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FSX Making mesh?

P

Pvjinflight

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32
Country
finland
Hello, now after getting comfortable with making photoreal sceneries I feel like learning mesh making. Basically what I want to do is a mesh for Malta.

What I have done so far: I went to http://www.gdem.aster.ersdac.or.jp/
and downloaded area which covered Malta and small part of Italy.

I got zip file Tiles_201205031852, which I extracted. Inside I have two folders,
ASTGTM2_N36E014 and ASTGTM2_N35E014 which both have two tiff files inside them, on another one named ASTGTM2_N35E014_dem and another named ASTGTM2_N35E014_num.

Now I have no idea what to do. I understood that I have to somehow use resample.exe in FSX SDK folder to create the bgl from these, but I dont know which tiff files exactly I need to place there. Also I understood that I have to make some kind of inf file, but not sure what exactly to put inside it..

Your help would be highly appreciated! I didn't manage to find any tutorials specialized on mesh making.
 
The quality of Aster are really terrible
This is an".inf" file ready to compile just place the name of the geotiff and look at the sdk (Terrain Configuration File) in The Resample Tool section to SampleType, NullValue, scale,FractionBits this are important value.

[Source]
Type= GeoTIFF
SourceDir = "."
SourceFile = "XXXX"
Layer= elevation
SamplingMethod = Majority

[Destination]
DestDir =
DestBaseFileName = "xxxx_Elevation"
DestFileType = BGL
CompressionQuality = 100
LOD = 13
FractionBits = 0
 
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Humm, how can I create geotiff, and from which file? Basically like said I got two tiff files inside that folder, and I have no idea what to do with them then.
 
You want to use the *_dem.tif files. Not sure if it's a standard convention to have both num and dem files, but it seems to apply to ASTER GDEM, at least. DEM stands for Digital Elevation Model.

The inf file that goes into Resample is really similar to one for orthoimagery, but with one important difference: layer should be Elevation instead of Imagery.

Here's an example:

Code: 
[Source] 
Type = GeoTIFF 
Layer = Elevation 
SourceDir = "." 
SourceFile = "example_dem.tif" 
NullValue = 0 

[Destination] 
DestDir = "." 
DestBaseFileName = "example_dem" 
DestFileType = BGL 
LOD = Auto 
FractionBits = 3

NullValue should help null out flat areas as to not waste space, and FractionBits will allow fractional elevations, helping prevent the stairstepping effect.

Also, if I recall correctly, you don't need to reproject the ASTER GDEM files because they're already WGS84 geographic.
 
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All is well explained above. One question have you problems with the Gdem aster data ? for me it have been of little useness, had a lot of missing data in his files.
 
Thank you very much for help, managed to do it and it seems to make terrain way more accurate than default at least.

One thing though, airport is now big higher from other terrain like on a plate, I know that this is the case with very many meshes. Is there any easy way to correct this?
 
Ok so far what I have done with airport elevation issue:

I changed airport altitude using Airport Design Editor to correct altitude, and runways & taxiways sunk there. However, terrain around them (and some over them too) is still at original altitude... What I did then was creating flatten polygon to that altitude using Sbuilder, however for some reason still about half of the runway is too high.

Any idea how to fix this issue?
 
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