Greater Toronto Area enhancement pack (work in progress)

[Roman Design 344]

I posted Oakville downtown area before, now this is Mississauga downtown. Very close to CYYZ - Toronto Pearson International Airport. Toronto has photogrammetry in MSFS, and Toronto Island CYTZ is a custom airport, but photogrammetry ends outside of Toronto proper, and starts again around Burlington and Hamilton area. Many important Greater Toronto Area VFR landmarks and POI are left to autogen.

I've decided to correct that as much as I can, importing and editing Google photogrammetry, as well as fix some glaring terrain errors, such as a huge and long weird "aqueduct" type ridge with a river on top.

The areas I'm working on are: Mississauga downtown bildings and condos (see photos), very close to where the Pearson airport is and clearly visible on every arrival and departure, Some distinctive areas on Toronto lakeshore beyond photogrammetry area, Oakville Downtown, Oakville Trafalgar Hospital area with a helipad, and two major GA airports in the area: Downsview CYZD and Burlington Executive Airport CZBA.

Buildings are cut off from the rest of the imported mesh, so all roads and trees and minor buildings are from default autogen and satellite imagery. Careful batch texture color correction, together with contrast and brightness correction is leading to good blending of custom and autogen.

I'm aiming for making the whole GTA area comfortable for VFR flights and authentic CYYZ approaches and departures, and make local GA flights more enjoyable. So far I've done Oakville downtown and now Missisauga downtown. Meshes optimized and heavily edited, textures color corrected to blend with autogen building.

I left textures unbaked, as all my experiments with baking textures according to guides keep ending up with inferior look and much larger file size with the same FPS hit as hundreds of texture files. 8192x8192 baked texture look very pixelated with this scenery size, and 16384x16384 produces packages that are 3 times larger, and still have weird artifacts.

 

Edited September 14, 2020 by romandesign

[MauBen 82]

Are these files available somewhere? Thanks

[Cognita 1,077]

This looks great! Are you planning to make this available?

[bobcat999 8,473]

Great work!  👍 

[Victoroos 205]

Great work.. 

[abrams_tank 7,397]

Vancouver has the same problem. Only downtown Vancouver and a little outside of downtown has photogrammetry.  The rest of metro Vancouver doesn't have photogrammetry. Actually, most Canadian cities don't have much photogrammetry.

While CYVR (Vancouver International Airport) looks decent given that it was not handcrafted, it would be cool if a 3rd party did a detailed and handcrafted version of CYVR.

[pmb 5,137]

2 hours ago, abrams_tank said:

Vancouver has the same problem. Only downtown Vancouver and a little outside of downtown has photogrammetry.  The rest of metro Vancouver doesn't have photogrammetry. Actually, most Canadian cities don't have much photogrammetry.

While CYVR (Vancouver International Airport) looks decent given that it was not handcrafted, it would be cool if a 3rd party did a detailed and handcrafted version of CYVR.

I think FSimStudios is working on CYVR (maybe including some enhancements of the city). Which would be great.

Kind regards, Michael 

[odourboy 1,289]

Looks great! Following with interest. 

[nosaj_armstrong 10]

This looks awesome! Wondering if you will tackle the CN Tower. It looks blurry/melting with the photogramy. 

 

Nice job, though!

[Steve_Ellis 273]

Looks fantastic, will look forward to it when released.

Just love the enthusiasm for the scenery in MFS at the moment, there is some fantastic stuff coming out.

[M-Air Bush Deliveries Ltd 50]

Look up the Yosemite thread to see how to do LODs and not mess up everyones framerate.

[RJC68 823]

Awesome,

Looking forward to trying this

Great work, thank you

[abrams_tank 7,397]

4 hours ago, pmb said:

I think FSimStudios is working on CYVR (maybe including some enhancements of the city). Which would be great.

Kind regards, Michael 

Oh, that's good.  Edmonton International airport (CYEG) looks really ugly in MSFS and it's not close to the real airport.  I see FSimStudios did a good job with CYEG for X-Plane so hopefully, they do a great job for CYVR too!

[andyjohnston.net 617]

6 hours ago, abrams_tank said:

. Actually, most Canadian cities don't have much photogrammetry.

 

I guess I'm lucky.  I'm out in the 'burbs in the Ottawa area and I can see my house.

[regis9 4,013]

Fabulous, thanks for doing this.  It’s interesting that there would be such a big gap in the photogrammetry data in between two areas that are covered.