Google photogrammetry in MSFS - custom scenery attempt.

[Roman Design 344]

Here's my attempt for downtown Oakville, Ontario - 3D photogrammetry (mesh and textures) imported from Google Maps, heavily edited in Blender, edited for brightness, contrast and color-corrected in Lightroom and imported into MSFS. Very very tricky thing to do. Color was the toughest - now I think it blends nicely with the sorrounding "autogen" scenery. Here are a few screenshots with different lighting and weather. You can see where it ends by the trees - autogen trees are more fluffy, while photogrammetry trees are very rough. Without color correction it stands out like a sore spot. I will add new Hospital with helipad and Burlington Air Park, a local GA airport, which is generic in the sim. My scenery is from the lakeshore to the "S" river bend. But he merging roads you can see that the color is very close, and generally it doesn't stick out much from the autogen around it, which was a hell to do. Any advice appreciated. I could not make a baked texture that looks good - it became ugly in the baking process. Decimating mesh also killed the quality. So the mesh is optimized but still heavy. Scenery is 366Mb and FPS is 22 when this is in view, while outside this scenery it's 30fps. I only have a GTX 1660 and this is a 4K monitor, so this is expected. Waiting for RTX 3080 and Reverb G2 VR before I will use this sim. Meanwhile I'm preparing the local scenery bits, strictly for my personal use of course. Using Google data should be legally OK for creative perposes. Hopefully the FPS hit will not be noticeable with 3080.

Note how the roads generally blend OK with default roads in the distance, without drastic color temperature or brightness changes. The trees from the church to the lake are still my scenery - while the trees on the far side of the river, starting from after the row of townhouses are autogen. You can see where the autogen buildings start int he distance and trees have more or less the same green palette and same contrast overall.

Another angle:

Dusk lighting

Golden hour. You can see that the trees are roughly the same color range, which was extremely difficult to achieve. They are still rough and low poly of course, but nothing can be done about that.

Night lighting: building's windows are not lit, of course, but street lighting is still there and looks not bad at all.

Daylight

Another angle. You can see autogen buildings in the distance. My buildings are a bit mor contrasty, but if I reduse darks and contrast they become too washed out, so this is a good compromise. Still, if you squint, they will blend in OK 🙂

For comparison, here is the model imported from Blender without color correction. Ouch. It's overly bright, the borders of the scenery stick out and it has a blue tint. Many DIY sceneries based on Google photogrammetry exhibin this, because without color and brightness correction this is what you get...

So, any advice on how to improve FPS and optimize it while not noticeably degrading the quality? UV unwrapping in Meshlab and then baking in Blender produced garbage. Degraded mesh and degraded textures, while the same FPS as unbaked package...

 

Edited September 12, 2020 by romandesign

[FlyIce 354]

Beautiful work! 

[ryanbatc 12,833]

Woah! Nice!

[dfeldman 35]

Great work! Well done.

[RustyFlyer 182]

Very, very nicely done... hat is off to you! And it seems that you have brought it over such that it is not an FPS killer. Well done, Roman 👍😉😎

[captain420 3,099]

Very nice work! With so many people learning how to do this, we're starting to see the world come together with so many amazing scenery!

[787flyer 633]

Wow! What a difference. How much time did you spend on that overall?

The  results are fantastic.

[Farlis 2,281]

Now someone upload a video tutorial on how to colour correct like this. 

I have done some church and POI models of my hometome, and while I like the way their shapes give the city back its visual fingerprint, they all do stick out like a sore thumb in direct light, because I did not colour correct anything and have no clue how this works.

 

(By the way, it is not quite as bad as your example shows, because the colours are more washed out in the scenery builder mode you are in. When the finished package is loaded into the sim, it is slightly better, although still not as good as your corrected models).

Edited September 12, 2020 by Farlis

[virtuali 4,421]

9 hours ago, romandesign said:

any advice on how to improve FPS and optimize it while not noticeably degrading the quality? UV unwrapping in Meshlab and then baking in Blender produced garbage

I don't know much about Blender but, in a tutorial I saw on Youtube, the guy presenting it said you had two options to unwrap: directly from Blender, which takes quite a bit of time, and by exporting to Meshlab, which is supposed to be quicker, but with inferior results.

In 3ds Max, there are several options, but the absolute best is Flatiron, which is a fairly expensive plugin, but gives professional results:

https://www.texturebaking.com/

This does both unwrapping and baking, and has so many options and different algorithms optimized depending on the source material.

However, the same company does also a FREE unwrapper, which currently supports only 3DS Max and Maya but, it seems Blender support is coming:

https://www.uv-packer.com/

 

Quote

 while the same FPS as unbaked package...

That's because your area was fairly small, so the unoptimized materials weren't enough to make an impact. With GPU is like that: your card can do it, until it can't and after the breaking point, fps will collapse abruptly. The freeware Monaco scenery had more than 16.000 different texture, and that was just too much, I guess yours is a lot less, so you might not see the difference but, I assure you baking should be done with this kind of project.

[Roman Design 344]

7 hours ago, aldridgem said:

Wow! What a difference. How much time did you spend on that overall?

The  results are fantastic.

I spent a couple of days on trial and error attempts. Once I figured out what works and what doesn't for me, this took a few hours. I expect the next couple of areas I want to do will take about 2-3 hours each. Stiil too much time IMHO, but it's amazing how reality can be digitized and converted to 3D from photos and then Google Maps can be cpatured in real time and imported into a flight sim. Such an amazing technology, we keep forgetting how great this era is.

[Roman Design 344]

3 hours ago, Farlis said:

Now someone upload a video tutorial on how to colour correct like this. 

I have done some church and POI models of my hometome, and while I like the way their shapes give the city back its visual fingerprint, they all do stick out like a sore thumb in direct light, because I did not colour correct anything and have no clue how this works.

 

(By the way, it is not quite as bad as your example shows, because the colours are more washed out in the scenery builder mode you are in. When the finished package is loaded into the sim, it is slightly better, although still not as good as your corrected models).

It's very easy, technocally. It just took a lot of time and trial and error. After the scenery is done, but before it's built for copying into sim, I run Adobe Lightroom Classic to batch-correct about 1500 textures (as there is no baking into one file). I made some guesses, conversion takes a couple of minutes on a good PC. Then textures are exported and replaced in the scenery folder (originals backed up for future color-correction attempts). The project is loaded in the sim editor and was "built". Then I copied it to the community folder and loaded the sim to see how it looks like. It was too contrasty, too bright and too blue. So I corrected that and dialed it in. So, build in Blender -> position and adjust in MSFS, make sure model is final -> batch color correct textures in Lightroom -> load project in MSFS scenery builder and build the scenery -> copy into community -> selaunch the sim and check the looks. Rinse, repeat. It took about 10 runs to get there. Not sure if it will work equally well for different areas. But now I have a preset that will hopefully make the process simple next time. Here is the photo with all that this preset does:

[Roman Design 344]

2 hours ago, virtuali said:

That's because your area was fairly small, so the unoptimized materials weren't enough to make an impact. With GPU is like that: your card can do it, until it can't and after the breaking point, fps will collapse abruptly. The freeware Monaco scenery had more than 16.000 different texture, and that was just too much, I guess yours is a lot less, so you might not see the difference but, I assure you baking should be done with this kind of project.

Believe me, I tried several times with different settings, following the guides. The alternative method, with MeshLab. It comes out so bad it hurts to look at it. I tried directly in Blender and I gave up after 4 hours of it working. Meshlab did it instantly. I tried the advised 8192x8192. I will try 16384x16384, I saw somebody do that. Maybe that will work better. It seems that the mesh eats up FPS, not the textures. At least with this size of the scenery. As when I did something wrong and the sim loaded the model in white (no textures at all) I had the same FPS as with textures.