1) Does it will need to be on a 3d model to be 2cm/pic on FSX? (if heard that photoreal can't be lower that 7cm)
2) can it be done With GIMP?
3) how does it work? wich tool to use? need to get some texture sample? (grass, asphalt, mud) or every texture are done manualli with simple colors?
4) does it cost FPS? (a friend told me that there are no FPS impact even with texture set max)
5) is it woth (trying) it, I mean that some areas in the world got poor imagery (ie. Wallis & Futuna) If I don this methode, it will only be airport area) not the whole scenery area)
Thanks in advance, and if you can tell me more, feel free
Greetings,
AScen
I
have done it as a matter of fact and I had some coaching from Russ White himself at the time while I was developing for Orbx.
1) Yes you will need to make a model, I used gmax, I started getting memory crashes when I reached about 70 textured tiles using my 1024px .psds in gmax so I had to make a set of tiny .psd "placeholders" specifically for use in the modeling program to avoid the crash. I had 30 cm imagery available and I had to resize that to 1462.857% to achieve 2 cm. It just took me 1 minute and 43 seconds to open the source file incidentally (1.4 Gb) and that's clocked at 4.4 Ghz and loading from an SSD. The source covers the ramp area only of a smallish GA airfield, it's 19,856 x 16,370px with a bazillion layers. You really need to grasp the sizes you'll need to be dealing with at 2cm before you start because once you get 1/4 of the way through synthesizing textures you've got so much into it a resolution change is not an option. I would recommend some test GPs at different resolutions, settle on the lowest one you think you can possibly live with, it'll look good when you get some buildings bedded in with some grass, etc.
2) I don't know, I'm sure it's possible, I had to limit mine to 1024 px textures to avoid the TML tweak which meant I had something like 140+ unique textures + seasonal variations and night. Photoshop has some batch processing functions that simplified things
a lot, I don't know if Gimp can do macro type things but that's what you need. Also you can use a batch file to process .psds directly with Imagetool so for me PS was the way to go.
3) What you need in 2015 is an RC drone with a good camera. I did it with whatever I could find at cgtextures.com but it was difficult because all the ground level photos of grass were actually
too high in resolution (or more correctly they simply didn't cover enough area). By the time you scaled them down to something that looked right at 2cm you had to tile it a million times to cover the area you needed to cover and then you'd end up with repetitive patterns throughout. You don't really need ground level photos taken by humans from 4 feet up, ideally you'd have dozens of photos from 50 feet up and covering 100 feet of ground that you could source all sorts of stuff from, a mud puddle, a patch of asphalt, tire tracks in dirt, etc. It wouldn't matter if the drone pics were from the actual airport so much, dirt, grass, and asphalt pics from a truck stop would suffice, mainly what you need is
a lot of asphalt and grass variation from a multitude of photos at your disposal, otherwise it's very hard to eliminate repetition.
4) I haven't noticed an FPS impact but the textures do need a couple seconds to load, sometimes you see black tiles even on adjacent photoreal while the GP textures are filling in, the sim seems to prioritize and photoreal and LC ground textures are always the first compromise, once the GP textures are loaded though it doesn't seem to hurt performance much on my setup anyway.
Honestly I think 2cm is overkill, I did part of my GP at 4 cm and you have to be sitting right on the border where the high and low resolutions join to even see the difference. Here you can see it, look at the bottom edge of the image right in the middle and you can see the line running vertically, 2cm on the right, 4cm on the left. The seam continues across the entire GP as shown by the red line, you'll notice by the time you move your eye to the opposite end of the concrete you can't see the difference because at that distance you're looking at lesser resolution mip maps anyway. The 4cm texture on the left requires 1/4 the work, pixels, modeled planes, and of course the VAS requirement will be significantly reduced. Image is straight from the sim, cropped but not resized or sharpened.
5) Of course it's worth trying, make a plane in gmax that covers about 70 feet on the ground in both directions (that would be about 2cm using a 1024px texture) and make a texture for it. See how it works out for you in the image manipulation program because the modeling program is pretty much insignificant, you'll spend 10 minutes making a GP that uses one 1024px texture and putting it in the sim, then you'll spend 4 hours trying to make that small spot of ground look right on your texture.
Have fun, you
will find it satisfying, not sure I can say
profitable though as it's an insane amount of work.
Jim
