Google Eath and photo scenery

[Guest JohnC]

Yes it is easy to use and in this case one simply creates a water polygon at the water height (0 for the ocean) using a carefully georeferenced background image to guide one. There is a tutorial (highly recommended to start) somewhere to be found in the LuisFelizTirado opus at the top of this Forum. I suggest you wait a little to see if the real gurus lurking here have a better idea.Cheers.

[Guest JohnC]

Actually I forgot to mention the more modern FSX_SDK which allows you to take a polygon drawn directly on Google Earth Plus, set the altitude in the Properties of the polygon, then compile it into a bgl file.....details are in Arno Gerretsen's scenerydesign.org, a terrific source of information.

[Guest steve43]

Hi guys, just for your info, I am now making progress with my arial textures and I am now getting to the stage where I need to make a blend mask for the edges. Here's a question.. I have managed to get the water mask working but how would I go about creating a blend mask for the whole area if my area is made up of several BMPs? Would I need to create a lower res image which covered all my coords?I still have 2 remaining jobs to do, pull in the airport boundry (how do I do that? afcad? I couldn't see how to do it) and pull in the coastline.. I am assuming using ground2k rather than ground2k4??Help appreciated..Steve

[Guest JohnC]

For starters, just make copies of the water masks, and pass for a while on revealing underwater artifacts or blending the photoreal into the generic textures. I aasume you want to remove an ugly square airport flatten boundary, and replace it with something more complex and realistic?FSX_KML can do all that. Look in scenerydesign.org. You need Google EarthPlus ($20/year) to draw the polygons, then FSX_KML gives you dozens of Microsoft options on what you want happening inside those polygons. It's very simple to use.I said FSX_SDK in a previous post and I meant FSX_KML..sorry for the confusion.Cheers.

[Guest steve43]

Hi JohnCI have done the watermask part by adding an alpha channel to the bmp files, this works very well. I do now need to work on some blending channel. I tried adding a blend channel to the bmp but this didn't work :-(In terms of the airport I now have a boundary fence that goes into the sea as the airport is on the coast. I need to really just be able to alter the boundry of the airport if this is possible?Will look into the KML stuff. I am assuming you can change coastline in FSX with this? At the moment I think the problem in FSX is that the coastline is around 30 meters out. I think FS9 had a better coast in Scotland anyway as well as roads? A lot of the roads that were in Fs9 are now missing in FSX.Thanks for your help John..Steve

[Guest JohnC]

You need two separate masks that are in grayscale, one to define water vs land (always in black and white), and another separate one to do blending by using grayscale values other than black RGB=0 and white RGB=255. The SDK shows how to use both to achieve what you need and how to write your resample inf input to incorporate both into your scenery. If you just make a copy of your landwatermask and call it your blend mask, and then use it as an experimental mask by changing some of the grayscale values to intermediate grayscale values, you will immediately see what blending can do. FSX_KML should allow you to do all kinds of excluding as well as flattening inside any polygon you draw in Google Earth Plus. It also allows you to draw roads on a Google template, and make traffic run "over" your photoreal roads. The FSX_KML documentation is really quite superior. You draw a polygon, you tag it with a Microsoft acceptable tag, depending on what you want to do, then click "build" and you have your bgl in a second or two. There is a tag called "Exclude everything" for example. Maybe that will xout a fence.There is a discussion about excluding fences in www.scenerydesign.org.I also urge you to completely familiarize yourself with TMFViewer which allows you to look at overlays of your bgls. Cheers:-beerchug

[GHD 21]

> There is a tag called "Exclude everything" for>example. Maybe that will xout a fence.You can only remove the fences in XML, use deleteAllBoundaryFences="TRUE" in the

[Guest JohnC]

Thanks GHD.......this version, (minus the boundary fence statement) cleaned out entirely this (fenceless) obsolete airport...except the flatten.. <?xml version="1.0"?>

[GHD 21]

The flatten must be removed with a shape file.George

[sightseer 895]

I have a question concerning the photoscenery issue.I've taken some pictures using google earth. I chose an altitude of1.06 km for my 1.2m test run. I took a picture and then looked at howmany pixels equated to the image of the scale. If the image of the scalecovered 256 pixels and the scale says '305meters' then305m/256pixels = 1.19m/pixel.I'll have to recheck my thinking onthat but my question is this:It doesn't seem to matter what size of image my 'stitched together'source image is. It could be 800 x 400 or 3000 x 3000. It just doesntseem to matter.My question is: am I missing something? is there a size of image thatI should be using to make things work better? Is it better to createone bgl from a bunch of small images or should I create a bunch of bgl's to cover an area?I'm going to have to get google earth plus and a copy of FSX_KML. they bothsound useful.

[sightseer 895]

>Thanks GHD.......this version, (minus the boundary fence>statement) cleaned out entirely this (fenceless) obsolete>airport...except the flatten..>> ><?xml version="1.0"?>>xmlns:xsi='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance'>xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="bglcomp.xsd">>> ident="VT48" > country="United States"> state="Vermont"> city="Burlington"> name="Fairholt"> lat="N44 27.60"> lon="W073 11.77"> alt="106.68M"> magvar="21">>> deleteAllApproaches = "TRUE"> deleteAllApronLights = "TRUE"> deleteAllAprons = "TRUE" > deleteAllFrequencies = "TRUE"> deleteAllHelipads = "TRUE"> deleteAllRunways = "TRUE"> deleteAllStarts = "TRUE"> deleteAllTaxiways = "TRUE"> deleteAllBoundaryFences = "TRUE"/>>>>>>>A second question: Is this what an exclude file is? Where is the file thatlists all of the airports and their information so I would know whatall I needed to exclude? or do you just guess at the airports approximatelat and long and then include every available 'deleteAll...' statements. In the example above: where would I get the 'lat', 'lon', 'alt' and magnetic variation information from?If a person wanted to redo an airport from scratch: is there one filethat excludes what is currently there and then another file which buildsthe new airport or is it all to be contained in one file? I reallydon't understand what an exclude file is.

[GHD 21]

>> I really don't understand what an exclude file is.See:http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho..._id=32932&page=The title is "Excluding autogen" but the thread includes references to airport excludes.George

[Guest JohnC]

Hi...if I understand your question, what you need to do is stitch together as large a rectangle of google photos as you can. Then you look at the NW corner and determine on google what the NW lat and lon is , as well as the SE lat and lon. You then calculate the difference in latitude, and divide it by the number of vertical pixels. Do the same for longitude dividing delta longitude by the number of horizontal pixels in your bitmap. You need this info tu build a resample input file (call it xxx.inf) and drop it on the resample executable, or much better still run it in the DOS window.The FSX SDK will show you how to write your inf file, and there are other examples on this Forum. You will get a rather large BGL and you simply put it in your addon scenery folder. If you have a good location with hi res photos, 1.06km will give you excellent results.

[Guest JohnC]

Exclude bgls simply prevent specific scenery parts from lower level sceneries in your scenery library from displaying. The airport example above works for everything except flattens. Flattens can be removed with FSX_KML for examples. So my two bgls made everything disappear, and one is then free to start from scratch....at a higher level scenery in the library. Sometimes the thread subjects wander around a little. Trust me, no one grasps it all at first.

[Guest JohnC]

Q:Where is the file thatlists all of the airports and their information so I would know whatall I needed to exclude?In the example above: where would I get the 'lat', 'lon', 'alt' and magnetic variation information from?Some of it exists on www.airnav.comQ:If a person wanted to redo an airport from scratch: is there one filethat excludes what is currently there and then another file which buildsthe new airport or is it all to be contained in one file?A: No. You should keep your exclude bgls in a lower level scenery for a while...... IMOP.You don't fold bgls that do different tasks together.There are photoscenery bgls, mesh terrain bgls, 3d structure bgls, exclude bgls, and flatten bgls and they should exist as separate entities.I suggest you try AFCAD for redesigning an airport. Loading an FSX airport into AFCAD will give you a lot of information.