AI trees vs photogrammetry trees

[OSJJ1985 134]

At this stage AI trees are better looking (or let's say actually look like trees) than the photogrammetry trees (sometimes very blocky). I am sure they are doing all the best in trying to improve the overall experience. At high altitudes it may not be a big thingy or flying fast. But when taxiing down the taxiway/apron  I do want to see "real" trees. Trees are among those things that greatly enhance the immersion, especially if you see the correct trees at your location (which even that wasn't always a given with P3D). Anyways I was thinking when it comes to dense forests, where I actually prefer this "blocky" presentation, because you're usually unable to see anything but the tree tops, this mesh style might greatly enhance performance without the cost of immersion (right now you need millions of trees to correctly represent a dense forest). I hope I haven't lost you at this point. My idea is to have dense forests (and other smaller areas where a larger number of trees are very close to each other) be depicted in this mesh style of rendering and have it surrounded by AI trees (produced by the AI engine according to whatever is fitting). This way it will just produce a small number of AI trees (a single row of around the forests perimeter) but still give an "illusion" of depth when close up on ground (or near to ground) level and preserve that dense appearance when flying over it AND keep performance high.

I hope I haven't lost you there and you get the idea 😉

Edited November 16, 2019 by OSJJ1985

[RALF9636 1,897]

Nice idea.

I have no doubt Asobo is aware of the blocky photogrammetry trees and will come up with a solution during further development.

 

[AUjeffk 10]

Maybe there’s an exclusion of blocky trees within xxx distance of an airport and those are replaced with ai trees?  Those would be most noticeable on takeoff, approach or on the ground

[Dominique_K 10,133]

1 hour ago, OSJJ1985 said:

At this stage AI trees are better looking (or let's say actually look like trees) than the photogrammetry trees (sometimes very blocky). I am sure they are doing all the best in trying to improve the overall experience. At high altitudes it may not be a big thingy or flying fast. But when taxiing down the taxiway/apron  I do want to see "real" trees. Trees are among those things that greatly enhance the immersion, especially if you see the correct trees at your location (which even that wasn't always a given with P3D). Anyways I was thinking when it comes to dense forests, where I actually prefer this "blocky" presentation, because you're usually unable to see anything but the tree tops, this mesh style might greatly enhance performance without the cost of immersion (right now you need millions of trees to correctly represent a dense forest). I hope I haven't lost you at this point. My idea is to have dense forests (and other smaller areas where a larger number of trees are very close to each other) be depicted in this mesh style of rendering and have it surrounded by AI trees (produced by the AI engine according to whatever is fitting). This way it will just produce a small number of AI trees (a single row of around the forests perimeter) but still give an "illusion" of depth when close up on ground (or near to ground) level and preserve that dense appearance when flying over it AND keep performance high.

I hope I haven't lost you there and you get the idea 😉

I am not very fond of your idea. If you fly a non-pressurized aircraft in a mountainous environment youu can be ASL high but not AGL high. You can see individual trees. If you watch my video Bush Flying in Papua New Guinea : Woitape to Tapini from the 1'10" mark, you see almost each tree  and that gives a sense of depth. Let's cut a deal instead of 1.5 trillion blobs, give us just half, a mere 750 billions of real trees  !  I suspect that all bush flyers will be with me here.

[RALF9636 1,897]

I am sure Asobo / MS will have a solution for the trees. They say that we even can land on a river bank, so the trees must be looking good everywhere.

.

[Raymond.Groenendijk 255]

Speaking about photogrammetry blob trees, do watch the 9 cities video again (you know that you want to anyway 😉 ) and watch the Barcelona footage. Now look at those trees, they absolutely don't look like the photogrammetry trees anymore as you can clearly see the detail in those trees. I've compared them to the trees in the Barcelona version from Windows Maps and there is a clear difference. So it seems like they have an algorithm present that can replace those photogrammetry blobs with actual objects which is insanely clever and opens up the road to future improvements of photogrammetry scenes. 

[Dominique_K 10,133]

38 minutes ago, Raymond.Groenendijk said:

Speaking about photogrammetry blob trees, do watch the 9 cities video again (you know that you want to anyway 😉 ) and watch the Barcelona footage. Now look at those trees, they absolutely don't look like the photogrammetry trees anymore as you can clearly see the detail in those trees. I've compared them to the trees in the Barcelona version from Windows Maps and there is a clear difference. So it seems like they have an algorithm present that can replace those photogrammetry blobs with actual objects which is insanely clever and opens up the road to future improvements of photogrammetry scenes. 

There are blobs in some cities (the small islands on the river  in Florence I think) but the issue for me as I said above are large forests in the boondocks. I don't want the jungles of PNG invaded by blobs. Invasion of the Blobs 😱. This ain't a horror game but a flightsim after all. Let us not mix the two genres . 

[Scottoest 1,561]

I suspect the 'blocky trees" are more a symptom of the procedural AI not recognizing that terrain as trees, so it just renders it as wonky looking terrain instead. The world in MSFS is probably filled with little patches like this where the Azure AI didn't quite work as intended - it just comes with the territory of not being able to hand-make and check everything.

I'm sure any particularly bad or heavily traveled areas where it occurs, if brought to their attention, will be "fixed" by ASOBO, but I fully expect people to be discovering spots like this now and again for the entirety of this sim's existence.  The world is a massive, massive place, and AI still can't perfectly visually analyze terrain like the human eye/brain can.

[Shack95 2,658]

Also in the Southampton approach footage you can see some non-photogrammetry trees among photogrammetry ones. The question is, were they placed manually or is this the AI’s doing?

[Dominique_K 10,133]

Blobby trees are not very nice (understatement) when you have round-shaped trees. They should be awful with any kind of palm trees !

So far this is really for me, the worst of what I’ve seen in the teasers. I hope they will tell us a little more about it in the weeks to come. An Ep dedicated to vegetation ?

[DaWu 779]

It will progress through out development. In the latest footage I saw cars going under bridges for the first time. So they make progress on these things. 

[cepact 517]

What you need to understand is that a photogrammetry area is not composed by individual elements like trees, buildings etc.. it's one single element / mesh, it's like a terrain, in which you have representation of buildings, trees etc...

So replacing photogrammetry trees by AI trees can be very complex because of this. They have to run an algorithm inside photogrammetry meshes to detect individual trees, remove them from the mesh and replace with AI trees with same density and height. 

And as you can see some trees have very weird shapes, so it can be very hard to guess which shapes inside the mesh maybe a tree or not, because some trees looks like cubes. They would also need to analyze texture among with the mesh.

Edited November 18, 2019 by cepact

[Dominique_K 10,133]

23 minutes ago, cepact said:

What you need to understand is that a photogrammetry area is not composed by individual elements like trees, buildings etc.. it's one single element / mesh, it's like a terrain, in which you have representation of buildings, trees etc...

So replacing photogrammetry trees by AI trees can be very complex because of this. They have to run an algorithm inside photogrammetry meshes to detect individual trees, remove them from the mesh and replace with AI trees with same density and height. 

And as you can see some trees have very weird shapes, so it can be very hard to guess which shapes inside the mesh maybe a tree or not, because some trees looks like cubes. They would also need to analyze texture among with the mesh.

I do understand that photogrammetry trees are a mesh, what I also understand is that I want none of that . 

Edited November 18, 2019 by domkle

[Casualcas 830]

I won't complain about them, as it's a leap above what we have currently,  when you look down at at a national park and can count trees on your hands over 100's of acres. Its fuller, greener, and more represented in MSFS

[Claviateur 789]

If the MS AI guessed trees/forests locations by analyzing the aerial images as the dev mentioned, I think the same could be done for the blocky trees in Photogrammettry. Then they could perhaps flatten the detected areas and plant procedural trees instead. But just guessing.

We must accept the fact that not only trees will have weird shapes in Photogrammetry but infrastructure as well. In Google Earth or MSFS previews, the Photogrammetry mesh gets more detailes based on distance / height. But then getting too close is not ideal either because the architectural shapes could look a bit deformed and organic like a surreal painting.

But this is to expect from Photogramettry with the resolution available through the techs of today.

And I take it as is 🙂

Edited November 18, 2019 by Claviateur