Dear friends who are all still happy with P3D!

Today I just wanted to introduce you to my work of the last few years - yes, years.
Some time ago I even created a thread here - somewhere - but I can't find it anymore... 🤐

First of all the following:
I'm not the type who likes to advertise his stuff.
The reason for the post here is actually that I was told again and again (actually, also more than years now...) that I should do more advertising.
For example here, because there are still many P3D fans active here who might be interested...

That's why I'm just going to do that now!

So, what have I done?
Well, what many others have already done - created photosceneries. With autogen, of course!

Very briefly, how does one get the idea to create photosceneries?
Well, back then, nearly 10 years ago (remember the time back then, that was before ORBX released something like TE Netherlands!), I wanted to enhance the approach area for my home airport EDDM a bit.
After a lot of reading, trying, deleting and trying again, I had created an area that covered about 40x20 km around Munich Airport.
Everything was created completely manually, every autogen building was placed by hand.
Many people were enthusiastic about it at the time and asked if I could create something like that for XYZ airport .
And yes, in fact I wanted to do that.

Shortly after, I visited Namibia (and that was really great!).
But I didn't like the flights in the sim (remember, at that time there was no openLC Africa!).
And that's when I had the idea to create a photorealistic Africa. It was a huge project, I never thought I could finish.
I have to say the following about this:
I was in my geography bachelor studies at the time. And an important part of it is, of course, the use of GIS software.
I wanted to combine this so that the creation of the sceneries would be easier.

And that's what I did, and created all of Africa photorealistically - in high quality and with accurate autogen.
After I had 800 GB of photosceneries for Africa, I thought - why not other regions?

In the meantime, a lot has happened here. I now use Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 OLI data to detect vegetation, which I refine with vector data, including OSM.
For buildings, I have chosen an AI approach, so that I can also extract building footprints from the RGB images using a convolutional neural network (with the restriction that it only really works well in Africa, as I have trained the model here).
Therefore, in the meantime there are more than 10 Python scripts á 1000-5000 lines of code with which I can create my sceneries - semi-automatically.

In the meantime, I have created all of Europe and Africa, and I am working on South America.
The server storage space is still a problem.
Due to the increased costs, I had to remove Central Africa and all my Asian sceneries from the server - even though I am working on making everything available again.

So, a lot of text...

It's probably best if I just show pictures - across the world, so to speak.

Athens

Marrakech

El Oued

Algiers

Cape Town

Ouagadougou

Somewhere in Ghana

Somewhere in Sierra Leone

Bulgaria

Currently working on Brazil

France

Frankfurt

Serbia

Tirana

Naples

Poland

Germany

Namibia


In the meantime, my sceneries - of course! - also come with comprehensive night lighting.

Furthermore - and I think this is not unimportant:
How big are the sceneries?
Well, I have installed a 4 TB HDD for my sceneries (whole Europe, Africa, half of South America, part of Asia, altogether approx. 60 million km²), on which approx. 2.7 TB are occupied.

A lot of information - including a current overview map - can also be found HERE and HERE.

For questions regarding the download, please write me a private message (preferably in the FSXForum or at FSDeveloper)!

Now, in conclusion, I have no other option but to wish you all a wonderful weekend!

Edited May 5, 20233 yr by MatthiasKNU

Good on you for creating all of this. 

I will be glad on any ScenProc scripting you can tell me. I am trying similar stuff, from 3 weeks and I get 0 autogen created all the time. 

Any help is appreciated. 

Matthias, your work looks awesome. I live near Munich, maybe I can bring over a 4 TB harddisk? 😂

Send your resume to LM immediately 😄

48 minutes ago, joby33y said:

Send your resume to LM immediately 😄

This ! 

4 hours ago, MatthiasKNU said:

Today I just wanted to introduce you to my work of the last few years - yes, years.

Matthias, you seem to have produced some super results with your work. Certainly the best I have seen so far.

Can you please clarify some points.   Your post above refers to creating photo sceneries with autogen, but the website highlights several times that the packages available are autogen packs which require existing photo scenery.  In that case, it would be helpful to know which photo sceneries have proved best for the various areas, when used in conjunction with your autogen. 

Please correct me if I have misunderstood.

First of all, thank you all very much! 

3 hours ago, d.tsakiris said:

Matthias, your work looks awesome. I live near Munich, maybe I can bring over a 4 TB harddisk? 😂

Well, just send me a PM, that's easier 😉

24 minutes ago, Biggles2010 said:

Matthias, you seem to have produced some super results with your work. Certainly the best I have seen so far.

Can you please clarify some points.   Your post above refers to creating photo sceneries with autogen, but the website highlights several times that the packages available are autogen packs which require existing photo scenery.  In that case, it would be helpful to know which photo sceneries have proved best for the various areas, when used in conjunction with your autogen. 

Please correct me if I have misunderstood.

Thank you!

Well, due to the copyright of the aerial photos I cannot make the downloads (exception: Spain) available freely for download.
If you like, you can of course create your own photosceneries - alternatively, you can simply write me a private message... 🙂

If you are just downloading one of the few autogen packs, you will need a seperate photoscenery - but not, if you write me a PM.
BUT: The Overview map also covers both - all areas marked as green, are available as Photoscenery+Autogen-package.

5 hours ago, PavlinS said:

Good on you for creating all of this. 

I will be glad on any ScenProc scripting you can tell me. I am trying similar stuff, from 3 weeks and I get 0 autogen created all the time. 

Any help is appreciated. 

Well, to be honest, I only use ScenProc for the Create* commands. The entire pre-processing of all the data (and there is a hell of a lot of data that goes into a scenery!) happens in my Python scripts, which communicate with ArcGIS Pro via the ArcPy interface. Just as a house number: the next country to come soon is Argentina. The final file size will be about 25 GB. But for this 25 GB scenery I had to process more than 3800 GB of data.

Edited May 5, 20233 yr by MatthiasKNU

I'd be happy to give you 5 x 4TB drives (20TB) to help keep your project going.  I'll PM you.

2 hours ago, MatthiasKNU said:

Well, to be honest, I only use ScenProc for the Create* commands. The entire pre-processing of all the data (and there is a hell of a lot of data that goes into a scenery!) happens in my Python scripts, which communicate with ArcGIS Pro via the ArcPy interface. Just as a house number: the next country to come soon is Argentina. The final file size will be about 25 GB. But for this 25 GB scenery I had to process more than 3800 GB of data.

That's really good. Anyway, wish I could help you with hard drives, but mines are filled as well. Anyway, thank you for what you are doing. 

Guys, really, thank you all so much!

To be honest - as much as I appreciate your support - hard disk space is not a problem here on my site. I myself have 8 TB installed in my FS-PC, of which approx. 4 TB are occupied by P3D (P3D+Airports+Photosceneries) and another 1.5 TB by MSFS. I have another 6 TB in my workstation, where I develop the sceneries. The two biggest problems are actually the high electricity costs and the server storage space. At the moment, however, I am planning to double the server storage space - also with regard to South America.

Dear friends!

It's always difficult to give a release date that you then can't keep.

But this time it worked out, and Argentina is ready!

As always, here are a few pictures:

As always, you can find the entire overview here:

http://www.fsxforum.de/viewtopic.php?t=19503

Requests as always by PN please!

Many greetings and a nice weekend to you all!

Dear all!

Some time has passed again, during which I have not been idle and in the meantime have (partly) recreated many countries.

To be exact, it has become several million square kilometres.

Unfortunately, after a graphics card driver update my P3D doesn't like to start anymore, so I don't have screenshots of all the new countries - but I have a few pictures anyway.

Let's start with South America. South America is (almost) completely finished - here Bolivia:

Brazil is also completely finished:

We continue with Chile, but unfortunately without pictures.
But there are some from Colombia again:

... as well as from Peru:

So, now on without pictures.
On the Asian side, both Oman and the United Arab Emirates have been added!

As always, you can find more information, an overview map, an update list, etc. here:
http://www.fsxforum.de/viewtopic.php?p=202088

Otherwise - as always, please write me a private message!

And now something on my own account:
It's the weekend when Prepar3D version 6 will be released.
From what I've heard of it so far, I'm not sure I'll be making that switch again.
I also wonder if my sceneries will still look as good in v6 as they did in v5.
For this reason, I will wait a while to see whether I will adapt my sceneries for P3Dv6 at all.
If it requires a lot of work - then I won't. 

So much for the moment
I wish you all a wonderful weekend!

This is pretty phenomenal stuff, Matthias.

You should seriously consider marketing this and offering it as individual countries or continents.

After all, ORBX did something similar and called it "TrueEarth", and they made a lot of money from it.  Not that you're in it for the money, but it would allow you to buy licenses for the photoscenery so that you could sell the photoscenery and autogen packages together.

If you end up creating this scenery for the whole world it would be a big leap forward for P3D, which at the moment lacks truly accurate scenery for most of the world.

Kudos.

Dave

This is amazing ! 

Great stuff Matthias! 👏