How MSFS2020 Deals W/ Ortho Clouds?

[dresoccer4 118]

I'm curious if anyone knows how MSFS2020 has gotten around the huge problem of clouds on the ortho images? I tried to google but found squat. I make lots of ortho sceneries for XP11 and it's a constant battle trying to find cool places in the world that are cloud-free. 

Anyone know how they do it?

[MrFuzzy 2,117]

42 minutes ago, dresoccer4 said:

I'm curious if anyone knows how MSFS2020 has gotten around the huge problem of clouds on the ortho images? I tried to google but found squat. I make lots of ortho sceneries for XP11 and it's a constant battle trying to find cool places in the world that are cloud-free. 

Anyone know how they do it?

I notice clouds baked into the terrain on a regular basis. If they have an algorithm, it's not perfect.

[dresoccer4 118]

Just now, MrFuzzy said:

I notice clouds baked into the terrain on a regular basis. If they have an algorithm, it's not perfect.

Yes there are some clouds that have escaped, but on the hole it's MUCH more cloudless than all of the typical sources I use, such as Google, Bing, Arc, OSM, etc. A large portion of the Earth still hasn't been satellite imaged w/o clouds (for civilian use at least). 

They must have used some sort of algorithm to (attempt to) clean up clouds, and I'm curious how they did it and if they'll continue to work on it to make it even more cloudless. I haven't seen any mention of this or any discussion, so was wanting to see if anyone else has.

[Tuskin38 6,435]

Areas with a lot of clouds are replaced with autogen textures from the looks of it.

[TheJAG 57]

Yes, there was something about cleaning the ortho when they started the project. It's not just clouds but also shadows, colours, etc. There's a video that has some high level info about the development - 

 

[turnandbank 243]

In areas with significant cloud cover they replace the ortho images with generic landclass textures. The transition from ortho to landclass textures and back again is blended, but more noticeable in some areas than others. Overall it does a decent job. Ortho tiles containing just a few small clouds and/or wispy clouds are displayed as is.

[dresoccer4 118]

6 hours ago, turnandbank said:

In areas with significant cloud cover they replace the ortho images with generic landclass textures. The transition from ortho to landclass textures and back again is blended, but more noticeable in some areas than others. Overall it does a decent job. Ortho tiles containing just a few small clouds and/or wispy clouds are displayed as is.

ah this is interesting info. It must be a remarkable set of programs able to automate all this that over the entire world. Wonder if it was developed in house or they used some other proprietary software.  

[kaosfere 3,115]

1 hour ago, dresoccer4 said:

Wonder if it was developed in house or they used some other proprietary software.

I am fairly certain, though not 100% positive, that this was among the work that blackshark.ai did for them.   This article supports that to an extent.

(Again, not positive, this is just me speaking from my own personal knowledge around the time the sim came out, not anything I've discovered due to my involvement with the simulator.  Also, it feels odd and slightly obnoxious to put this disclaimer here, but I feel like that's something I need to be careful about now with certain topics if I want to stay engaged with this community.  Sorry.)

Edited April 6, 2021 by kaosfere

[kiwikat 506]

I would also suspect blackshark.ai had something to do with it. It wouldn't actually be that difficult to create ML algorithms to detect clouds. Replacing what is below them with something reasonable is a bit more tricky. I think sometimes they just put in generic textures rather than doing something like Adobe does with photoshop where it actually uses algorithms to predict what should be there.

The fact that they were able to run the entire world through these algorithms both for clouds and color cleaning as well as building/tree generation is incredible and a testament to cloud computing.

[David Mills 4,722]

You can always tell an XP user by his or her use of the term "ortho."

[turnandbank 243]

Yep! I made about 4TB or scenery with Ortho4XP. I even replaced clouds with textures similar to the surrounding area on many tiles or I would swap in tiles with no clouds from a different provider and try to colour match them.  Very tedious work to do manually. Glad MSFS as figured out a way to automate the process! It isn't perfect, but it is nice to just be able fly almost anywhere with this level of realism. Rather spend my time doing that!