MSFS MSFS Toolkit by Nool Aerosystems

[SprightlyOldMan]

Hi Paavo, like Airtrooper, I know that this tool isn't designed for creating elevations for large areas.
However, I would like to ask you if you have an explanation for my problem, which appears ONLY in some parts of the sea, at the end of the area containing DEM data.
I used this command line:

msfs.bat elev -imagery "D:\tmp\GIS\Canary\WGS84\LaGomeraMare.tif" -border "D:\tmp\GIS\Canary\WGS84\LaGomera.kml" -exclude "D:\tmp\GIS\Canary\WGS84\AeroLaGomera.kml" -fillnodata -dump "D:\tmp\GIS\Canary\WGS84\AeroLaGomera.shp" -res 2 "D:\tmp\GIS\msfs-toolkit\CanaryDEM2M\PackageSources\scene\LaGomera.xml"

Let me explain better with these images.
This is the island "La Gomera", one of the Canary Islands:

You can see the grid obtained by the DUMP function of the tool
And here's what appears in the simulator:

The anomaly is that these "poppings" appear (and disappear as you approach) only in some places, not all around the island.
The same problem also occurs in other islands, for example in Sicily.
I think they are the same artifacts that Kenny Chen reported with v0.40 release

What could it be causing?
Do you have any tips to eliminate these defects?


Update 9/19/2021:
From further tests I realized that artifacts are not caused by the tool, but by MSFS engine: it shows up clearly on large surfaces.
However, I managed to get a good result by setting -falloff parameter to 200



Thanks for your great tool !!!

Chris

 

[piotrkol]

Great tool! Made some aerials with ease today - wow

Question from me - anyone has any tips for a workflow with editing tiffs in PS? I managed to figure out how to extract the geodata to a .wld file through QGIS but I'm kinda stuck on putting the geodata back into the edited .tif

Cheers!

 

[M_LORD]

Great tool! Made some aerials with ease today - wow

Question from me - anyone has any tips for a workflow with editing tiffs in PS? I managed to figure out how to extract the geodata to a .wld file through QGIS but I'm kinda stuck on putting the geodata back into the edited .tif

Cheers!

import edited tiff into qgis and export again with georeference to geotiff

 

[TheJon182]

Maybe this is a very simple question but im strugling with this.

In the tutorial from your webiste you recomend going to https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/ in order to get the imagery but since the airport im working for is located in Europe, i don't know how to create that imagery tiles from Google Earth for example.

 

[GaryGB]

Maybe this is a very simple question but im strugling with this.

In the tutorial from your webiste you recomend going to https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/ in order to get the imagery but since the airport im working for is located in Europe, i don't know how to create that imagery tiles from Google Earth for example.

In which country is the airport or other scenery area that you are working on ?

There are in most (but not all) European counties, a governmental GIS online free data access portal for imagery and/or elevation data.

GaryGB

 

[TheJon182]

In which country is the airport or other scenery area that you are working on ?

There are in most (but not all) European counties, a governmental GIS online free data access portal for imagery and/or elevation data.

GaryGB

Spain

 

[GaryGB]

Spain

You're in luck, then, as Spain has a well-developed GIS portal with detailed data available:

Centro de Descargas del CNIG (IGN)

En el Centro de Descargas del CNIG puede descargarse gratuitamente la información geográfica digital producida por el IGN

centrodedescargas.cnig.es

GaryGB

 

[TheJon182]

thank you a lot!

 

[TheJon182]

You're in luck, then, as Spain has a well-developed GIS portal with detailed data available:

Centro de Descargas del CNIG (IGN)

En el Centro de Descargas del CNIG puede descargarse gratuitamente la información geográfica digital producida por el IGN

centrodedescargas.cnig.es

GaryGB

That page seems to be more complete but these are the file formats that i get:

From the US webpage listed in the Toolkit webapge tutorial, you are getting the TIF format, so the line you have to write to Cut imagery into tiles is: msfs aerial -border "Source\purdue.kml" -imagery "Source\*.tif" -res 0.5 "PackageSources\aerial\tiles"

Since i am gettin the format .ecw, it would work to just write: msfs aerial -border "Source\purdue.kml" -imagery "Source\*.ewc" -res 0.5 "PackageSources\aerial\tiles"

Or i have to convert .ecw to .tif in someway?

UPDATE 1:

Not working with .ECW

Any help?

UPDATE 2:

Solved converting to TIF

 

[piotrkol]

@M_LORD - nice, that works! Dzięki

Anyone been doing any aerials since yesterdays WU5? I created one yesterday evening like usual but it crashes the sim while loading the flight when spawning at the airport.
I tried spawning at a nearby airport and managed to get flying but the sim crashed as soon as I flew into the aerial covered region.

- Tried to change the border, made it a bit smaller, and redone the tiles and package but no results.
- After removing the aerial package the sim works fine
- it's a 1,48gb package with about 6800 tiles.
- Looks good in the create a flight world globe thingy
- While flying it looked nice from far away but crashed as soon as I flew into the area.
- Updated the SDK
- SDK package tool returns no errors while creating a package


>>> EDIT.

Well I sort off figured it out - I made a much smaller aerial (1500 tiles at 640mb) and it works with no problems. Is there a limit to how big the cgl file can be?

 

[TheJon182]

Fast question:

In the toolkit you give an option to modify image tiles with code using ImageMagick, thats awesome, but i would like to monitor the changes im doing to the image, so i would like to use Photoshop to do that.

Im familiar with the Batch processing in Photoshop in order to apply same changes to all tiles but the question is: I'm going to lose any metadata modifyng the aeriales already tiled with yout toolkit so this method is not gonna work? Or these .png tiles doesn't save any metadata already.

 

[mrbump]

Hi, I just tried out the aerial creation for the first time. Works great, but I see JPEG artefacts in the created PNGs. As the processing downsamples from very high quality Tif to Png I wonder if you use JPG as an intermediate format somewhere (after the downsampling step)?

 

[MikeB54]

Trying this for the first time today but I am running into an issue that left me scratching my head.

I'm experimenting with elevation files. I run the command: msfs elev "C:\Users\Mike\Documents\KCLT\source\USGS_13_n36w081.tif" -border "C:\Users\Mike\Documents\KCLT\source\KCLT.kml" -airport "C:\Users\Mike\Documents\KCLT\mkb-airport-charlotte-douglas.xml" -res 10 "C:\Users\Mike\Documents\KCLT\PackageSources\elevation\KCLT_elev.xml"

It is returning the message in red: ERROR argument dest: XML name must end with '.xml'

Ideas as to what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks

 

[TheJon182]

Good afternoon, Im getting this error message while trying to use de elev function. Any ideas whats going wrong?

- My elevation data is a .TIF file converted from .ASC (that was the native format of the data, i just converted to .TIF in order to follow the tutorial`s workflow) ( i used QGis for the conversion)
- I created the .shp file with Qgis, i also got .cpg, .dbf, .prg and .shx when i draw and saved the polygon used Qgis.

EDIT:

I keep trying to get this work. I have changed the EPSG format in te conversion from .asc to .tif. now using EPSG 4326. and im using the code -epsg. Noew getting this error:

I think the problem could be the evelation data file I'm using, you can check it here:

This is the native Data Elevation File (.asc) format:

PNOA_MDT05_ETRS89_HU29_0854_LID.asc

drive.google.com

This is the conversion into .tif with same native epsg format:

LEOA_Elevation5.tif

drive.google.com

This is the conversion in to .tif changing the epsg to EPSG 4326:

LEOA_Elevation5Mod.tif

drive.google.com

None of these files are working.

Thanks for read.

 

[astaticmusic]

i am still trying to set this up but when i try to build the project folder i am only getting this, can anyone help?

i also have this ... but its not letting me enter anything...

thanks for any help here!

 

[astaticmusic]

in the instructions it doesnt say what to name the path....or does that matter? i tried naming it msfs or msfs tools

 

[astaticmusic]

im having problems . is this the correct place to -or how - to set this up?

 

[mrbump]

In the powershell you must precede your command with .\ if you're trying to run it in from the current directory.

.\msfs [tool] [options]

In the old style console you can just type

msfs [tool] [options]

But what you probably really want is to have the tool somewhere in a directory and run it from within the directory where your source data lies - then you don't have to prepend the whole path for your input files:

within
c:\mysourcedata>
you type
c:\noolpath\msfs [tool] [options]

In order to run it repeatedly or try different settings you could add your command into a batch file. I have one that looks like this:

set noolpath=c:\Nool
call %noolpath%\msfs elev -imagery swissalti3d*.tif -border LSGY_hm_boundary.kml -res 3.0 -epsg 2056 hm.xml
pause

A batch file is a text file with the extension ".bat"

Edit: this way makes it unnecessary to add anything to the path variable. Safer for you if you don't know what you're doing.

 

[astaticmusic]

In the powershell you must precede your command with .\ if you're trying to run it in from the current directory.

.\msfs [tool] [options]

In the old style console you can just type

msfs [tool] [options]

But what you probably really want is to have the tool somewhere in a directory and run it from within the directory where your source data lies - then you don't have to prepend the whole path for your input files:

within
c:\mysourcedata>
you type
c:\noolpath\msfs [tool] [options]

In order to run it repeatedly or try different settings you could add your command into a batch file. I have one that looks like this:

set noolpath=c:\Nool
call %noolpath%\msfs elev -imagery swissalti3d*.tif -border LSGY_hm_boundary.kml -res 3.0 -epsg 2056 hm.xml
pause

A batch file is a text file with the extension ".bat"

Edit: this way makes it unnecessary to add anything to the path variable. Safer for you if you don't know what you're doing.

the problem starts with - I cant get the PowerShell to accept the text the tutorial says to enter! ??

 

[mrbump]

as I said: start with dot backslash to indicate you want to run the tool from the current directory:

.\msfs ....

or alternatively enter the whole path to the tool

c:\nool\msfs ...