Jump to content
Sign in to follow this  
Hornit

User Friendly Scenery Builder Are we CLOSE?

Recommended Posts

Guest JohnC

Dick, if you are a beginner, I would like to suggest you (a) become an expert in producing photoreal textures with Paint Shop Pro and (:( learn to place those photoreal textures in a BGL file with Terrabuilder PRO.Download or order some infrared photos from EarthExplorer if you can to work with. Coloring photos and using the Paint Shop Pro tools to shade, blend textures with masks,etc will keep you busy for a while.Very busy.You can produce very superior VFR scenery with custom photoreal textures of the region you are interested in flying over. Later you will need a facility (Martin Wrights BMP2000, freeware you can find and download), so you can look at individual default Microsoft textures to understand how Microsoft default textures look and allow you to use spinoff custom textures. They are in a format that normal Paint Programs cannot view or modify.You should search this Forum to understand how Bob Bernstein can produce small bgl's with SCASM to remove mutiple groups of default buildings from MicroSoft bgls so you can replace the default buildings with your own.I would download MicroSoft's SDK on GMAX and work through the tutorial so you can start to produce 3D structures and place MicroSoft defaault building with your own custom buildings.I wish I could simultaneously work on really accurate photoreal scenery and keep up with the experts on this board but simply do not have enough time. This way you can have your own anatomically accurate lakes ponds roads and highways with your own custom buildings placed where you want them.Paint Shop Pro,the GMAX SDK,BMP2000 will get you a long way down the road and will keep you very busy developing a facitlity with them.I would appreciate any opinions regarding this approach for a beginner.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Wow! the shot of Monaco says a lot. I am willing to invest the time if someone can do a cursory tutorial on the proper steps to get that kind of result. I downloaded G2K and its sitting here gathering dust because it just looked a bit daunting on the setup/bitmap creation(overhead shot) and how you go about doing the actual changing of the scenery. I would start by enhancing my home areas and branch into doing major cities like New York, Boston, London, SFO etc enhancing the poor coastline and shoreline areas in these cities. I learned how to use Apt 2.6, PSP Pro, all the Afcad/AI tools, so this should be doable. The only probelm right now is the tutorial is just not easy to follow. If that could be changed I would be going to town right now!Hornit

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Guest Richard Hill

JohnC;I do not know where you live, but I know that in my area things have changed to a point where if you were gone for 15 years you would not know where you were. We now have the FBI Fingerprint division, our interstatw was all 2 lane devided highway now a 2+ mile section is 6 lane and now another section that is two lane is going to be 8 lanes. Our airport was a small 3500 ft runway, they took off the top of a mountain and filled in the valley on 21, added 250 ft overrun to 03 now their talk of adding another 1700 ft. We had an area of a small Mall along I-79 in the past six years for example Lowes tore down one store and rebuilt one on the same spot several years ago then more land was made available Wal-Mart built a Super Center about a mile south of the Old Wal-Mart and at least ten other stores. Last Fall more land was made available Now we have an even larger Lowes and several new stores there. Now North ot this near the FBI Several hundred acers are being developed A New Hospital Hotel Complex and much more along a new US-50 I-79 devided highway connecter. I would never thought things like this would have happened 40 years ago let alone what has happened in the past 6-15 years.Richard; The photos are all 7-10 years old.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Guest JohnC

I feel your pain...but my experience is that artificial roads,lakes,etc. made from scratch out of your head NEVERr come close to aerial photos...look in the Terrabuilder Forum at the mine in Utah someone has posted...and look at how artificial the default coastlines are in Hawaii...not to criticize Microsoft but they are so plainly artificial I can hardly stand to look at them now.I would use the 7-10 year old photos and keep all the natural features as they are and draw in the roads and new development...better some roads are drawn over than all of them drawn from scratch.But this is just my opinion about aesthetics. I would drop out of this hobby if I couldn't lay down real photographs.Good luck to you, whatever your choices are.I can't seem to upload a little piece of photoreal coastline off the runway in Kahului, Hawaii to emphasize my point.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Guest Richard Hill

JohnC;I do not know where you live, but I for one can only obtain photographs that are from 6-10 years old. What use to be forested farm or other areas is now buisness or populated areas.For example! The FBI Fingerprint Division came here. A section of I-79 that was only 2 lane is now six. Another 2 lane section iss going to be 8 lanes. We had a small mall area with a Wal-Mart, Lowes, Kgogers and a few smaller stores. They first tore down the Lowes and rebuilt a store twice as big. About 7 years some land was developed south of there with a new Wal-Mart Supercenter and several ather stores. This fall more land weas developed a New even larger Lowes was built with many more new stores. Now several hundered acers are being developed along a new devided bypass from US-50 to I-79 with a new larger hospital motel complex and who knows what else. Our airport was 3500+ ft long. They took off the top of a mountain filled in the valley on RW-21 end, added 250 ft overun on 03 added 3500 ft to 21 now at 7,000 ft + and talk of extending 21 another 1700 ft. this is just in the past ten years. Most photographs are distorted to an extent. USGS data Shape files mainly are rather up to date. If we had a program simular to TerraScene that could produce the detail and acuracy, plus allow editing of smaller sections prior to making a much larger map, transfer this map data into scenery files, I would be more than willing to pay up to one hundred dollars for a user friendsl program.I see little activity on the Terrabuilder forum so I guess it is not what is needed. I hear Ground2K is close to what is needed but not quite there. At my age and a disabled VietNam Combat Veteran I love woriking with scenery for FS2k2 I wouked with Fly!/Fly2K!, for some time. Back in the old FS2,2,4 days we got the designer with the program that was rather simple in todays standards but what I would considere user friendly. With the DEM files available 7.5 minute or even smaller Land Use Land Coverage we could do a lot. I know many people spend many days and hours to produce the tools we have now. Many ask for help in creating good documentation to make them even greater, but if one has little knowledge of the workings of FS2002, he can not be of much help. If I had the right tools I would gladly upload all the scenery I could upload or send it on CD's for free + $1.00 per CD S&H, for those who wanted it. FS2k2 is a fantastic program but except for some areas it is far from VFR. I will post a screen shot of The New River Gorge tomorror to give an example of FS2002 default and one of TerraScene.Richard;

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Guest

Hi Dick, while I always enjoy reading of your work, and study your posts, I've never thought that the results of TDF lines and polys comes anywhere near photo scenery. Its certainly a case of "each to their own". It seems your images show "corrected" default, while I like flying over something VERY different than the default altogether.Best regards,Bob BernsteinPS...thanks for the tip of a corrected terrain sdk...right on the money as usual.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Hi John.I'd like to direct this to you, and Bob, and others that have found photoreal a satisfying approach.One thing that is most disturbing about photoreal is how it is difficult to merge the photos seamlessly to the default textures. Applying them as trimmed VTP polys could help.Photoreal and VTP/LWM can be combined. There is no reason you could not lay aerial photo 'slices' as VTP polygons. When placed as a Layer4, they will behave exactly like default landclass textures. Even better, the poly shapes can be trimmed to follow the edges of roads, or fields, or cities... so blending the photos into the default terrain becomes quite easy. As a Layer4, then VTP lines and polys can be placed over the photoreal if desired. And LWM watermasks will still create water.====================Regarding the shorelines of Hawaii... Shorelines do have a somewhat cartoonish appearance. Part of that is due to the texture used for the shorelines. You may also not be aware, but the shoreline BGLs of Hawaii are assigned many different types of shorelines... but these texture assignments are defeated by the terraintextures.cfg file, which assigns all these many types to mainly 1 shoreline texture. Hawaii would look very different with the correct shoreline textures.====================Regarding the accuracy of aerial photos, there a several issues involved. Camera angles, lens distortion, reprojection of the source photos all add to these sources becoming less reliable. In truth, a good surveyor can produce topological data superior to aerial photos or satellite images. This is true with mesh sources as well. The newer Aster data is subject to a great deal of local distortion, that must be mathematically adjusted to create a good DEM, whereas a good team of surveyors could do a more accurate job. ( But it might take hundreds of thousands of surveyors to do it!) The love of imagery data comes from the scientific community. But when the data needs to be "massaged" to make it useable, then the science becomes psuedoscience. It reminds me of a military problem the US had several years ago when the scientific mapping data led the US to bomb a friendly Embassy.. then they blamed the data. It was not the data, but the team of scientists and mathematicians that insisted it was correct... and the military officers that accepted the science as fact. A surveyor could have told then it was an Embassy. In fact, local paper maps of the area correctly identified the building ( prepared by surveyor data ). Government officials later explained, although the digital data was reliable, it was not neccessarily accurate. (?)Atmospheric and time-of-day/season also affect these sources. And they are also many times out of date... just like any other data. MS used data that was from the Digital Chart of the World ( originally CIA data ). That data was compiled by scientists and mathematicians from satellite and surveyed data, then "resampled" to "fit the grid". It's way off. Aerial photos are are off.. but not nearly as off as MS' data. Oddly, MS now has much more accurate data as is evidenced by their MapPoint programs. I'm hoping this data gets used in FS9, but I'm not going to hold my breath. Even rendered as VTP and LWM, it would greatly increase the number of CDs needed to give us the sim.I'm saying this because we often like to think we can always get more accurate data, when it is unlikely we will ever get perfect data.This comes to bear on Richard's problem. Even if he were to get that perfect data, it would be a full-time job to constantly update the real-world changes into the sim, for even a rather small area. So we must accept a level at which we can say this is OK for my scenery. ========================My problems with photoreal are that is isn't necessarily more accurate than digital sources, and the photos must be reprojected, and worked over with a paint program to just get 1 acceptable season. MS has 5 seasons, and night. Then there is the problem of blending in the photos to the default terrain textures. Then there is the problem of megabytes of textures.I can avoid all this with VTP and LWM polys and lines ( not that they don't have their on problems ). I've taken data from Terrascene images and converted them to LWM and VTP BGLs. They are stunningly accurate ( as long as the SHP data was accurate ). I'll possibly use aerial photo sources in some projects down the road, but probably as a template for a VTP/LWM program such as Ground2k or AutoASM. LWMDraw can take a 'slice' as a bitmap source to perfectly fit it's 256x256 format.=========================Why would MS not create Niagara as VTP and LWM, rather than photoreal? Because I don't believe thay had the tools to create the small area as an accurate VTP and LWM. They have this big database of DCW data, but Niagara would have needed to have street-level accuracy in the data... much easier to color some photos than to create a drawing program like LWMDraw or Ground2K, or to convert the data to a CAD program and then export it as BGLC code. Also MS had a decent set of USGS aerial photos from their terraserver website.But I would't be surprised if we see an example or two of a detailed VTP city in FS9. Oshgosh was the first addon they gave us that had VTP and LWM elements... and those were a bit crude when measured by the possibilities I've mentioned. MS now has developed MapPoint.net for mapping data. And MS might want to show us what they can do. Oshgosh was released at a time when Christian Stock and I very much needed some clues as to VTP shoreline design, and landmasking of LWMs. MS delivered the clues right on time. I accused them of teasing us with it, and they might have been. :) I expect a tease or two with FS9.Right now, I'm pretty happy we have several choices to explore for rendering ground scenery that can satisfy our individual preferences. And it appears we'll be able to use all current methods of scenery design for FS9. Good news for everyone.Dick

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Guest

Dick, <>I agree that construction using VTP polys makes sense, as long as everything else works as I want, such as autogen. I've followed the threads forever looking for the point to jump in, but I had a problem over the first year of fs2k2....so much to learn that I got very little scenery designed! For the past few months, I decided to apply what I'd learned and churn out a few of my favorite spots, so I could have fun flying when I wanted to. I'm working on Harvey field, and re-doing from scratch, so again, my time is very tight.Care to collaborate, and in that way demonstrated what can be done?Bob B

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Hi Bob.Actual collaboration would be difficult for me as I have lots of things going on of my own. :(But I can answer questions, and help with details either here or through e-mail.If you have resampled slices of aerial photos that you believe are placed correctly, then Ken Nelson's LWMDraw might be the way to go, as you can load the slices right into his program, and use them as templates to make VTP and LWM. You need to know the Cell and Area location of the slice, and TDFCalc3, or LandCalc2 would help you there. Or perhaps you already have a spreadsheet to helps ID CUSTOM texture location.Ken's program is fairly straight-forward.The same approach could be used with Ground2K, by using the source bitmap you used for photoreal, and using that as the background image. Christian has taken some flak for a lack of tutorials, but a few hours with the program pays off very well. Then the interface becomes quite intuitive. As Luis points out above, it works very well... and I'm sure he'll agree the process actually becomes fun to work with.Dick

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Guest JohnC

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts about photorealistic images.And I admire your very original Forum login name.I am one of the (I think many) guys who have to make a choice

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Hi John.You made some very good points.For example, I could make a very detailed ground scenery of Walworth County, Wisconsin, and about 10 people would have any use for it. It's not as exciting as Guatemala City. :(It would seem it does almost no good to explain techniques learned from experimentation or studying the SDKs and making theories of scenery design.I mean, who could make sense of it all? The understanding of FS2002's Terrain Data File structures was a first step towards a new design process. The work of Christian Stock over a year ago is finally bearing some fruit. The release, and testing, of the new terrain SDKs, and some creative daydreaming on the part of a few of us, right here in this forum, must seem like something in a strange tongue to most simmers. And it is a strange tongue. Obtuse, complicated, irritating. Then sometimes I pop in with a mesh-clinging Santa Claus picture, or Ken Nelson writes his nick-name in the snow with water... and it all becomes even more maddening to others that can't devote the time to learn this stuff.But occasionally a Ken Nelson ( LWMDraw ), or Chris Wright ( AutoASM ), or Falko Dienstbach ( SCM2VTP ), or Iain Murray ( Coastline-Maker ), or Christian Fumey ( Ground2k ), actually can make some sense out of this... and a tool is made. It's these tools that are the second step towards bringing a rather painfree design experience to most people. The tools are getting better. And it's much more fun to actually make LWM landmasks, and create terrafirma, than it is to learn how it's done. Or to paint a patch of woods north of your hometown that MS "forgot" to include, with VTP polys ( and autogen ! ). It's the tools that will make the process easy. The knowledge only makes the tools possible. How many people can draw an FS2000-style night-lighted road halfway across West Virginia by hand coding SCASM?Nobody. ( At least nobody would want to. )But with FSSC, or Airport, or AS&D, or Architect.... very "do-able". And you don't really need to know how or why to do it.With Coastline-Maker and Ground2K, the process doesn't even require you to know any ASM programming, or much of the SDK. Just draw, and create the BGL... just like many people use older design programs now. Just like TerraBuilder evolved for photoreal, and LandClass Assistant for Landclass creation.So when I start babbling about vertically flipping 8-bit, mipped, with alpha transparency textures for use with VTP polys... There are a couple of guys out there that actually understand what I'm saying, and figure out how I put the mesh-clinging Santa on the turf, and can make a tool that will do that. And once you have the tool, and learn how to use it by playing with it, the process starts to become a little more user-friendly. This is the same process for Airport, Ground2k, TerraBuilder, TerraScene...I see the third step coming when designers like you, and Richard ( who started this thread ) get tired of not having tutorials on how these tools work, and decide to write a guide themselves. That's how it gets done.I'm not likely to write one, since I'll be off in the outer-edge somewhere, obsessing about zero-height advanced buildings, elevated in space, for helipads, and how it affects the autogen ( I'm not kidding! ). :-eek Dick

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
Sign in to follow this  

  • Tom Allensworth,
    Founder of AVSIM Online


  • Flight Simulation's Premier Resource!

    AVSIM is a free service to the flight simulation community. AVSIM is staffed completely by volunteers and all funds donated to AVSIM go directly back to supporting the community. Your donation here helps to pay our bandwidth costs, emergency funding, and other general costs that crop up from time to time. Thank you for your support!

    Click here for more information and to see all donations year to date.
×
×
  • Create New...