Yosemite Valley scenery - photogrammetry creation

[B777ER 2,486]

4 hours ago, 2reds2whites said:

Would you like some cheese with your whine?

Ahh, just as I thought, nothing to counter with so you resort to a childish retort....brilliant. 

Edited September 14, 2020 by B777ER

[n4gix 4,947]

1 minute ago, B777ER said:

NOTHING OF ANY IMPORTANCE!

B777ER, stop. Just. Stop.

Thank you in advance.

[wthomas33065 994]

Here's my .02

.01.  VFXSimmer's Devils Tower is brilliant, and it is easy on the frames.  Even got me to dig out my copy of CETK and watch Roy Neary throw shrubberies through his kitchen window, and watch Barry get pulled out of the dog door for his trip to "The Tower".

.02  Yosemite is a place of extreme beauty, and this scenery is a definite improvement over the default, but it has optimization issues as the OP clearly stated.  Yosemite Valley is not like Devi's Tower, so you can't use the same technique.  

But the fact that you can get this level of quality and still maintain a flyable sim is pretty amazing to me.  Of course, I come from FSX when 12FPS was considered great performance.

It will get better, and if it doesn't.  I won't look a gift horse in the mouth.  Good work.   A good deal many more support you than condemn you.  Keep it up.

[M-Air Bush Deliveries Ltd 50]

13 hours ago, VFXSimmer said:

And if you were more experienced in the art of not being obnoxious I might be interested in carrying this conversation further.  The fortunate thing about anonymous internet exchanges is that you don't know who you are insulting at the other end.  You might be a bit embarrassed to find out.  I guess they don't teach manners at whatever real time hobby classes you take?

Anyhow, if you actually had a bit more experience you'ld realize that the time sink is dealing with nonconvex tetrahedral meshes which is what you get from google map photogrammetry.  It can survive one generation of reduction fairly well, but go farther and it tends to break apart, so you have to rebuild a proxy mesh to maintain the shape.  Eh, but what do kids know these days?

Yes, meshes reconstructed from photogrammetry point clouds are far from ideal in their topology, nevertheless a second grade polygon reduction is intended for LOD2, ie the mesh that is viewed from far away anyways.

The absolute low point was when I tried the Glasgow city that someone did for FS2020. He or she literally put the entire city as is in FS2020. The thing did not even load in right before I was very close to it. Heck, if I took my Agisoft Metashape here and the drone, I would do a better job because I would actually set up LODs or even export them directly from Metashape. To easily get LODs from Google maps, people should just export 3 three times at different zoom levels. This gives the inbuilt Google LOD mesh everytime, you know when you zoom into Google maps 3D you see the LODs transitioning. If doing poly reduction and retopo on your end is too hard, this is the easy way around it!

Point is, all this brute force modding with tanked frame times and load times throws a bad light on FS2020 with the conclusion drawn by the general public that the game can not run complex 3D photogrammetry properly. 

 

[VFRflier 6]

Is the actual DEM file for the area being remade from imported sources (like the USGS 1/3 ARC stuff) or is it being pulled from the google map or manually edited one peak at a time with the built-in SDK tools?

 

PS  I'll be keeping this mod even if there were no further changes - thank you

PPS  Monument Valley could be just as majestic .....

Edited September 14, 2020 by VFRflier
added PS/PPS

[kaosfere 3,115]

2 hours ago, M-Air Bush Deliveries Ltd said:

Heck, if I took my Agisoft Metashape here and the drone, I would do a better job because I would actually set up LODs or even export them directly from Metashape.

You know, if you spent half the time you spend arguing here trying to prove your superiority over the OP and disdain for everyone else on actually writing a guide for the community, or even building something yourself, instead of relentlessly tearing things down you might get more of the quality of scenery you seem to demand from a free product  That you, instead, continue to feel the need to argue here even after moderator intervention probably says something about your character.

@VFXSimmer, I flew the valley last night and it was a great experience, even with some of the flaws you acknowledge.   I thank you for the contribution and look forward to further evolution of it.  I know it's tempting, but I'd encourage you not to rise to further bait from the troll in this thread, it's obvious they're all noise and no signal at this point and have no intention of playing well with others.  This is one of those times I really wish the moderators on this site were more willing to give a single user who clearly intends to contribute nothing other than bomb throwing a bit of a timeout rather than locking threads.

Your work speaks for itself, along with your openness about its issues and obvious skill and knowledge in the area.  Thanks again.

Edited September 14, 2020 by kaosfere

[Steve Dra 7,588]

23 minutes ago, M-Air Bush Deliveries Ltd said:

If this FS2020 thing was not released way to early because they needed a new star of the show for the Xbox One X series after they lost Halo for release, I would do modding myself. But here comes big talk again: Nobody with experience jumps such early trains. As another user pointed out, the SDK seems to be as transparent as a brick wall. Looks like part of that because of a too early release. No hop hop guys, please mod with LODs from Google maps, daddy needs some good mods ready when he buys this game next year fully patched for half price in some sale.

Hehe.....you're most likely right.  I'm pretty sure everyone will pretty much agree with you that this was released way to early to be called v1.0, but I'm actually glad they released it as is for my own personal reasons...I can deal with the half-baked version and accept it for what it is...not what I want it to be.   The VFR enjoyment I've gotten from is thus far has already exceeded the ROI I calculated for it. (yeah, I do that for every purchase....the Carenado 182 is still under the threshold to hit the buy button, but on the radar, hehe).

The easiest way to tell if a title was released too early is very simply if the SDK is fully documented or not.  We already know the answer to this question, so I just put it out of my mind, and watch to see how all devs, commercial or not, tinker with my new toy to see what they can figure out despite MS/AS's best efforts to thwart them. 🙂

Glass half full approach I guess...I'm to old to waste time on things I can't change (getting a fully baked flightsim to market), and focus on things I know I can enjoy now while I'm waiting (VFR'ing all over the world....chucking at some of the scenery that is criminally wrong, (like the default Washington Monument for example), and marveling at what is right...no matter how obscure).

Like this....the Drive-in movie theater on an obscure US Navy base in Rota Spain where I had my 1st kiss back in the 70s

Or an actual helo I worked on in the Navy, now in the boneyard....

Real pic of me Christmas '85 in the Persian Gulf, one of the other helo's in my squadron hovering in the background..me on the right...

 

Glass half full.  These 2 places I visited alone paid for the sim in entertainment value in my opinion.

I'd like to see you get involved in the community if you have time to contribute, I know what you said about not jumping on the train this early, but if you're not gonna' jump on now, but have constructive tips to give the modders' who have, please share.

Who knows, by the time the train arrives at your station, on-time and with ALL the cars perfectly in tow, you may have many new addon's available for free that will be close enough to your standards as to be worth at least loading up in the sim to check out. 😉   

 

[wthomas33065 994]

21 minutes ago, Steve Dra said:

chucking at some of the scenery that is criminally wrong, (like the default Washington Monument for example

Even that is explained perfectly once your realize that Washington DC is not a Photogrammetric area, and that no hand drawn object was created for it, so autogen did exactly what it was designed to do. 

A lot of the complaints around Autogen stems from the fact that FS2020 has much fewer hand crafted scenery objects than FSX.  Photogrammetry is expected to fill in those gaps.  

What remains to be seen is if hand drawn objects can be used to replace photogrammetric ones.  The two scenery areas I've purchased, London and Washington DC, are enhancements to non photogrammetric areas.  It will be interesting to see if Scenery developers can find ways to clean up photogrammetric areas and substitute autogen and hand drawn objects where appropriate.  

[VFXSimmer 1,310]

1 hour ago, VFRflier said:

Is the actual DEM file for the area being remade from imported sources (like the USGS 1/3 ARC stuff) or is it being pulled from the google map or manually edited one peak at a time with the built-in SDK tools?

 

PS  I'll be keeping this mod even if there were no further changes - thank you

PPS  Monument Valley could be just as majestic .....

Hi VFRflier, actually these are 3D models replacing the DEM terrain in game.  Geographical features in Yosemite aren't well represented by height fields because there are undercuts and overhangs.  A DEM only stores 1 value for a given position on earth which doesn't work in these situations.  3D models also allow for a much higher level of detail, well beyond even the best 1/3 ARC height field samples.

This scenery was made by exporting models from google earth - I broke it up into chunks by feature (El Capitan, Cathedral Rocks, etc) and then I fit it into the mesh.  One of the nice things that the MSFS scenery editor has that something like World Editor for X-Plane does not is the ability to do terrain mesh adjustments in the editor as you go.  This allowed me to push the existing mesh down below the surface where it conflicted with the new geometry.  Also key was that the editor works in game so you're free to move the camera to every angle to see how the new features are working.  Even in this early state the software allows you to do things you can't elsewhere without a lot more pain 🙂

[Steve Dra 7,588]

7 minutes ago, wthomas33065 said:

Even that is explained perfectly once your realize that Washington DC is not a Photogrammetric area, and that no hand drawn object was created for it, so autogen did exactly what it was designed to do. 

Oh yeah...was fully aware, and knew autogen was just doin' its thing, but you'd think maybe they'd pop a model there before release so the backlash from simmers who don't understand how it all works would not have this prime target to rage about. 🙂

10 minutes ago, wthomas33065 said:

It will be interesting to see if Scenery developers can find ways to clean up photogrammetric areas and substitute autogen and hand drawn objects where appropriate.  

That is what I'm hoping, to have a good balance to reduce the performance hit while making tall monuments look like monuments vs 300 floor thin hi-rise buildings. 🤣

[VFXSimmer 1,310]

1 hour ago, kaosfere said:

 

@VFXSimmer, I flew the valley last night and it was a great experience, even with some of the flaws you acknowledge.   I thank you for the contribution and look forward to further evolution of it.  I know it's tempting, but I'd encourage you not to rise to further bait from the troll in this thread, it's obvious they're all noise and no signal at this point and have no intention of playing well with others.  This is one of those times I really wish the moderators on this site were more willing to give a single user who clearly intends to contribute nothing other than bomb throwing a bit of a timeout rather than locking threads.

Your work speaks for itself, along with your openness about its issues and obvious skill and knowledge in the area.  Thanks again.

Thanks Kaosfere.  As I said in the OP, I'm making this scenery primarily for myself, but its also really great to hear other people like you getting to enjoy it as well 🙂.  I spent the last day wringing a lot more detail out of the google data - its pretty impressive - should make for an even more satisfying closeup experience.  Gonna take a little while because it requires patching together a lot of closeup captures, but it'll be worth it.

As for the "other stuff" I dont give it much thought.  Ive hired and fired more people like that in the modeling department than I care to mention.  And heck if he wants to keep bumping my wee thread back to the top of the pile its all good by me 🙂

[VFXSimmer 1,310]

4 hours ago, M-Air Bush Deliveries Ltd said:

 

You're adorable 🙂

Edited September 14, 2020 by n4gix
Removed quote of hidden post's defamatory slurs.

[VFRflier 6]

24 minutes ago, VFXSimmer said:

actually these are 3D models replacing the DEM terrain in game.  Geographical features in Yosemite aren't well represented by height fields because there are undercuts and overhangs.  A DEM only stores 1 value for a given position on earth which doesn't work in these situations.  3D models also allow for a much higher level of detail, well beyond even the best 1/3 ARC height field samples.

🙂

Thank you, do you have an opinion on whether or not blanket "hi-res" DEM file replacements are viable or even possible?  I'm thinking via a Ortho4XP-style thing without the photo part - just a better underlying mesh.

[VFXSimmer 1,310]

29 minutes ago, VFRflier said:

Thank you, do you have an opinion on whether or not blanket "hi-res" DEM file replacements are viable or even possible?  I'm thinking via a Ortho4XP-style thing without the photo part - just a better underlying mesh.

The SDK has a terrain section labeled simply "TO DO" so your guess is as good as mine.  Will know more in the future I'm sure.  Speaking as someone who built a ton of Ortho4XP stuff, I'm not itching to go back there and refill the hard drives to that extent, but I agree that higher res DEMs would be nice in many of the mountainous areas.  I'd personally rather lobby MS/Asobo to stream a higher res dem as an option for those of us whose machines can handle it.

Edited September 14, 2020 by VFXSimmer

[VFRflier 6]

15 minutes ago, VFXSimmer said:

Speaking as someone who built a ton of Ortho4XP stuff, I'm not itching to go back there and refill the hard drives to that extent, but I agree that higher res DEMs would be nice in many of the mountainous areas.

I have 30TB of finished ortho (1/3 ARC & ZL19) and had plans for more before the MSFS 2020 launch, now I'm just waiting on better DEMs to see which direction to go.  Due to the simplicity of the MSFS 2020 approach I really want to save the time and just cruise my favorite areas with better geography.