Dream Beaches

[nzcoaster]

Well since summers approaching and the Weather is so bad South of here why don't you book yourself a cabin a Kiwi Bach and drop on in , pull up at a beach in your Beaver light a fire and cook up some of those crayfish that you caught out of the rocks. sounds like a good mission to me

Dream Beaches

these shots are just a small portion of the area and havent been altered in any way. I was flying in the Trike thing 50-60 fps 1900x1200 32bit Ansio and antialising all detail and mesh settings cranked up to max except for autogen cause there ain't none yet .(it might obscure the beautiful scenery) and no special effects on water stuff cause it makes no difference in the area covered by photo scene . I know FSX really hassels over Big Smoke city areas unless you have some munter of a machine but on my moderate machine athlon64 3800 2 gig ram and 6800gt 256 mb I get amazing FPS around NZ . I admit I like slow and Bush and Fiords and Mountains and Coasts so for those struggling I reckon you'll be kicking yourself with excitement when you get into this stuff (hi rez FSX based photo scenery and little effects and whatnot equals good time) I look forward to be able to share this scenery with you all once I talk to my boss

Seeya and stay warm
Let me know if you want to purchse any cabin on the beach .Nows you chance for that exclusive Virtual Beach Bach

[deaneb]

son of a beach !!! That looks real good.

Deane

[Charl]

Well I read that in the online virtual reality game Second Life, there is actual trade in virtual assets and commodities.
You buy the VR currency and can cash it in for real money just like any other currency.
There's a Realtor who's made several hundred thousand (real) dollars trading virtual real estate.
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/technology ... drcrd.html

Can I have the bach nearest the inlet, on the beachfront?

[Alex]

Wow, great work, that looks really really good.

Now all I need to do is get a computer that can run FSX decently...

Alex

[mavman]

WOW...!!! that looks awesome!!! Imagine getting 25+fps flying around scenery like that!!!

[Timmo]

Was that loaded in using the FSX SDK tools? I going to install and look at them in the next few days so hopefully ill have some Bay of Plenty high res areas into FSX soon??

If you did use the new SDK tools, were they easy to use?

(Im a nosey fulla: What package were the 'Town basin capture' photos generated with?)

[nzcoaster]

Hi Timmo

I used the FSX SDK tools to create this scenery and yes it is extremely easy if you have access to Geotiffs or Sids. Both sids and geotiffs can be some real massive sizes ie
The Main Sid I work with is just over 1 gig and if I export out from that slices of geotiffs I end up with about 60 gigs of geotiffs

My Procedure to do this is

Import my sid file into Global Mapper and then reproject it from New Zealand Map Grid
to WGS84 . I can then export out slices to 24bit Geotiff (Geotiffs max size is 4 gigs)

I then just feed the geotiff to the resampler with a simple .inf, heres an example of what I use

Ps the great thing with geotiffs are all the geographical coordinates are imbedded in the file and so the resampler reads that and places your scenery accordingly

[Source]
Type = GeoTIFF
SourceDir = "D:\WhgGeo"
SourceFile = "Northland_Col_B3.tif"
Layer = Imagery
Variation = Day
NullValue = 255,255,255

[Destination]
DestDir = "Output"
DestBaseFileName = "Northland_Col_B3"
DestFileType = BGL
LOD = Auto
CompressionQuality = 80

Then just wait and whack it into your addon scenery dir (its all one file now for FSX aerials everything just sits in the bgl

My only learning curve at the moment is what to do with water areas as I love the photo water from my aerials but they are of cause hard and you can land on them
I still need to learn how to make a geotiff watermask and a geotiff alpha blend so I could have the FSX style water around the harbour and coastlines

I hope this helps and feel free to ask on anything
Also I used Sketchup Professional for all my modelling of the Town Basin and tons of photos and Uleadphoto Impact for perspective correction and image manipulation

I use Vue Infinite for creation of Skyspheres and advanced texture creation
Lightwave 9 and Cinema4D and Right Hemisphere Deep Exploration for 3d works in other areas

seeya
Greg

[JonARNZ]

Amazing, any ideas when you might release it and how? (CD, download etc)

[Timmo]

Thanks mate...
I installed the SDK last night and had a quick look....the tutorials seem a heap better than the 2004 ones and the various programs you get are useful as well (especially the .bgl viewer- it gave me the reason why Whakatane looks so wrong: the landclass is all up the duff....)

Other good things are the shapefile to bgl convertor (although the default vector data looks like LINZ stuff anyway so not much point changing that)

There is a section on water masks.....i think im going to go with Targas so then i can do a semi transparent part in the Whakatane and Ohiwa harbour where it is very shallow water....i think if you use the targa format youll loose the tfw information/spatail reference information but there are ways around around that (ie. defining it in the .inf file used in the bgl compiler)

Also usefull is the better tools for making auto gen...now if i can only find some time to really get into it!

(oh btw: the Bay of Plenty region: In mrsid format is about 5gb....in uncompressed tif files, from memory it was 8 DVDs....40gb? haha...gotta love sids)

[Timmo]

Im just having a play with this now- ive succesfully done some trials using geotiffs but its a dammed if you do/damned if you dont in regards to the water mask.
I.e. Use geotiff is easy but it isnt easy to create water masks so you end up with the water as part of the image (only a problem near water....if the image was all land it would be easy). I thought i could use our vector data (coastlines etc) and colour the polygon white so that in the compiler it will treat it as water....unfortunately the quality of the data isnt so good so it clips some areas of land and extends out into the sea in some areas.....One option is to digitise a new coastline which exactly matches the aerial photo data...Ill look into this

The other option is to export both the geotiff tags (in the image header) and the actual .tfw file (which is possible in ArcGIS). You can then export the geotiff, edit it (i.e. draw in the water mask in photo shop...when you save it the geotiff header tags are removed) and then re open it in ArcGIS- the image will still know its position from the .tfw. Re-export it as a geotiff and plonk it in FSX....

OR

Go the whole hog, convert to targa and make nice semi transparent areas which will show both the image and the water effect in FSX....it does mean that youll need to write a more in depth .inf file for the compiler though (i.e. not as easy as using a Geotiff)

Thoughts??

Also, do you know if its possible to place the default autogen and vector objects (Roads etc) on top of the aerial photo?? (ie your aerial photo would replace the landclass textures but not the roads, coastline etc....it would make things A HEAP easier if you could?)

[toprob]

Timmo
How about following the multi-channel multi-source example?
In the past I've built watermasks by having a separate image for the mask -- a 24bit BMP with white land and black water. I've just done a quick experiment which worked in part:)
I built a small GeoTIFF and saved the TFW file. Then I masked the water the same way I normally do to get a black/white watermask and saved as a TIFF. I changed the name of the TFW file to match the mask and reloaded it into Global Mapper and exported a GeoTIFF.
I then ran this INF:

[Source]
Type = MultiSource
NumberOfSources = 2

[Source1]
Type = GeoTIFF
Layer = Imagery
SourceDir = "SourceData"
SourceFile = "smalltest.tif"
Variation = Day

Channel_LandWaterMask = 2.0

[Source2]
Type = GeoTIFF
Layer = None
SourceDir = "SourceData"
SourceFile = "testsmallwater.tif"
SamplingMethod=Gaussian


[Destination]
DestDir = "Output"
DestBaseFileName = "masktest"
UseSourceDimensions = 1

Only trouble is the water is only semi-transparent. But it works in principle:)
The SDK example uses a separate image for day, night, water mask and blend mask.

[nzcoaster]

Hi Guys

This is my Initial success with using a Geotif that has a 2 alpha channels 1 being the mask land sea area and the other being the alpha blend



alpha 1 = mask = black and white

alpha 2 = blend = black through to white fade

I like the Geotiff method but it does involve using GeoTiffExamine to reinsert TFW info back into the header of the tif after editing

Speaking of which Photoshop is good though Gimp is very good to use except that it complains about info in the geotiff to start with which I just ignore

I like the all in one file method
What do you guys think?

Water Mask and Blend

[toprob]

Certainly sounds like this is the way to go. I've had no luck turning my twice-alphaed image back into a GeoTIFF, but I'll try it your way.
However it may be simpler to just transfer the info from the TFW file into the INF file. You'd only have to do it once.