Green color where it should not be ?

[jfri 42]

I have noticed that in MSFS the roads are very often displayed in green color as if they were grass strips. For example when I fly where I live I see the asphalt roads being green although there can be isolated patches with the correct color.
I even think I see a small tint of green over buildings. But the green roads are the most glaring inaccuracy which I find very disturbing. Does anyone recognize this ? Can we expect it to be corrected ?

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

Yup, that happens all over the place.. the Bing Source data seems to have some colour inconsistencies..

[jfri 42]

11 minutes ago, Bert Pieke said:

Yup, that happens all over the place.. the Bing Source data seems to have some colour inconsistencies..

But I don't have this problem in XP11 with Ortho generated scenery which also use Bing.

[pmb 5,137]

It's indeed an artefact of the original imagery, but not limited to MSFS. If you look upon the Prepar3d incarnation of ORBX True Earth GB you will find those green roads as well, just fly the short hop between  EGLL and EGLC and you will see some.

This has been debated on the ORBX forum several times, but obviously it's not possible to solve in a simple way, otherwise ORBX, who are quite clever, would have done it.

On the other hand, the X-Plane incarnation of ORBX True Earth GB does not sport those green roads. Obviously they are covered by a road overlay there. If memory serves me right, it was said on the ORBX forum that this isn't possible in the Prepar3d version though.

Obviously ORBX as well as Bing use the same original imagery with a color cast.

And yes, the green roads are mega-ugly.

Kind regards, Michael

Edited April 30, 2021 by pmb

[pmb 5,137]

There is a recent mod which tries to solve this (and other) MSFS color artefacts using Reshade

https://de.flightsim.to/file/10366/corsten-s-reshade-settings

I didn't try it myself as my previous experience with Reshade hasn't been that convincing, but anyone wanting to try it is free to do so.

Kind regards, Michael

[Dominique_K 10,149]

I understand that a small outfit like Orbx cannot do it. A bit surprised that MS with its huge AI intellectual resources can’t. The sim knows where most of the roads are as we see traffic on them.

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

7 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

I understand that a small outfit like Orbx cannot do it. A bit surprised that MS with its huge AI intellectual resources can’t. The sim knows where most of the roads are as we see traffic on them.

It doesn't draw all the roads likely due to performance issues. You can draw them yourself, but...

As a matter of fact, I am just finishing up a scenery that really pushes the boundaries of roads and objects, and I am seeing some pop-in effect. I'm hoping it's just a cache conflict, but I won't know until I let someone else try it in a couple weeks when I release.

I would say maybe missing OSM data, but then your point of they are driving on the empty road is well taken.

I don't know yet if I hit a poly limit due to LODs, or the issue is texture loading, or just the fact I hand placed 1000 blades of grass.

Edited May 1, 2021 by Alpine Scenery

[Dominique_K 10,149]

1 minute ago, Alpine Scenery said:

It doesn't draw all the roads likely due to performance issues. You can draw them yourself, but...

As a matter of fact, I am just finishing up a scenery that really pushes the boundaries of roads and objects, and I am seeing some pop-in effect. I'm hoping it's just a cache conflict, but I won't know until I let someone else try it in a couple weeks when I release. Otherwise, it's a LOD issue I'm having, but regardless it's not that big of a deal and I'm sure I'll figure it out soon enough.

I don't know yet if I hit a poly limit due to LODs, or the issue is texture loading, or just the fact I hand placed 1000 blades of grass.

Ha hand placed grass ! I know the feeling from P3D 😄.

it doesn’t draw the roads, I agree, but it knows where they are. 

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

2 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

Ha hand placed grass ! I know the feeling from P3D 😄.

it doesn’t draw the roads, I agree, but it knows where they are. 

I was trying to be original in the look, the one advantage P3D and XP11 airports had was they rarely ever looked alike. MSFS airports are mostly all using the same textures at this point, since everyone is using the same aerial source, which is then overlayed by the same Asobo textures. I have tons of Aerial I can use too, but that's my next project and using custom aerial imagery in this game isn't quite working as I want it to just yet, but I have hopes to replace much of Utah with higher res aerial (maybe, trying later).

Edited May 1, 2021 by Alpine Scenery

[cianpars 1,166]

If you look at most satellite imagery, you will note it tends to be a bit too grey.  I think ASOBO had to colorize the images as a result of which the roads look green in some areas.

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

5 minutes ago, cianpars said:

If you look at most satellite imagery, you will note it tends to be a bit too grey.  I think ASOBO had to colorize the images as a result of which the roads look green in some areas.

AFIK, Asobo is using an alpha-blending trick which is using the blackshark AI to place the grass texture replacement, but I am not sure if they used any coloring other than the global lighting shader. They likely touched up some areas, but the color of the imagery appears often very similar to the Native Bing imagery if you compare it (in some cases). That's why flying with a high cloud layer can really help the imagery and contrast in many places where the aerial imagery is not 100% perfect.

Edited May 1, 2021 by Alpine Scenery

[Dominique_K 10,149]

32 minutes ago, cianpars said:

If you look at most satellite imagery, you will note it tends to be a bit too grey.  I think ASOBO had to colorize the images as a result of which the roads look green in some areas.

MFS harmonization/balancing of colors in sat imagery is, lets say, perfectible 😏.  Anyway, specifically speaking of roads which is this thread focus, it is a well researched topic these recent years. Tens of scientific papers. For instance, but there are many, many more.

 A review of road extraction from remote sensing images - ScienceDirect

There is a need for a Blackshark.ai of the roads 😁

Edited May 1, 2021 by Dominique_K

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

5 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

MFS harmonization/balancing of colors in sat imagery is, lets say, perfectible 😏.  Anyway, specifically speaking of roads which is this thread focus, it is a well researched topic these recent years. Tens of scientific papers. For instance, but there are many, many more.

 A review of road extraction from remote sensing images - ScienceDirect

There is a need for a Blackshark.ai of the roads 😁

Yah, I've been down that road. IT's a PITA trying to color correct aerial imagery with automated techniques, very difficult.

[cianpars 1,166]

1 hour ago, Alpine Scenery said:

Yah, I've been down that road. IT's a PITA trying to color correct aerial imagery with automated techniques, very difficult.

Yeah, I used to make scenery for FSX downloading and converting Bing images and had to apply a little green colourising to them. I've long forgotten how todo that or what programs I used (FSEarthTiles rings a bell). A guy names Christian Buchner created Tileproxy which was great and spurred me on to create something more permanent.

But with the slow internet speeds and smaller HDs, I could never publish it.  I made the Channel Islands in photo scenery, spent hours on watermasking (with GIMP) and added objects from various libraries.  Could never find decent elevation data though and ended up learning to draw the mesh from scratch in some places.

I've long forgotten many of the skills needed and am going to have to learn them all again to work on MSFS.

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

2 hours ago, cianpars said:

Yeah, I used to make scenery for FSX downloading and converting Bing images and had to apply a little green colourising to them. I've long forgotten how todo that or what programs I used (FSEarthTiles rings a bell). A guy names Christian Buchner created Tileproxy which was great and spurred me on to create something more permanent.

But with the slow internet speeds and smaller HDs, I could never publish it.  I made the Channel Islands in photo scenery, spent hours on watermasking (with GIMP) and added objects from various libraries.  Could never find decent elevation data though and ended up learning to draw the mesh from scratch in some places.

I've long forgotten many of the skills needed and am going to have to learn them all again to work on MSFS.

I ended up writing my own remastering software, because Lightroom used to lack a key feature that allowed you to view the huge aerial imagery at smaller sizes, while applying the remastering settings to the original larger source (hence remaster thumbnail, apply to giant image). However, Adobe Lightroom added the feature about 1-2 years ago, so now I quit my remastering project. Therefore, I suggest using Lightroom to remaster Aerial images, as not only does the NVME drives we now have make a huge difference, but Lightroom has the key feature it was missing before which makes it MUCH MUCH simpler to remaster the giant oversized images. If you buy the Adobe Photoshop subscription, Lightroom monthly license comes free with it (at least with mine it did).

The other choice is to remaster the images as broken up smaller pieces, but there are obvious disadvantages to this. Of course there is AI that can do it to some degree, but it takes too long to get it working correctly, and it's too complicated. In Lightroom, you can remaster about 2000 per week (or even more).

If you are interested, shoot me a PM sometime and I may have some kind of joint project to work on, not sure would have to discuss on Skype. 

Edited May 1, 2021 by Alpine Scenery