

[TurboTomato 90]

http://italyphotoreal.weebly.com/download.html

Look for "EUROPE PHOTOREAL" and then "EUROPE AUTOGEN" further down (though it says Italy excluded).

Edit: I downloaded Italy photoreal from this site previously and it's decent quality stuff :)

[theskyisthelimit 48]

54 minutes ago, TurboTomato said:

Watching this topic with interest.

I used FSEarthTiles to create photoscenery of Austria as there were no full commercially available products (or freeware) at the time. I didn't bother with any watermasks for lakes, and obviously it being a landlocked country it was pretty straightforward to do - iirc I used the Google Earth desktop application to get the coordinates to create and specify grids for input into FSET, and then I'd leave it creating the scenery overnight.

I have a ton of photoscenery for Europe gathered over the years but the link that really interests me is the one that has the whole of Northern Europe at 2m, along with basic seasons and autogen. I'm trying to decide whether to start downloading it as a) it's massive so it will take a long time even though I'm on unlimited fibre and b) it's massive and I'd need to delete some of my current photoscenery as I simply don't have the space. Hmmmm....

What did you find the best setting for resolution in fsearth tiles?  I compared MSE v3 (the sharpest, along with ultra res) and found that probably a 1 is pretty close, but the size is quite large.. for instance.. to do the state of PA in usa it needs i think 95GB or more (forget exactly) while the same sharp MSE v3 is about 10-15 GB in size (i think this is close, so about 7 or 8 times bigger for fsearth tiles).. MSE must be doing something to keep the size down.. this is far less desirable on size, but the steeper cost of around $40 per state is not desirable either.. 7200 rpm hdds are cheaper.

edit: correction might be closer to 50GB in size from MSE v3, so maybe 2x the size with fsearthtiles  (side note, alot of their installers throw virus errors), descriptions show that v3 is 50cm texture resolution (i think 50cm per pixel? )  With Fsearth tiles a res of 0 is 0.5 meters per pixel and res 1 is 1m/pixel while res 2 is 2 m/pixel (quite a difference?) and correction, if i sized the state up correctly at res1 its 390GB! and 98GB at res2 

I may end up opting for 2 on resolution, though i should compare to 3 as well.  I also tried to contact MSE/PC aviator on a 50% of coupon and noone ever replied (i did get one for a different state but not the PA one).

 

It would be nice if there was a non satellite view for fsearth tiles.. would make it easier to segment areas.

[TurboTomato 90]

I can't recall exactly what setting I used, but I'm almost certain it would probably have been 2m per pixel - firstly I didn't need any more for tubeliner IFR and secondly it uses huge amounts of disk space when creating the scenery (far more than the scenery itself iirc, as it must compress it down in the final output). Austria worked out at about 60GB.

[TurboTomato 90]

 

On 9/6/2017 at 5:28 PM, TurboTomato said:

http://italyphotoreal.weebly.com/download.html

Look for "EUROPE PHOTOREAL" and then "EUROPE AUTOGEN" further down (though it says Italy excluded).

Edit: I downloaded Italy photoreal from this site previously and it's decent quality stuff :)

Well I've started to download Europe from the links on that site, starting with the UK - it all looks really nice, there are some changes in tone but they're not that drastic and there appear to be no hard tonal changes. Looking forward to getting more!

[TurboTomato 90]

Scratch what I said about it not having hard tonal changes - they are there but not too noticeable. Have done the UK and now working my way down the east of Europe - it downloads pretty quickly from the links (though they are from a Russian cloud service).

[theskyisthelimit 48]

For those using FSEarthTiiles.. is there any way to save grids that are mapped out.. so if you close the app it reselects the region.. or do you just have to remember the grid 4 corners coordinates?

Also.. any way to stop a tile production session and just resume/pickup where it left off... finding even my best i7-6700 machine takes about 29 hours for one large region, like say a state (PA).. and my server machine takes literally days, something like 5 or more with an A8 amd

 

[klamal 282]

25 minutes ago, theskyisthelimit said:

is there any way to save grids that are mapped out.. so if you close the app it reselects the region.. or do you just have to remember the grid 4 corners coordinates?

I create my "grids" in Google Earth first and save them there.  Then save each "grid" as area.kml and then drag and drop that onto FSEarthTiles.  That way I keep track of what I've done already in Google Earth.  Works pretty nice.

[theskyisthelimit 48]

6 minutes ago, klamal said:

I create my "grids" in Google Earth first and save them there.  Then save each "grid" as area.kml and then drag and drop that onto FSEarthTiles.  That way I keep track of what I've done already in Google Earth.  Works pretty nice.

Oh nice thanks.. i didnt realize this was possible.. a huge time saver.. i should be able to break things in half then, make 8 hour runs of areas overnight and continue on the next night.  It still is quite dramatic how much longer it takes to do an fsearth region vs ortho4xp.

[OzWookiee 18]

On 05/09/2017 at 0:12 AM, WebMaximus said:

So in other words there's still a need for products such as FS Global also when using photo scenery to have correct elevation, mountains shaped like IRL etc?

Check out FreeMeshX it's a high quality freeware mesh replacement for FSX/P3D similar to ALPilotX HDMesh for X-Plane. 

I've been getting my own DEM files and compiling my own mesh for the areas I'm flying in. A lot of work but I enjoy the results. If you don't have the time or inclination then get FreeMeshX instead =) 

I fly in XP and P3D and am slowly learning the differences with the scenery files and how to best make my own photo scenery. FSEarthTiles is working well so far but as you say we're really missing the autogen and water masks that Ortho4XP does so well. 

If you're flying in the US I've found a great little product for adding autogen for the state: nuvecta Landscapes. Around about US$6 per state and it looks good so far. Only for the US at the moment though. 

Trying to find a good way to get the water vector data from OSM and convert that to masks for my photoscenery.