Utah Statewide Photoscenery

[=Hollywood=]

Finally completed Phase 1 of 1m photoscenery for Utah...

There's a slideshow available at this link (http://www.fsdreamscapes.com/graphics/vfrutah/utahflightlg.html)...

There were too many pics to post in a thread so I made a slideshow with 400+ shots showing a flight from NW Utah to SE Utah...

Several years research and development and one year of solid work in direct development, as of today I completed the statewide coverage, sans water mapping, night lighting or autogen which are next on the to do list, along with final color correction that will be better quality and get rid of the emerald/mint greens and turn them back into more natural colors...

Thanks to everyone here, especially Arno, Holger, Timmo, and anyone else I've forgotten at 5:34am in the morning before heading to sleep... Without your help from time to time, without your inspiration, thinking outside of the box and pointers over the years this project never would have started...

Thanks guys!!! The rest of the USA will be on its way soon :-)

[Bob Keeshan]

Just curious, what's the impact on fps with this?

[xbuddy]

its simple with sbuilderx, but it could be not beautiful than yours :)

which images do you use, googleearth?

[=Hollywood=]

Photoscenery adds to an increase in FPS due to not having to draw and calculate lots of vector data and autogen, users actually report on all photoscenery add-ons that I've heard of to date an increase in FPS...

Source data was from State and Federal Government agencies and is public domain data...

Work involved 1 year of proprietary software development as well as about 10-15 stages of color correction...

[=Hollywood=]

Finally made up a QuicktimeVR screenshot, something I've been wanting to do for a long time :-)

http://www.fsdreamscapes.com/videos/testpano2.mov

[Timmo]

wow- Looks really good Dean!
How do you make the QR VR movies? Do you need the pro version or can you make them with free tools?

[=Hollywood=]

Hi Timmo,

I posted this over at flightsim's screenshot forum but will copy and paste here...

Hey guys, :) Ok let me find the info for you, as it's easy peasy to do, well mostly...

When i had to do up a 3600x3600 screenshot from FSX for a calendar someone brought this program to my attention...

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html

I used it to create a 100 screenshot composite image to generate the image master... Cropped it and now it's the on the May page of a geospatial calendar...

To generate the 360 degree panorama, i just went to 2d cockpit mode, turned off the panel and set zoom to 0.50... Took a screenshot in slew mode, rotated clockwise and took a picture at approx 45 degrees and repeated until the 360 was complete... I used autostitch above to make a cylindrical panorama and then cropped the edges to get rid of the distortion...

Next I saved that as a JPG and used:

Pano2QTVR from http://gardengnomesoftware.com/pano2qtvr_download.php

They have a demo mode that is sufficient for generating the QTVR file, and then under "project type" chose "cylindrical" and selected the input file (i.e. the stitched image from before that was created in autostitch...

Then on the "settings" tab I chose the image resolution 1024x768 (based upon your source image height really), and under the "viewing parameters" setting I set the "Start FOV" to 45 degrees... Click render and your QTVR is ready...

Just do a google search for QTVR embed code for embedding into a webpage if needed ;)

Pretty quick and easy though...

[Ron Waite]

Is this for FS9 or FSX?

[=Hollywood=]

FSX right now, but it will be ported to FS2004 as well...

[Ron Waite]

Oh good :) I will definitely be buying the FS2004 version, as an SLC-native, it's awesome to see a product like this coming out. This and James's KSLC scenery will definitely be an awesome combo. :)