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PaulVR

Paul van Roy 's great scenery of the Netherlands !

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Paul van Roy, thank you for a beautiful scenery ! I started with the relative small europoort scenery to make a start and to test it on my puter and it runs great and is very well done. No doubt I will d. load the Rotterdam part of the Netherlands scenery. Hope there is still more 'in the pipeline...!' Thanks for sharing your work !Best regards,Wouter

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Wouter,Thanks for your kind words. The Europoort tile is just the western tip of the scenery (it's mostly water). The Rotterdam tile is the main part of the scenery. It was published to be used together with Henry Werij's excellent EHRD Rotterdam scenery.It was my initial intention to convert the Fly! version of the Netherlands scenery for Fly II, but I ran into some problems with the alignment of the different tiles, and I decided to wait and see if further development of Fly II by the beta team would bring any improvement. It's been awfully silent on that front, so I've put the whole project on the shelf (not in the dustbin, mind you!).Paul

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Paul,Sorry to hear about that alignment trouble, pity.You have made more scenery for the Netherlands for Fly!, is that scenery compatible with Fly!2,(have read somewhere in an interview wth Richard from TRI , that Fly!2 was backwards comp. with the scenery originaly created for Fly!) ...? Wouter

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Unfortunately Fly! scenery is not compatible with Fly II. Fly II uses a higher resolution for scenery than Fly. When Fly II was still in development, it was generally assumed that TRI would publish a scenery converter, but this never happened. The only way to convert Fly scenery for Fly II is to re-slice the original targa images with the built-in slicer of Fly II. In theory this could be a relatively simple process. Unfortunately the slicer doesn't do the job flawlessly: the tiles which make up the scenery don't align properly. You get very annoying 'ruptures'. Also, when you're working with quarter globe tiles, they tend to slighly overlap which causes certain tiles not to show up at all. The only option left is to try to manually correct the errors, which is very much a question of trial and error and very time consuming. I never could get it right and I eventually gave up.The reason why I did publish the Rotterdam scenery for Fly II, is that - because these were only 2 quarter tiles belonging to different globe tiles - the alignment problem never showed there.Paul

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Paul,Thanks for your explanation re. the alignment issue.In your tutorial I can read that the scenery you made, is painted with textures from How in the World , based on a Terrascene rendering, satelite images and digital road maps.Are these digital road maps (free?) downloadable somewhere... If yes, do you have probably a webaddress ?Do you have used parts of the satelite images in the scenery itself.Wouter

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Wouter,The digital road map I used is a commercial route planner (Route 66), so you can not get it for free or download it. But it is widely available in Belgium and the Netherlands. The satellite images weren't free either, but they only cost 2,50 euro. They were on a CD-ROM which covers the whole of the Benelux region. Unfortunately, the CD-ROM is no longer available.I only used the satellite images as a reference to know which HITW textures I could use best to approximate the real world as close as possible. The resolution of the images themselves was far too low (less than 1/3 of the resolution of the scenery) to be used directly.Paul

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Paul,Thank you for the information about the digital maps and satellite images .In a software catalogue,Route 66 Benelux is annouced as a planner with maps,seamless to be set from countryscale to even 1:2000 , with all the details like roundabouts etc, this looks very well. Railroads also...? Is TerraScene automaticaly able to 'read' the digital maps of Route 66 , like TS is doing with USGS and Shapefile datas ...?Do I need some kind of Photoshop program as a minimum requirement to build/paint a scenery ?I don't own such a program.Wouter

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Wouter,Route 66 is indeed very detailed. AFAIK Terrascene cannot read the data of Route 66, I think it's a proprietary format. I started to use it in the Netherlands 2 scenery, that's why that is so much more detailed than the previous sceneries. Route 66 contains detailed information about the shape of cities and towns, industrial and wooded areas, waterways, coastlines, lakes, roads, highways (with on and off ramps), railways...The way I used those data was first to take a number of screenshots in Route 66. Then I rescaled them to the scale of the Terrascene scenery and stitched them together. I did the same with the satellite images (which cover smaller areas than the TS rendering). Then I brought them all together in a layered Photoshop file and created a fourth layer on top of those in which I drew the scenery, by copying, pasting, erasing and painting different textures. You need a powerful paint program like Photoshop for this, because then you can use a number of time saving tools and you can even automate a number of tasks. Using a more basic tool would mean a much longer 'production time'.It would be a great asset though if someone would come up with a way to 'read' the route planner and convert it into a Terrascene rendering. You still would have to do a great deal of editing for every area which is not water, built-up terrain, woodland or industrial area, but you would maybe only need 20 % of the time it took me to do the scenery.Paul

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PaulI was interested to see your remark about '1/4 Globe tiles overlapping'-I didn't know that but have discovered that an imge superimposed upon TS2 produced 1/4 Globe Tile (UK photo scenery in my case) does not instantly transfer to a 1/4 section within a full Globe Tile. The full globe tile is slightly smaller scale. I presume that the Fly!2 slicer sorts out the difference but it does mean I've had to 'fiddle with rescaling in PhotoShop' when transferring my 'Heathrow Zone' 1/4 globe tile scenery into a bigger scenery area.Would love to have your great Netherlands scenery available in a Fly!2 version.Now that you can use TerraShape to 'expose the Fly!2 runways' is there no way of re-fitting your scenery into 'Full Globe Tiles?'DaveT

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Paul ,You wrote to have taken screenshots in the routeplanner program (btw I did find in my collection a fine digital map program from KPN-Telecom called CDfoon-gids) , what scale did you about use and how many shots were nearly taken ... ...the well documented guide called uk4fly (UK4FLYscenerymanufacture.ZIP in FLY!II scenery library) from David Taylor, talks about 57 x 57 images ( 3249) 1: 10.000 scale for 1/4 globe tile . This is an _amazing_ number , with attached an amazing piece of work to handle this... The rescaling towards the Terrascene scenery scale, did you do that with Photoshop ?The more I read about it and think , and fly over and over it again, the more I admire your tremendous work ! As a former inhabitant of Rotterdam , Delft and Rijswijk, I was living more than ten years in the heart of the scenery : it is trilling precise and with a spot on local atmosphere!!! Regards,Wouter

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Hi Dave,I tried the full globe tile approach, but it has a number of drawbacks. The file sizes become even more huge than they already are with 1/4 tiles, and I still had alignment problems. Any change you make to the position of the scenery takes 4 times longer to process before you can assess the result. In the end I was more waiting for the computer to finish rendering than actually doing some useful work.I'm not sure I understand your 'Terrashape' remark.Paul

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Wouter,I don't know of a way to accurately and 'mathematically' determine the scale for a scenery project. What I did was to use the Terrascene rendering of the area as a starting point. Then I overlaid it with one satellite image which I scaled manually until a number of critical reference points exactly matched. Then I could apply that scaling factor to the other satellite images. All done in Photoshop.For the Route 66 screenshots I used the same process, but this time with the satellite images as a reference, because though of low resolution, they still are more accurate than the TS rendering. The number of screenshots needed depended upon the level of detail I wanted: the more you zoom in, the more detail you get in the route planner, but the more screenshots I had to take. If I remember it well, I needed between 40 and 50 screenshots per quarter globe tile.Then you can easily select areas and roads with the magic wand tool and paste in the textures you want. But I often could only use small portions of the HITW textures and had to do a lot of additional painting to get the desired effect. A highway for example had to be manually painted three times over to get the look right (the road base, the asphalt texture and the separation between both lanes). Those details were often only one pixel wide (which already represents 15 m in the real world! - many roads aren't even that wide).I'm glad you think the local athmosphere is spot on. I've maybe been 5 times in the Netherlands in my whole life and I've never seen it from the air... :-)Paul

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