photoreal scenery is ugly when...

[brownbox]

I downloaded sections of NZ with photoreal scenery e.g mount egmont, gisborne, tekapo and what I noticed is that where the photoreal ends and the landclass begins, it looks really tacky, sometimes going from bright green to bright brown

[toprob]

This is always gonna happen, I mean the photoreal is derived from a photo, which is adjusted to try to make it reasonably realistic. (subject to the limitations of aerial imagery.)
Outside the photoreal are default textures, determined by the land classication. A good landclass file, but it won't solve it completely.
The Red Baron landclass gives a good result with many of my photoreal areas.

[deaneb]

yep - blame microsoft. After all they made a lot of NZ default landclass very brown. You can't get more real than photos, but they are only as good as the day they were taken and since the whole country cannot be imaged in one day you will always get changes in colour, brightness and contrast. Just look at Google earth.

The only hope is accurate landclass and perhaps a way of blending textures where different areas meet.

Deane

[ardypilot]

Get the free red baron landclass, it works brilliantly with photoreal!

Just for examples, the Hokitika, Tekapo, Wanaka, Corromandel, and Rotorua scenerys all blend in with it perfectly- you can't even tell there is a boundrey!

[ScottER]

Hi all,

I am new to this forum and was looking through some of the old posts.

There is a way to merge photoreal ground cover with the default texture using Luis Sa's Sbuilder. You can load a bitmap photo along with an "alpha" greyscale bitmap to fade the perimeter tiles from opaque to transparent. I personally use Terrabuilder for the internal tiles and SBuilder for the fade-in since Terrabuilder uses a better (I think) method for resampling and converting the image. The attached screenshots show the LINZ Hamilton aerial photo (rectified using Globalmapper) merged over 1 LOD13 tile. It matches really well with the Red Baron topo and landcover. The roads in particular merge beautifully from default to photoreal.

[Alex]

Looking good there Scott, sounds like a cool little tool. But yea, I don't like it either, I've decided not to get any more if I can help it, and am really just looking for the airports themselves.

Alex

[Charl]

Scott that is stunning.
I've griped forever about the Big Step between photoreal and the RBE with default textures and this looks like a prayer answered.
Does it have to be done while setting up the scenery?
Can it be applied retrospectively to Godzone photoreal scenery for example?
Does the merge have to follow a straight line or could it follow, say, a watercourse?
How much effort is involved?

[ScottER]

Hi
Merging the photoreal to default is relatively straightforward assuming you have an aerial photo to start with (E.g. the LINZ NZMapGrid or NZTM orthohotos) and know the exact coordinates of the NSWE edges. In the case of the LINZ photos both types need to be rectified (stretched and skewed) to convert from our projection systems to the WGS84 projection used by flight simulator. The NZMG photos also need to have a datum shift applied (use the calculator from wherearewe.co.nz and apply to all 4 corners). You then need a tool such as Globalmapper where you enter the corner coordinates of the image and project it in WGS84 format. You then end up with an image in the correct projection with the Lat/Lon coordinates of NSWE edges known exactly (I use a spreadsheet to keep track of all the coordinates and to convert from D:Min:S to decimal degrees).

Now the image can be imported into either Terrabuilder Lite or Scenery Builder. I use Terrabuilder for the main part of the image and create a water mask (using Photosphop or PSP) to allow the rivers lakes and coastline to show through. I run the image through Terrabuilder first and use the "scenery issues" text file generated to adjust the image to exactly 4.8 m/p.

I then load the image into Scenery Builder and select an LOD 13 grid to show. Remember that for photoreal, only LOD13 tiles that are completely filled with the image show up in flight simulator. At this point I decide how much of the image I want to use to merge with the default. If say the west edge has the image covering approx 80% of the tile then I will use that 80% (which wouldn't show up anyway) as the "merge" portion, otherwise I will use a whole LOD13 tile. In the former instance, you the need to add enough pixels to the image (say 200p using your image editor) to ensure it will completely fill the LOD13 tile and recalculate the new latitude or longitude of that border (again my spreadsheet calculates the new coordinate and all I do is enter the number of pixels added). Before I do this, I take a screenshot from the Scenery Builder window and use that as an overlay over the image to create the greyscale alpha mask. I.e in Photoshop or PSP make the mask white where the image is to show fully and fade to black to merge to the default scenery. The merge line can be along a straight line or follow a contour - whatever you like - depending on how skilled you are with your image editor.

Enter the new images back into Scenery Builder, select the tiles you want to show up in flight simulator and hit the button to generate the bgl and texture files. Follow the excellent help files in Luis Sa's Scenery Builder to see how this all works. Just a point here, there must be no texture folder associated with the scenery folder. Instead the texture files generated by Scenery Builder must go directly to the scenery/world/texture folder. At this point I go back to Terrabuilder and enter the original image (i.e. one that will only full the LOD13 tiles that aren't part of the "merge" tiles generated by Scenery Builder), and generate the bgl and texture files as usual.

Phew! Maybe this isn't as straightforward as I thought! Does this answer your actual questions? As far as applying retrospectively to Robin's godzone scenery, if you had a matching photo for the area alongside his scenery you could add just the merge tiles but the problem usually is that the photo isn't available. For the area within the godzone scenery, Robin would really have to make the changes and redistribute it.

One final note. For some reason the LOD 13 tiles generated by Scenery Builder sometimes seem to "separate" slightly then come back together as you fly over them, especially in a north/south direction. This effect may be worse on some machines than others depending on your graphic card, drivers etc, but on the whole this method works really well with a much more realistic effect than the "ugly" straight edge you normally see in photoreal scenery.

Cheers
Scott

[Charl]

Does this answer your actual questions?

Indeedy. I will not be jumping straight in there and fixing all my old Godzone photoreal, that's for sure.
But maybe one of our resident scenery gurus will take this on board when he gets round to fixing the Coromandel photoreal?
Many thanks for the post, and what scenery are you about to release??

[toprob]

One final note.  For some reason the LOD 13 tiles generated by Scenery Builder sometimes seem to "separate" slightly then come back together as you fly over them, especially in a north/south direction.  This effect may be worse on some machines than others depending on your graphic card, drivers etc, but on the whole this method works really well with a much more realistic effect than the "ugly" straight edge you normally see in photoreal scenery.

I originally meant to produce the Queenstown scenery using this method, as the colour imagery I started with wasn't rectangular. However on my system any scenery produced this way tends to flick in and out of existance as you fly over it.
FSX includes the abiity to apply a mask to images using the normal Resample method, so I'd expect to be able to include a blend to default in any scenery produced for FSX.
Unfortunately this isn't backwardly compatible, though.