Building footprints

[toprob]

I was thinking of a post from Ian recently, talking about reviving the local town photoscenery project which we've talked about a long time ago. I can't find his post, so I'll post this here.
LINZ have just released "NZ Building Outlines (Pilot)", which includes building footprints for parts of Canterbury, Hawke’s Bay and Waikato. They are using this as a test-case, I guess, to see if there's a need for this for all of NZ -- there certainly is, as far as I'm concerned, and I've let them know that!
This would be a handy way for someone to quickly add buildings to photoscenery, as there are tools which automate this. I re-autogened Hawke's Bay using LINZ data only (although retained the individually placed vegetation rectangles) and it took about 20 minutes from start to finish, as opposed to the months it takes by hand.
Hopefully LINZ will release the rest at some stage. If anyone is interested in making their own autogened photoscenery using this sort of data, I'd be happy to give advice and help.
You could easily build an autogenned photoscenery with free tools, although you would need a sim which includes a free SDK. Come to think of it, though, I think you can download a usable SDK anyway...

[Ian Warren]

Photo Real Scenery, the idea off the little towns in around an area such as the recent work with photo Westland by Doug , in doing the AGN of the town that dose take a little time , really requires a dedication , one small area for example did take a quite a few months simply because the photo back then was Black and White and required hand painting it, Ashburton , the autogen was easy but because it was B/W the photo was of low resolution.

Thus placing required a little artistic flair and a little experience, with having the vegetation whizzed through it would really as seriously speed the entire project up ... I did have postings comparing Ashburton , Alexander, Hamner Springs and few others , they would able to be found this link also shows the compare between VLC and ORBX , trouble with the 'Big O' elevations got screwed !
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=15985&hilit=The+Christchurch+AGN+rebuild

[emfrat]

I notice the latest ADEX (v1.7) can use a model footprint database, to improve placement. Just d/loaded the manual, haven't read it yet.

[toprob]

Yes, previously with ADEX if you placed a model in your airport, for instance, you would see a rectangle showing the model bounds -- now you can see a shape more approximating the real model, so you can better align things like airbridges etc.

[Ian Warren]

I notice the latest ADEX (v1.7) can use a model footprint database, to improve placement. Just d/loaded the manual, haven't read it yet.

That is interesting, I must have a look, strange one thing that ... the penny dropped YONKS BACK , with low res photo off old ... and the areas or township is not covered .. rather the hand paint .. go through a selection of hi-res photo textures to rebuild a town , another Brilliant Idea that I never put into action. I brought AFX I should check that for up dates just for the hell of it ..... But I might have a look at ADEX , thing is can default AGN be used rather placing lib objects?

[toprob]

No, the ADEX footprint feature is not related to building footprint data, it just looks at existing models and figures out their shape. It isn't much help with autogen, I guess, although I only use ADEX for airport facilities.

I've spent an hour doing a wee test on how quick it is to get photoscenery into the simulator. I chose Ashburton because it was mentioned here:)
An hour ago, my Ashburton looked like this in Prepar3d:



Now it looks like this:





That's 6862 buildings and 1597 vegetation polys.

I wouldn't release it like this, as there's plenty of work to do first, like colour-correction, water-masking, adding trees etc, but this is a good start.

Here are the steps I took:
At 1:45 I ordered the download from LINZ, for the aerial image, footprint data and vegetation data.
At 2:08 LINZ emailed me with a download link
I then downloaded the files, and by 2:15 they were unzipped
At 2:25 I dropped the aerials into resample.exe, after piecing them together and building a geoTiff
While that was running -- it takes time, in this case about 20 minutes -- I ran Scenproc and converted the LINZ footprints/vegetation data into autogen
By 2:45 I'd loaded it all into Prepar3d.

[Ian Warren]

One hell of a difference between default P3D, little diff from FSX , you can seen the more defines structure rather a plopped in default town.

[dbcunnz]

I made some inquiries with Andrew Ferrel from LINZ about the building footprint and this is his reply

At this stage we where only funded to do a pilot to see the value of an outlines data set. In order to assess the potential value we would love all potential users to use the data, and to complete the survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/building_outlines_pilot , this will give us the real world examples to push the case for more capture.

I would love to see this expanded to capture outlines from all imagery captures, we just need to show the real value.

Note: We are going to complete the Canterbury region which includes Christchurch city, Selwyn, Waimakariri, and the currently not included high Country. This should come available in the next few months.


Andrew

I have just finished the West Coast apart from a little more autogen would have been nice to have had the building footprint for the West Coast it would have completed the autogen.
I am about to start on South Canterbury from Chch down to the Pareora River so it will be interesting to try this building footprint out on it

[Ian Warren]

I was reading Savern Reweti's Massey Aviation Uni/school thesis on flight training and how much it replies on MSFS and people like us building accurate scenery for CAA rated VFR/IFR training so is something that could help regard to getting images.

[toprob]

There are Christchurch/Banks Peninsula footprints on the Koordinates site, which fills in the gap a little.

[Ian Warren]

So they now have covered the entirety of Banks Peninsular ? .... that would be a bonus !

[toprob]

Well, they've done building footprints, but the aerial imagery for the Peninsula is rubbish. From various things on the LINZ site, I think that a new Central Canty set might be on the way.

[Ian Warren]

I almost completed the survey, I go back to it and see what the outcome is, I stop 70% thru thinking what I was looking at was exempt from imagery.

[toprob]

Although I've done more general surveys on LINZ before, the specific one here relates to footprint data only. There are a few uses for FS development, but the most obvious is using Scenproc to turn the footprints into autogen buildings.

[Ian Warren]

I did the survey, not sure if there will be a quick reply , today was back into art and playing around installing scenery during breaks.