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Hi,
Over the last days I have been exploring the usage of the increased photo resolution on the mesh terrain and I would like to share my results with you.
Let me start with the source images I used. I am lucky to have access to some high resolution images (16 cm resolution) of the area around Schiphol airport in the Netherlands. So I used these as a test. I have them in the ECW format, so my first was to convert them to GeoTIFF images. As they are also in the Dutch RD coordinate system, I reprojected them to WGS84 as well when I created the GeoTIFF images. To do all this I used some of the tools of the GDAL library.
Why did I choose the GeoTIFF format? Mainly because it makes placing the images in FS a lot easier afterwards. The GeoTIFF format stores the location of your image in the file as well, so you don't have to tell resample about it anymore. You will see that it makes the INF file a lot simpler.
As my images have a quite high resolution (after the resampling to WGS84 around 20 cm per pixel) and it covers a resonable area as well (about 8x15 km), I had a huge amount of data in the end. So much data that it did not fit in one GeoTIFF file, so I split it into 6 parts. In total about 15 GB of data.
In the INF file for FS you can use multiple sources, so I added all my GeoTIFF files there and let resample do the magic of merging them all. After reprojection of the images, they had a small black border around them (due to the rotation that occured during the reprojection). By setting the null value in the INF file to black, resample nicely took away these pixels and my images joined very well.
My first go to convert this INF file was not a huge success. After around 8 hours of compilation I had my BGL file. But it was almost 6 GB in size and that is too big for FS to load. If you BGL file is above 2 GB in size it will simply not show in FS. So I had to do another compilation and this time I included the option to split the BGL file automaticall in different files based on the LOD grid. I used the LOD11 in this case to keep the file sizes under 2 GB.
So after another 8 hours of compilation I now had a collection of BGL files and they show very well in FS. I must say that I am very happy with how it looks in FS, the textures really show a lot of details (especially if you compare it with the Fs2004 resolution) and that makes the scenery look a lot better. I have attached some screenshots of the result (the JPG compression reduced the quality a little bit) and also the INF file I used as a reference.
On my PC, which is quite new, I also did not see a big reduction in performance from loading this huge amount of data. But when you are flying fast, I don't think the highest resolution is rendered fast enough, so such high resolutions are probably only useful at airports and for VFR flight locations.
As you might have seen on the screenshots (if you have already looked at them
), I have also tried to tweak the XML scenery of the airport so that the taxiways do not show. I changed their type from TAXI to PATH and that only shows the center and edge lines, but not the concrete/asphalt of the taxiway itself. I still have to explore this idea a bit more, but this might give a nice solution to the problem that a lot of sceneries have with their Fs2002 style high resolution ground polygons and the curvation of the earth. It is still a bit to early to give a real conclusion on this, as I still want to do some more testing. But I think if you clean the aerial photo so that it no longer contains markings, aircraft and other details this could lead to very nice results with the sharp markings from the XML on top. My main worries are that the XML markings might not be flexible enough to make really realistic patterns and also not flexible enough to make red clearance lines for example. But I need to explore that a little more to be sure about that. So to be continued...
Over the last days I have been exploring the usage of the increased photo resolution on the mesh terrain and I would like to share my results with you.
Let me start with the source images I used. I am lucky to have access to some high resolution images (16 cm resolution) of the area around Schiphol airport in the Netherlands. So I used these as a test. I have them in the ECW format, so my first was to convert them to GeoTIFF images. As they are also in the Dutch RD coordinate system, I reprojected them to WGS84 as well when I created the GeoTIFF images. To do all this I used some of the tools of the GDAL library.
Why did I choose the GeoTIFF format? Mainly because it makes placing the images in FS a lot easier afterwards. The GeoTIFF format stores the location of your image in the file as well, so you don't have to tell resample about it anymore. You will see that it makes the INF file a lot simpler.
As my images have a quite high resolution (after the resampling to WGS84 around 20 cm per pixel) and it covers a resonable area as well (about 8x15 km), I had a huge amount of data in the end. So much data that it did not fit in one GeoTIFF file, so I split it into 6 parts. In total about 15 GB of data.
In the INF file for FS you can use multiple sources, so I added all my GeoTIFF files there and let resample do the magic of merging them all. After reprojection of the images, they had a small black border around them (due to the rotation that occured during the reprojection). By setting the null value in the INF file to black, resample nicely took away these pixels and my images joined very well.
Code:
NullValue = 0, 0, 0My first go to convert this INF file was not a huge success. After around 8 hours of compilation I had my BGL file. But it was almost 6 GB in size and that is too big for FS to load. If you BGL file is above 2 GB in size it will simply not show in FS. So I had to do another compilation and this time I included the option to split the BGL file automaticall in different files based on the LOD grid. I used the LOD11 in this case to keep the file sizes under 2 GB.
Code:
SplitFileLOD = 11So after another 8 hours of compilation I now had a collection of BGL files and they show very well in FS. I must say that I am very happy with how it looks in FS, the textures really show a lot of details (especially if you compare it with the Fs2004 resolution) and that makes the scenery look a lot better. I have attached some screenshots of the result (the JPG compression reduced the quality a little bit) and also the INF file I used as a reference.
On my PC, which is quite new, I also did not see a big reduction in performance from loading this huge amount of data. But when you are flying fast, I don't think the highest resolution is rendered fast enough, so such high resolutions are probably only useful at airports and for VFR flight locations.
As you might have seen on the screenshots (if you have already looked at them
), I have also tried to tweak the XML scenery of the airport so that the taxiways do not show. I changed their type from TAXI to PATH and that only shows the center and edge lines, but not the concrete/asphalt of the taxiway itself. I still have to explore this idea a bit more, but this might give a nice solution to the problem that a lot of sceneries have with their Fs2002 style high resolution ground polygons and the curvation of the earth. It is still a bit to early to give a real conclusion on this, as I still want to do some more testing. But I think if you clean the aerial photo so that it no longer contains markings, aircraft and other details this could lead to very nice results with the sharp markings from the XML on top. My main worries are that the XML markings might not be flexible enough to make really realistic patterns and also not flexible enough to make red clearance lines for example. But I need to explore that a little more to be sure about that. So to be continued...
