The repeating landclass textures in Asia had made me give up flying in the region (apart from Australia to Hong Kong, for which I have good photo scenery). Then I discovered Gibson Sceneries' North East China and China - Hong Kong to Shanghai v2 payware.
The product is described as "economical real scenery for en-route flying above medium altitudes", so above FL100 is where it starts to look good.

Now, it might only be LOD12, however, for ~25 GB of disk space (I deleted the duplicate LOD 11 that came with it), I now have the whole eastern part of China.
It's made a big enough difference to me that I'm now interested in buying some mainland China payware airports.

Climbing out over Bao'an (Pearl River Delta) and ZGSZ

Guangzhou

Somewhere over Inner Mongolia

Somewhere over Jiangxi Province

Shanghai

Beijing

Coverage area

It's not for low and slow VFR, but I like how it looks on the climb, in the cruise and on descent.
Water masking is good if you like the default water to show. I prefer the real water version.

For the cost of a good payware airport in P3D you can have a lot of photo scenery.
 

@F737NG  Thanks a lot for this recommendation.

It's really good looking and 25 GB is not to much for this big area.

Beautiful pics. Thanks for the recommendation.

Wow, that's a huge area. Great screenies and thanks for the info

I suppose that LOD 12 is not the mesh, it's the resolution in this case?! So 9,6 m / px ?!
(Equivalent to ZL 14 in X-Plane.)

1 hour ago, bernd1151 said:

Wow, that's a huge area. Great screenies

Thanks.
It really is a large area. Good balance between detail for high level IFR flights, storage costs and price.
 

24 minutes ago, PhotoReal Earth said:

I suppose that LOD 12 is not the mesh, it's the resolution in this case?! So 9,6 m / px ?!
(Equivalent to ZL 14 in X-Plane.)

It's the resolution. So yes, LOD 12 = ZL14 = 9.6m
 

Hi F737NG. I am glad that you like the scenery concept and great screenshots! A forum member made me aware of your post.

I have produced the scenery and have an upgrade to China coming soon using a different concept. I will upload to Simmarket as time permits and it will be a free upgrade to existing purchasers. 

I will explain the concept. For those who do not know, LOD stands for "Level Of Detail". With LOD13, the scenery will show below and around the aircraft. With an LOD 12, the scenery will show further out from the aircraft leaving your add-on land class scenery showing below and around the vicinity of your aircraft. LOD11 will show further out from LOD12. If 15m imagery is produced at LOD13, the scenery will appear blurry at lower altitudes due to the low resolution.

My new technique and maybe a first for flight simulator (FS/P3d), is to produce a "composite blend" of the imagery scenery at LOD12, however using a mask over the imagery such that if this scenery layer is placed above you land class scenery, your land class will surround your aircraft at lower altitudes, however further out from your aircraft the composite between your land class and the imagery will be seen. At higher altitudes, the blended scenery is hardly noticeable and the scenery will appear as real world. Your Landclass scenery is not altered in any way. If you turn the composite layer OFF, your landclass will be fully seen as if the composite did not exist. I tested a blend at LOD13 which gives a composite over the full area of your land class, however autogen will not show through and it can look a little messy over built up areas, thus I decided to produce one composite scenery at LOD12. The installed size of the Composite NE China will be around 15GB.

Here are a few screenshots over NE China showing the "composite". The scenery blends in nicely if you own ORBX Global.

The following is over ORBX Global with ORBX showing at low altitude. The composite can be seen in the distance

Some composite and full imagery appears in the distance

I am currently reproducing my Australian States, Tasmania, NSW and Victoria as a complete composite area of SE Australia. So far this is looking at being around 10GB. I will upload this to Simmarket hopefully by the end of this month.

ORBX AU2 in front of the wing. Composite above the wing tip with imagery showing further out. Any differences are hardly noticeable.

A nice shot over eastern Victoria.

Cheers,

Norm Gibson

 

Edited April 12, 20206 yr by gibo
Speeling and incorrect image