Photoreal Default Scenery

[greaneyr]

I'm just curious to get some thoughts on this one. What are people's opinions on what to use as a basis for our 2d mesh textures? Photoreal, or something else?

I know it might seem like 'photoreal' is the Hare while 'something else' is the Tortoise in this race, but there are a couple of points to consider:

• Not all parts of New Zealand have access to the same quality satellite photographs. This will mean a distinct change in photoreal scenery quality from one area to another.
• Copyright restrictions over use of Google Earth images? I'm not sure about this. I know we're releasing it as free, but does anyone know outright if people can actually use Google Earth images like we do?
• Shadows and perspective flaws. Unless the sun is directly overhead at the time the image was taken, you will see shadows. This looks unrealistic when the sun is in the same part of the sky as the shadow is in. It also creates a perspective distortion when viewed from anywhere other than directly overhead. Also, there are often buildings where you see the sides of them since the satellite wasn't directly overhead when it took the photograph. This kills perspective. I hate seeing forests on photoreal scenery since they always look a bit surreal. They have the shadows that would suggest they are tall, yet they are totally flat. If you put trees on top of them, that can look a little bizarre too. I often feel that FS' ground scenery polygons look a lot nicer than photoreal forests.
• Stretched cliff face sides. If you drape an image over steep terrain, it stretches the image on the steep slope and can look really horrible.
• Sharpening halos very obvious. Those into photography will understand what I mean here. It's what you get when an image has been artificially sharpened. The edge of a dark object on a bright background is highlighted in a colour brighter than the background. From a distance, this makes the image appear sharper. But up close, it just looks horrible. This is something you often notice in photoreal scenery based on low res images. I'm not sure if FS adds in some sharpening itself here too.
• Only looks good from high altitudes. If it's a lower res image (and for the most part, I'm referring to the best thing FS9 can handle) photoreal scenery really only looks good from high altitudes, in my opinion. This is mostly because the previous 3 problems listed above aren't noticeable from there. For IFR flights, this is fine. For any kind of rural work, it can be very limiting.

So if not photoreal, then what? And I don't have the answer to this. I think photoreal has it's place around airports and on paddocks etc where default FS just never looks like NZ, but it seems that it falls down wherever you bring in 3d objects. Unfortunately, this is probably about 95% of this country's scenery tiles. I just wanted to try and stimulate some debate and see what people think about this. I suspect we'll end up using it, since that's what we have a lot of already out there. But the quality gaps between areas isn't something we will be able to just ignore.

[toprob]

You've summed it up nicely. The main issue is the quality of the available imagery, not so much that the imagery is poor quality, but that if you are creating ground textures for use in a landclass-type scenery -- such as the default simulator -- you can choose a top quality image of the ideal New Zealand small town, for instance, and repeat it, in various combinations, over the whole country. You are not relying on the variable quality you get from most aerial imagery. For instance, the LINZ imagery for the Auckland area is very good quality compared to what some countries have to deal with, but parts of it are blurry, I suspect where clouds have been painted out. That's why the default method of displaying the ground -- a handful of hand-crafted photo tiles repeated all over the place -- can give a better quality over a larger range of display sizes. The problem is it isn't real, it's someone's idea of what New Zealand looks like squashed down to a few hundred different textures.
Photo imagery appeals to those who want to see the real thing, but it does have some drawbacks.
By the way, the imagery I use for this type of scenery is not satellite imagery, it is aerial imagery, taken from an aircraft. I would not touch Google Earth imagery for distribution -- it is just not allowed. The only freely available imagery is LINZ, and they no longer release it on a yearly basis.
It was always my aim to release a NZ-wide photo scenery, but the imagery just isn't available.
However, that's not to say that the imagery will never be available, and this week I've actually registered my interest in the future of a complete photo coverage of NZ, and am negotiating for the rights to distribute it. This is a long-term project, though.
Remember that well-done autogen can overcome most of the issues of flat forests etc, but this is a lot more effective in FSX than FS2004. If I did put together a NZ-wide photo scenery, though, I suspect that by then FS2004 would be a distant memory:)

The alternative is to do exactly what VOZ started out doing -- create a specific NZ texture set. This would be a big project, but would be well worth the work.

[greaneyr]

QUOTE (toprob @ Jan 25 2008, 06:00 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

The alternative is to do exactly what VOZ started out doing -- create a specific NZ texture set. This would be a big project, but would be well worth the work.

Would this benefit both FSX and FS9 users? Also, will it override the default textures, or can users install it 'as well as' ?

[toprob]

QUOTE (greaneyr @ Jan 25 2008, 06:07 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Would this benefit both FSX and FS9 users? Also, will it override the default textures, or can users install it 'as well as' ?

The difference is the resolution -- FS2004 texture resolution is fixed, FSX is not, so you would ideally want two different texture sets, derived from the same high-quality imagery. However it is only really going to be effective with a quality landclass as well.
This type of scenery normally overwrites the default, if you know how VOZ works then you know how it would work here -- instead of just overwriting the files, VOZ uses a utility to back up the default textures, install the new textures, and you can reverse this at will. Hence the expressions 'to VOZ' and 'to unVOZ'.

[Timmo]

My thoughts would be a mixture of both. If you've been following the Land Class stuff ive been trying to do for the last little bit, this will make NZ look a lot more realistic (in the short term) by updating the landclass to the same accuracy as the rest of the FSX default data (i.e. 1:50 000). This uses vector polygons to define the boundaries of different land types so everything that is larger than the minimum mappable unit (MMU) should be visible (a 1:50 000 dataset relates to around a MMU of 1 Ha). There is a slight draw back that a) the boundaries arent 'blended' between landclass types (as is done with the less accurate default raster based land class) and b) there is no way to disable the inference of landcover dependent on slope (i.e. on a steep slope on farm land, FSX will place bush to overcome the shortcomings of the default landclass). Of course with very accurate polygon based landclass, if there isnt bush defined in the landclass then we dont want it....because it likely isnt there in the real world.

Im hoping that these replacement files should at least 'buy us some time' before we move onto replacing the actual textures....because that is a big project in itself. I just have to re-establish a contact at the Ministry for the Environment to get final sign off as the guy I was liasing with left MfE at the end of last year

[greaneyr]

QUOTE (Timmo @ Jan 25 2008, 11:37 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

My thoughts would be a mixture of both. If you've been following the Land Class stuff ive been trying to do for the last little bit, this will make NZ look a lot more realistic (in the short term) by updating the landclass to the same accuracy as the rest of the FSX default data (i.e. 1:50 000). This uses vector polygons to define the boundaries of different land types so everything that is larger than the minimum mappable unit (MMU) should be visible (a 1:50 000 dataset relates to around a MMU of 1 Ha). There is a slight draw back that a) the boundaries arent 'blended' between landclass types (as is done with the less accurate default raster based land class) and b) there is no way to disable the inference of landcover dependent on slope (i.e. on a steep slope on farm land, FSX will place bush to overcome the shortcomings of the default landclass). Of course with very accurate polygon based landclass, if there isnt bush defined in the landclass then we dont want it....because it likely isnt there in the real world.

Im hoping that these replacement files should at least 'buy us some time' before we move onto replacing the actual textures....because that is a big project in itself. I just have to re-establish a contact at the Ministry for the Environment to get final sign off as the guy I was liasing with left MfE at the end of last year

Sorry, I actually meant to mention your amazing Landclass updates in my original post. I think stuff like that is actually a better solution that 'photoreal'.

[Timmo]

hmm re-reading my post this bit: "If you've been following the Land Class stuff ive been trying to do for the last little bit" could come across as being slight snarky/sarcastic haha- sorry about that, that wasnt the intention.

I think actual photoreal areas will always be the 'best' but of course to cover the whole country wouldnt be practible at this stage. Replacement landclass files and textures would at least provide a better base onto which photoreal areas could be placed around areas of interest...at the moment, placing an aerial photo texture on the default terrain (Desert!) looks a bit naff....ideally the transition between photoreal and landclass based ground should be very hard to spot unless you are familiar with the area

[greaneyr]

I used to be a big fan of photoreal, but lately I've noticed I'm not so keen on it. To me, photoreal is like scanning a page of text then saving the image as a jpeg, rather than applying OCR software and saving the resulting text. The problem with photoreal is that it's non-negotiable once it's down. You're stuck with whatever shadows and textures were visible at the time. If you build it up using individual components, then the sim can render it however it sees fit for the particular environmental conditions at the time.

[Christian]

My take on this is that we should try to get a photoreal background for airports from google earth. We should get away with artistic reuse since the area is small and modified (ie get the colours better, remove shadows etc). Doing big photoreal areas is probably more the scope of payware (although there are some freeware efforts).

Once I start work on Roads & Rivers for FSX I'm doing something similar to Timmo, only using the recent 1:50,000 mapping, not the old landcover set. I had a play with this ages ago (before Timmo started his project) and I have to say the first results were awesome. I wish there were more hours in the day so I could continue this. I've also started to create a replacement texture set. Nothing unique, basically just some recolours of the defaults like the freeware VOZ. Once I have my shop up and running well, I'll put finishing touches on and distribute that as freeware, could be easily made part of this project.

Doing a texture set like FTX is a massive project, I hope Orbx is going to do NZ this year.

Cheers,
Christian