Ortho4XP question

[JNS 106]

Hi.  I was just wondering at how low an altitude one can typically fly before the Ortho4XP scenery starts to look a little "strange".

Thanks for any comments.

Jeff Smith

[Guest-475 81]

There is no simple answer to that question, as it is highly depended on a lot of factors:

- Quality of the source orthophots
- Zoom level
- Texture resolution settings in X-Plane
- Type of environment (urban, mountainous, flat, forests etc.)
- Use of decals (gritty details) or not

etc...

But even with all things being equal, it's still highly dependent on each ones subjective perception. Let's say we have the exactly same scenery and two different people. One of them might already find it perfectly fine at 3000ft, while the other will still complain about the lack of quality at 18,000ft.

I only build tiles in ZL16 with decals, and I am totally happy with the results even when flying GA or helicopters low&slow. Others won't do such things even with ZL17.
I have a small area of about 20 tiles around my home town built in ZL17, but that was just to check if I would see a large benefit in rebuilding my other orthos. Turns out, It's not worth the additional time and HDD space for me.

Also keep in mind that you can set up Ortho4xp to build tiles with a higher ZL around airports and a lower ZL for all the rest.

[JNS 106]

Thanks, Matthias, for the very helpful answer.  I suspected what you said might be the case.  I guess when I get XP11 loaded I'll just have to try some and see what I think.

Jeff

[turnandbank 243]

I find ZL17 with ZL18 for 3kms around airports provides a good balance and is very impressive in most areas. As the above post says, results do very depending on the quality of the ortho photos. Not all ZL17s are equal in detail.