Thanks Scott and John C, here is where I am at at the moment. Last night I spent about 3 hours trying to figure out a conversion for the mercator to geographic projection latlon. Here are a few questions:1. How do I convert the lat/long position google earth gives me to the latlon resample requires? My scenery ends up about 20 miles out on the lon and around 1/2 mile out on lat?2. I'm not getting my head around the pixel/meter issue. Is there anyway to work out the pixel/meter by how far you are above the earth in GE.. something like 200m = 2m/pixel3. JohnC when you mention this: "8. That is not a problem because you can determine the extents of the pixel in the NW corner of your image, and your pixel size in degrees very easily and place them in resample." What do you mean by pixel size in degrees? How can you work that out? Do you use the GE app that Luis mentioned above at ptsim?Sorry if I am missing the obvious... keep with me guys I think I am getting there (very slowly!)Cheers,Steve

Hello Steve,Here are some answers:1) the lat/lon positions that Google Earth gives are the ones that resample needs (see below). If your scenery is only 1/2 in lat I think that the reprojection is not necessary2) about "pixel per meter" here is what I think - say that you have a picture that spans 1 minute latitude per 1 minute of longitude. This picture spans about 1850 meters in the NS direction (1 minute of latitude is about 1 nautical mile or 1850 meters if I remember). The span in meters in the EW direction depends on the latitude. For a latitude of 40 degres the span is given, approximately by:Span_EW = Span_NW x cos (latitude)So, for a picture with a width of 1 degree of longitude, the span will be, more or less, 1417 meters.Now you, depending on the Zoom settings that 1deg x 1deg picture can have, say, the following sizes in pixels (height x width):case A 200 x 150case B 400 x 300 case C 800 x 600case D 1600 x 1200The resolution of your picture in meters per pixel will be:case A 9.2 x 9.4 ( 9.2 = 1850 / 200 and 9.4 = 1417 / 150 ) case B 4.6 x 4.7 ...case C 2.3 x 2.3case D 1.1 x 1.2If you are using FS2004 resample will produce bitmaps, that you will see in the sim, with a resolution about 4.8 x 4.8 meters per pixel. Therefore you can say:case A - the original picture has insuficient resolution. The resample tool will use interpolation to create the necessary pixels. The produced bitmaps will have about 4 times the number of pixels of the original picture. The final pictures will have a great extent of interpolation and they tend to be smooth and detail is lostcase B - the resample tool only needs to make small adjustments. Probably it preserves the information of the originalcase C - if the resample tool is in line with the "sampling theory" this seems to be the best input in the sense that ... case D - ... you can not preserve the detail of this picture in the output image. Probably you are loading your system with unnecessary data; processing time is longer. 3) You need to specify the following parameters in the INF file required by the resample tool: Lat = Lon = NumOfCellsPerLine = NumOfLines = CellXdimensionDeg = CellYdimensionDeg =The web tool that I pointed out to you shows the borders of a picture. If you do not use that web tool you should be able to get these borders. Say that they are:North < north border latitudeSouth < north border latitudeWest < west border longitudeEast < east border longitudeSay that your picture has a height and a width in pixels of:Rows < height in pixelsCols < width in pixelsThe formulae for the INF are: Lat = North Lon = West NumOfCellsPerLine = Cols NumOfLines = Rows CellXdimensionDeg = ( East - West ) / Cols CellYdimensionDeg = ( North - South ) / RowsA final note about the reprojection - if you go from Mercator to LatLon or viceversa, longitudes "do not change". So we are only worried about latitudes. The north border latitude that the INF file sends to Resample is OK (you read it from a chart or else). The CellYdimensionDeg parameter will allow Resample to walk on the input picture with minimal error if the the vertical span is low.I hope this is correct and useful,Regards, Luis

hELLO STEVE... OPEN UP GE AND CLICK ON TOOLS AND GOOGLE EARTH OPTIONS WILL ALLOW YOU TO SET THE LAT/LONS IN dEGREES "ONLY".NOW YOU CAN FIND THE nORTH AND SOUTH LATITUDES AND EAST AND WEST LONGITUDES IN DECIMAL DEGREES OF YOUR BITMAP. cLICK ON vIEW AND MAKE SURE STATUS BAR IS CHECKED...IT WILL APPEAR AT THE BOTTOM AND WILL HAVE YOUR LAT LON EXTENTS IN DECIMAL DEGREES....HOWEVER, INSTEAD OF MOVING YOUR CURSOR AROUND AND WRITING DOWN NUMBERS...........YOU CAN GET PRECISE VALUES AND KEEP THEM FOR FURTHER REFERENCE IF YOU PUT PLACEMARKS PRECISELY ON THE nw CORNER AND se CORNER OF YOUR IMAGE. tHE PROPERTIES DIALOG BOX WILL STORE THE EXACT COORDINATES IF YOU NEED THEM LATER. YOU'LL GET THERE.

I have been struggling to create an airfield using GE, not so much getting the shot but trying to figure out the optimum height. I have tried 200m which took about 12 different shots which I painstakingly put together in photoshop. However despite all of that, whilst it looks great from the top down view, even as I zoom in, however the moment I am in spot view it is just mushy, no detail at all. I have tried putting a small texture on but that hasn't made a fat lot of difference.Also I have been using the Gmax FS2002 gamepack to cretae a ground polygon, however whilst I can get everything in the right place, if I use DXT5 with an Alpha to get a nice blend, the Aircraft shadow dissapears in one part of the airfield, despite no height change, if I use DXT1 and colourkey, no problem , the shadow is on wherever the aircraft is, trouble is I get that horrible black edge.Don't suppose anyone has any pointers or ideasThanksPaul

Guys, I have done it! Thank you Ruis for all your help and to johnC. After hours of mucking around with numbers I managed to create a strip of imagary around my airport which matches 100%. I am now totally impressed with this.. ok must go and grab a beer! :-jumpy Cheers guys!Steve

Well, maybe I shouldn't be drinking my beer so fast. I have run into problems. After trying to add my second bgl with a water mask I am getting strange water squares appearing all around my nice new textures :-( I didn't think this was going to be easy..help anyone?Steve

Show us the squares and tell us whether you used an blend mask and/or a landwater mask and publish your inf file. BTW, You will soon develop an irresistable urge to post a few screenshots in the AVSIM screenshot forum

Hi JohnC,I don't have the files here (at work, well supposed to be!) I did use a landwater mask but then tried without the land water mask and the same problem appeared? I had 2 texture strips running horizontaly. One set had a SW coord of 56.4556 and the NW coord for the next strip the same. Should I overlap slightly when creating textures?Steve

Hello,The row of tiles that are traversed (spelling?) by that common border will not be generated. I think that there is "multisource" type of parameter and I do not now if you can instruct the resampler to "glue" the 2 source pictures. Regards, Luis

Steve, congrats on your progress. Make sure you've downloaded the sdk update off the ms insider site for photoscenery. The update fixed some bugs that sound similar to what you are seeing.You can include each image as additional sources in your inf file, and compile them all into one bgl. The sdk describes that.Best,Bob

Hi Bob and Luis,Thanks guys, I have now got it working! I should have been using the multisource type. I have even got my sea alpha channel in place and all is looking good. The only problem now is the default coastline needs editing as it is too far out and my textures don't cover the default coastline. Is this easy to edit? The other thing is that the fence surrounding the airport is in the sea, I am assuming also that it is easy to edit the airport fencing? Of course not forgetting blend masking but I will cross that bridge when I get there ;-)Thanks for your help guys.Steve

I have been trying to follow this thread and to be honest I am absolutely baffled. I am simply trying to place pfotoscenery at N52.139491 and W-1.8478139. I have been using GE to get the shots, however I am really struggling to get the resolution I want. In FSX from a distance it looks great, however it looses all detail in spot view.It will not sink in at all how you adjust to obtain the optimum resolution. I can follow all the stuff about pinpointig etc, but using the resample tool????. I have been trying to do this with the FS2002 Gmax SDK and using ground polygons. The only reason that I am taking that route is that I already have the Generation X photoscenery for the UK and I am trying to blank out all of the ground objects that were there when the photo was taken by effectively putting photoscenery over photoscenery..if that makes sense.I would really appreciate someone explaing this in real idiot mode so that I can have a go..gove me 3dsMax anyday :-)CheersPaul

Hi Paul, yes it is quite baffling if you are new to this. I was certainly baffled but perseverance does pay off :-). Im not sure fully about the resolution issue yet. I followed Luis instructions further up this post and they helped a lot. I think (and Bob and Luis could maybe confirm or deny this) that FS works out the closest LOD according to the parameters you put in the inf file. The best way to experiment is to take a small section of high resolution data like in London or something and basically grab a small street make a note of the coords and work out the x and y dim values according to Luis's post and create a bgl file using resample. One thing I would check are your setting in FSX itself. Check that you have anistropic filtering enabled as this helps with the blurries.Not sure about putting scenery on top of other scenery but it would be worth checking the scenery library in terms of the level the scenery is appearing..Hope that helps a bit? The blind leading the blind maybe?Steve

The BGL Compiler section of the FSX SDK details how to write an xml file to delete part of an airport.I suggest you use the command prompt dos window to submit the xml file because you will get error messages that way. Just dragging the xml file with an error onto the BglComp icon just doesn't tell you much. It blinks but no bgl files appear.As to your default land sticking out from under your photoscenery, I use Ground2k to "cut away" the default land with water. If someone has a better way, I sure would like to hear it. Looking at this stuff at "work"? Bad boy. :-wink2 :-lol

Thanks JohnC, now I feel real bad. I suppose it would be different if I actually had some work to do :-violinBut thanks for the advice I will look into ground2k, is it easy to use?Steve