WIP: Deleting clouds from Ortho

[mSparks]

Before

After

Not sure what to do with this one, but I can now fly with cloudless ortho for pretty much the entire world..... Part of the same dev I was doing for snow textures:

[Murmur]

Cool! How did you do it? AI?

[Bjoern]

Either Msparks has learned to do shaders or he figured out more usages for decals, because that's how he accomplished snow on orthos.

[mSparks]

4 hours ago, Bjoern said:

Either Msparks has learned to do shaders or he figured out more usages for decals, because that's how he accomplished snow on orthos.

Wasted a lot of time on that plan:- got nowhere

This one is "pure" image processing, taking a tile like

and spitting out

Took a while to rebuild my orthos, but so far looking good - except a new issue - baked in cloud shadows.....

Solution is breathtakingly simple, "OMFG that is so obvious" moment, so much so I could add it to my Ortho4XP fork.

But not sure what to do with it ... pretty raged at the .org tbh, so much so I don't really want to see it there ... Also, OrbX are making good money on similar for the UK, and 1. I like OrbX and don't want to undermine them, 2. I wasted a lot of time on this one and would quite like to get a few hours avio benzine out of it and 3:

^^which I would preferred to have posted in

But well, locked threads and Sh/t

[Greazer]

Done that in Gimp but in limited areas, takes a long time.

[ThrottleUp]

Was never into orthos let alone the painful process of making them but I wanna say I admire your perseverance, specially stuff like this - removing clouds and such. Cool stuff 🙂

[Bjoern]

On 6/22/2021 at 10:31 PM, mSparks said:

Solution is breathtakingly simple, "OMFG that is so obvious" moment, so much so I could add it to my Ortho4XP fork.

Do it!

 

On 6/23/2021 at 4:23 PM, ThrottleUp said:

Was never into orthos let alone the painful process of making them but I wanna say I admire your perseverance, specially stuff like this - removing clouds and such. Cool stuff 🙂

From my experience, orthos are only worth it when they're ZL16 or more and in combination with X-Europe.

I wasted so much time generating ZL14 orthos for the US (due to disk space constriants) and combining them with the X-America beta version just to discover that there still is too little stuff like buildings and trees on the ground to cover up the horribly tiling ground detail decal layer that is superimposed on an essentially blurry mess.

[ThrottleUp]

1 hour ago, Bjoern said:

I wasted so much time generating ZL14 orthos for the US (due to disk space constriants) and combining them with the X-America beta version just to discover that there still is too little stuff like buildings and trees on the ground to cover up the horribly tiling ground detail decal layer that is superimposed on an essentially blurry mess.

That must have been a pain. For me the problem with orthos is that for me they make it seem like I'm flying over a table with a photo glued to it and plastic trees and houses stuck on top. I just couldn't shake that feeling. I never used them but watched YouTubes in full screen of people that had. 

I still like the native scenery and have managed to get nice dense tree cover over the jungles. The only problem I have not solved yet is to get rid of the straight lines of trees. All my XP11 forests look like palm oil plantations.

 

 

[Bjoern]

18 hours ago, ThrottleUp said:

I still like the native scenery and have managed to get nice dense tree cover over the jungles. The only problem I have not solved yet is to get rid of the straight lines of trees. All my XP11 forests look like palm oil plantations.

Stock scenery is great in cities and for dense forests, but those boring and nearly autogen-less rural textures...ugh.

[ThrottleUp]

3 hours ago, Bjoern said:

Stock scenery is great in cities and for dense forests, but those boring and nearly autogen-less rural textures...ugh.

Agreed. The absolutely barren areas of the XP11 world (which I can see on Google Earth are full of tree cover & houses) still bugs me a lot and is an immersion killer. 

[mSparks]

On 6/24/2021 at 11:21 PM, Bjoern said:

Do it!

Maybe, but there are a lot of reasons not to spend time there, the first being hopefully Ortho4XP generally is obsolete by the end of the year, and also it definitely doesn't need any more checkboxes.

It might be better - for example - to use it to fix up 

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/36327-us-orthophotos/

I've seen some nasty SS's of that, which it would probably go a long way to fix up.

I'm just trying a few different providers atm to see how robust it is

2 hours ago, ThrottleUp said:

which I can see on Google Earth are full of tree cover

Have you tried

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/41570-hd-forests/

Bjoern also put me on 

https://simheaven.com/new-x-europe-details-and-update/

Ohhh update

 

[Bjoern]

15 hours ago, mSparks said:

Have you tried

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/41570-hd-forests/

That doesn't fix the issue with rural areas. The problem there is that the textures for fields, etc. don't have any autogen assignments whatsoever and therefor no 3D objects at all.

Unlike FlightGear...

https://i.imgur.com/FNyzDjR.jpeg

 

[mSparks]

53 minutes ago, Bjoern said:

don't have any autogen assignments whatsoever

oops wrong one

https://simheaven.com/new-simheaven-forests-available/

(its included in x-europe I think)

[Biology]

Is it... really that simple? Maybe I have been overthinking it by trying to divide a texture into several patches, using a convolutional neural network to classify patches and then use separate convolutional neural networks to fix them.

[mSparks]

  

1 hour ago, efis007 said:

Would you really want us to believe that your little code is enough to... fix/uniform/dedefect/recolor/refine, reconstruct, re-clone, correct

Doesnt matter what you believe tbh, my ideal way would be to sell the tiles, but that would be illegal, because i dont have the rights to share them, let alone sell them, if I share something linux only someone else will share the tiles, which would be illegal and lose me the value of stumbling on a solution, cant build a closed source version cross platform because many of the tools are gpl licensed.

Doesn't leave me many options.

My current decision is to just wait a bit more, default XP12 scenery is already edging towards making it obsolete, Laminar are definitely cooking "next gen scenery" it's just not ready yet, and I would say I am a long way from 100% satisified with the results, OrbX global range is much better quality where its available.

Its also not a unique situation, lots of truly lovely XP12 stuff (e.g. autoatc) I have isnt quite ready yet, but one way or another it is not going to be a huge wait until its all out in the wild, a new release of the 744 is 99% ready and getting that out will free me up a lot of time, but if you've seen my linkedin bio (not aviation related in any way) there is a lot of other waaaay more exciting stuff happening at the moment that I really need to give 110% attention to - flightsim stuff is still very much a hobby rather than a day job.

1 hour ago, efis007 said:

I don't know how much experience you have in making satellite scenery

In my younger days I worked a lot with navteq, collins bartholemew and vodophone on various projects from policing to windowsce map sdk's. I know a lot more than most.

1 hour ago, efis007 said:

how do you fix it into a defect-free tile?

Well that is also an issue, none of them are "defect free"

my current method still has

Asobo doesnt fair much better

Neither meet my standards, and based on what they have said I expect LRs in house stuff to make them as obsolete as OSM, smartphones and google earth made much of the mapping industry. 

If it really takes too long I'll do what I did for the XP11 744 ND icons and hack something together.