Preview of photoreal Key West scenery

[Guest geognut]

Hello all,I've been working on freeware photoreal scenery for the Florida Keys, starting with the Marquesas Keys (30 miles west of Key West), moving westward. I'm attaching a screen capture of Key West.This scenery was compiled from free USGS 4-m black/white imagery, available from Terraserver. I *hand colored* this imagery with Paint Shop Pro, which was a very tedious process. Because of this, I can't guarantee that I'll complete the entire Keys. I may just do the lower Keys.The screen capture here shows the scenery at a glance; I haven't yet imported it into FS2004, and haven't yet tested it with USA Roads. I'm inclined to tell users to put the Keys scenery at a higher level than USA Roads (thus not displaying USA Roads), since this photoreal scenery will show all the correct road placement anyway.Finally, another important note about this scenery is that *finally*, each and every key (no matter how small) will be displayed, in it's correct, precise geographic location!Let me know what you think.-Jason http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/84883.jpg

[ibanez737 2]

Wow, that looks really nice! I can hear the Jimmy Buffet music playing already :) Will it have autogen?-Scott

[Bill Womack 7]

Looks great! Somebody stop me if I'm wrong here, but I believe photoreal terrain textures automatically take priority over the road lines such as in USA Roads. I know I made some for an airport I'm doing and even though USA Roads has a higher priority in my scenery library, the photoreal completely supplants USA Roads. BTW, I used Terraserver imagery as well, and the roads in my scenery, to my delight, match up perfectly in both position and width with The USA Roads around the periphery of the scenery. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that would happen! Anyway, beautiful work. I can't wait to try it out.thanks,

[Guest geognut]

Okay, this is good to know. So I won't need to provide instructions to set the Key West scenery at a priority above or below USA Roads.Also, I assume the photoreal scenery also suppresses all autogen scenery? I'd prefer to not have autogen with this.thanks,Jason

[arno 1]

It depends on the way the scenery is made. If you place the photo scenery with VTP polygons it is possible to give them a lower layer then the VTP roads. In that case they can work together.If you placed them with resample they will always be shown above the roads.

[Bill Womack 7]

An excellent point, Arno. I was thinking of the resample method for photo-terrain. Yes, VTP polys are depending on their layer order.

[Guest geognut]

Well, I imported this new scenery into FS2004 and it looked horrible. The synthetic colors I painted didn't look realistic at all, and the scenery was blocky, especially around the marinas. So I'll have to reevaluate this project. It was a neat idea, but I'm not sure I'll have the time to continue.-Jason

[bob.bernstein 0]

your image looks like it would be nice in fs....before you give up, why don't you post your inf file? (assuming you are using the resample method).Bob Bernstein

[Guest]

Another suggestion would be to just concentrate on Key West rather than such an ambitious project as the entire keys. Then if you like your results you can move on to other keys.Hope you don't get discouraged as the Keys are a great place to fly but sorely lack the attention they deserve. Only other observations is don't worry about USA roads since photoreal should replace those. Also, reconsider about autogen... sure at 10,000 feet (like your photo), it looks great but coming into a landing you will lose the "realism" and feeling of speed if everything is flat. Megascenery was originally going to release without autogen... good thing they didn't. just 1 of my 2 cents...

[Guest geognut]

Here's the output from a file called "al.inf":[source] Type = CUSTOM SourceDir = "D:florida keys" SourceFile = "keywest_mask.bmp" Lat = 24.623358394160582920000000 Lon = -81.830045784418345540000000 NumOfCellsPerLine = 3000 NumOfLines = 3000 CellXdimensionDeg = 0.000039220917822836545480 CellYdimensionDeg = 0.000036496350364963649080[Destination] DestDir = "D:florida keyskeywestTmpAlpha" DestBaseFileName = "keywest" UseSourceDimensions = 1And here's the output from "su.inf":[source] Type = CUSTOM SourceDir = "D:florida keys" SourceFile = "keywest.bmp" Lat = 24.623358394160582920000000 Lon = -81.830045784418345540000000 NumOfCellsPerLine = 3000 NumOfLines = 3000 CellXdimensionDeg = 0.000039220917822836545480 CellYdimensionDeg = 0.000036496350364963649080[Destination] DestDir = "D:florida keyskeywestTmpBmp" DestBaseFileName = "keywest" UseSourceDimensions = 1I'm using Photo Scenery Maker, which I've always had good success with. It uses "resample.exe" to load both my bitmap image ("keywest.bmp") and the water mask I created ("keywest_mask.bmp"). Both are 24-bit color BMPs. The images are 4m resolution (from Terraserver).

[Guest geognut]

Yeah, I'm discovering that autogen would be good to include, now that I've tried flying over my flat scenery. But I'm not sure how to incorporate autogen, since I'm using Photo Scenery Maker (the only utility I'm familiar with), and it uses resample.exe.And I'm not completely giving up yet, since I've invested so much time already on the Key West area. You have a good point - to focus only on this area for now!-Jason

[bob.bernstein 0]

your infs look fine, one suggestion, don't submit a 4m/pixel image directly to resample.exe. I don't know how your gui tool works, but from my experience of feeding resample.exe directly, you'll see degradation unless you size your image more closely to 4.8m/pixel using the best possible routine for that conversion.If you have a top notch tool like photoshop, that'll work ok. just reduce your image size. make your image 3000*(4/4.8) on each side.If you don't have a good tool for that, you can find some freeware out there, elrond elvish produced a nice tool (unfortunately he called it imagetool before ms used the name).I'd be interested in a screen shot of the results.Bob B

[bob.bernstein 0]

Its easy to add autogen. Again, your gui tool is something I don't use..I feed the core tools directly. But, that should be irreslavent. MS produced the autogen tool that you use independant of the work to make your texture slices.Just download the annotator from the sdks. thats the tool to use. it will open the finished texture and then produce a corresponding .agn file.you have to do each texture file individually, so it takes some time.Bob B