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Massive water class creation

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us-missouri
I am creating nationwide vector data for United States waterbodies from USGS NHD Plus data, and I'd love to find out what the most efficient way of importing all this data into flight simulator (FSX/P3D) and assigning appropriate water class definitions would be.

So far, I have stripped out shapefiles and imported them into SBuilderX and appended as Legacy_LWM_Water_NoFlatten. While there are no shorelines (I had to exclude the stock streams and shorelines), these water polygons fit nicely with the 1/3-arc-second data I've imported into the sim. Since the coverage area I am working with covers the Mississippi River between the Missouri and Ohio confluences, I would like to change the big river polygons to deep inland brown and minor waterbodies to shallow inland brown. Is there an efficient way to do this, such as a class map? I'm trying to save a billion or so clicks of the water class tool if at all possible because the stock blue is gorgeous but doesn't look right at all.
 

arno

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Hi,

You might want to check my scenproc tool. It can create terrain vectors as well. And can be scripted to process the data in a specific way. So, if your input data has some attributes to identify the different types of water you can create the output easily.
 
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I was debating this morning whether or not to try ScenProc. I did watch one of your videos earlier and it does seem like there are a lot of things I can do with your great program. Most of what I am making will be freeware to share with the flight sim community, but do I need a different license if I ever get into the payware side?

Thanks, Arno!
 

arno

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Hi,

Everything that is available for free in scenproc can be used for freeware and payware products. No special license is needed for that.
 
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Well I see a support page on your website, so I'll definitely be making a donation if this works for what I am trying to accomplish!
 
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us-illinois
Hi Chris:

IIRC, since the discussion on working with water bodies started by Thorsten Reichert (aka "Horst" in some older posts at FS websites) which I previously cited in one of your other threads on this subject matter , AFAIK, Arno has developed a way to process water body polygons so that where streams and rivers meet lakes and oceans, the polygon can be created / merged, and shorelines properly follow the outline of the final merged water bodies. :wizard:

I cannot recall, however, if Arno had also developed a way to convert Poly-lines to Polygons so ex: Stream source data could be changed into polygons of defined widths with- or without- ...tapering of such resulting polygons.

Sorry I did not have time to find the (several ?) posts where Arno addressed this task using *.SHP files with a combination of GIS software and ScenProc. ;)

GaryGB
 
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I always read all of your files and linked pages/discussions you are kind enough to take the time to write. If they don't make sense at the time, I go back and re-read them once I know more and can understand them. That's the beauty of working through so many different projects at once: when I get stumped on one, move to another -- that I was stumped on before). Chances are I learned something since the last time I got stuck that now makes sense and I can constantly be moving forward.

So now I can re-read all the ScenProc entries in my searches and see what I can come up with.

Thanks as always!
 

arno

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The main challenge that I see with making water polygons for the sim, is that they require an elevation value as well. So somehow you need to know the elevation to set for the different lakes and rivers.
 
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Hi Chris:

AFAIK, QGIS is likely able to apply elevation as a Altitude "Z" field into a X,Y (Lat,Lon) *.SHP Poly-line data set for ex: Streams. ;)

Conceptually one uses USGS 10-Meter elevation data to merge vertex point elevation into Poly-line vector point records.

The QGIS output should then be a X,Y,Z data set with Lat,Lon,Alt fields for each vertex point record in each Poly-line.


I am familiar with this feature option in Global Mapper; perhaps some QGIS links might shed some light on this: :scratchch



PS:

FYI: I found this tutorial on QGIS: "Tutorial : How to use QGIS for Hydrology" :teacher:

https://www.engenious.com/Content/Tutorial.pdf


Of particular interest was this section: "How to get Elevations at Nodes From DEM"

...using the QGIS "Point Sampling Tool Plugin"


Also, I found this tutorial:

"QGIS Extract Ground Elevation"



This info may prove useful for roads and other vector objects, as well as in your work with water bodies here: :idea:



GaryGB

GaryGB
 
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arno

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In scenProc I have also added feature that it can sample raster data to get the elevation value for the water polygons. But that has not been tested a lot yet.
 
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