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MSFS MSFS Toolkit by Nool Aerosystems

Messages
4
Country
us-ohio
So I'm using the elev tool to import a heightmap from http://gis3.oit.ohio.gov/geodatadownload/osip.aspx for I69, but when I do this with the ESRI GRID DEM Mosaic in the form of .adf files, this happens:
1627515026585.png

It's like it's scaled incorrectly, like the elevation is in feet and it expects meters or vv. Is there any way of correcting this or manually specifying height scale or whatever?
 
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Messages
4
Country
us-ohio
I added scaling. Replace your current msfs_elev.py with the latest one from https://github.com/noolaero/msfs-toolkit and add -scale 0.3048 argument. This will scale units from feet to meters.
Thanks for the quick reply. That seems to have fixed it somewhat, but it's still a bit too high:
1627522143344.png

and the runway is sunken into the ground (which means it may be at the correct height):
1627522324234.png

Thanks for the help anyway. I was just at this airport the other day and the elevation of the taxiways and the sloped runway are not accurately depicted in the sim at all.
 

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Paavo

Resource contributor
Messages
192
Country
estonia
Please send me the DEM file, I am unable to download it directly (connection times out).
 

Rotornut44

Resource contributor
Messages
635
Country
us-florida
I've been transitioning my workflow over to using these scripts today, but I'm running into an issue with transparencies for aerial imagery. I'm feeding the aerial script a GeoTiff that I added a mask to in Gimp for blending. The Tiff displays just fine when I open it, but when the tiles are created, all transparency is removed.

Any ideas? Is this a known issue, or could it be something stupid like forgetting to convert the mask to an alpha before export (even though I thought this would be done automatically)?
 

Paavo

Resource contributor
Messages
192
Country
estonia
Existing transparency is ignored. Instead a new transparency channel is created based on shapes given with -border <file> and blending radius given with -blend <m>.
This means you don't need to manually mask aerial imagery. Just draw appropriate polys.
 

Rotornut44

Resource contributor
Messages
635
Country
us-florida
Existing transparency is ignored. Instead a new transparency channel is created based on shapes given with -border <file> and blending radius given with -blend <m>.
This means you don't need to manually mask aerial imagery. Just draw appropriate polys.
Would it be a possibility to add backwards compatibility for this so that you could do either method? Or has this been supported already in a version prior to adding the kml method? Using the kml is a great idea for simplicity, but in many cases, I end up creating a fairly complex blendmask that just wont translate over with the same results. In order to reduce file size as much as possible, I will typically remove areas of imagery that will not be seen.
 

Paavo

Resource contributor
Messages
192
Country
estonia
Manually applied blending has never been supported.
Tiles outside your export area or inside and with no visible pixels are automatically skipped over and not written to output folder. You end up with only the PNGs your project actually uses.

I may be able to fairly easily add support for pre-existing transparency, but I need to test it before I can say anything firm.
 
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Rotornut44

Resource contributor
Messages
635
Country
us-florida
Manually applied blending has never been supported.
Tiles outside your export area or inside and with no visible pixels are automatically skipped over and not written to output folder. You end up with only the PNGs your project actually uses.

I may be able to fairly easily add support for pre-existing transparency, but I need to test it before I can say anything firm.
If you can make that work, that would be great! I doubt I'm the only one that uses this method to get rid of some unneeded bulk. The previous aerial I did, I was able to shave ~30% off of the CGL size by doing that. Depending on the coverage area, that's a lot of savings to pass up (At least, when you worry about file size). ;)

Another question for you, this time pertaining to the elevation tool. I'm getting a runtime error when I run the command snippet for my project. Everything seems to be in order based on your written tutorial. The DEM GeoTiff is Mercator WGS84, but from the sound of it, this shouldn't matter. Another thing I thought of is that the scenery contains 2 airports in close proximity, in the same file. However, thinking it may be something to do with the runways, I enabled -nodefo, but I still get the error. So, something's not liking something. Whether it's the script or the data..

Thanks!

Code:
msfs elev -imagery "S:\flightsim\scenery\MSFS\freeware\PATK-Talkeetna-v2\Data\DEM\*.tif" -border "S:\flightsim\scenery\MSFS\freeware\PATK-Talkeetna-v2\Data\DEM\patk_3m_dem.shp" -airport "S:\flightsim\scenery\MSFS\freeware\PATK-Talkeetna-v2\Package\PackageSources\data\PATK.xml" -res 3 -falloff 300 -nodefo "S:\flightsim\scenery\MSFS\freeware\PATK-Talkeetna-v2\Package\PackageSources\data\PATK.xml"

dem_error.PNG
 

Paavo

Resource contributor
Messages
192
Country
estonia
Reproject your source files to EPSG 3857 (Web-Mercator or Pseudo-Mercator) or 4326 (WGS84) in QGIS, Global Mapper or any other common mapping tool.
It looks like the current projection information in your source files is invalid. Also make sure that "patk_3m_dem.shp" has a valid projection info (in *.prj), or just save it to KML format and use that instead.

Manually applied blending will not make any difference in file sizes. The aerial tool only produces tiles that fall within your export area (border polys). For example, I have hundreds of gigabytes of aerial imagery sitting in a network storage server, I input polys covering the few small airports that I am interested in, and the aerial tool creates only those PNGs that are within the given polys and have visible pixels (that is, are not fully transparent).

The only benefit you'd gain is better control over blending. Currently it is uniform (by default 30 m), manual masking would let you to have non-uniform blending, sharper in some places, smoother in others.
 
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Rotornut44

Resource contributor
Messages
635
Country
us-florida
I did not initially export a .prj alongside my Shapefile. Everything works correctly after generating one. Thanks!
 
Messages
11
Country
france
Thank you for your project, it helps me a lot because i had issue with sim default elevation on my project (PALH), conficting (because too close to PANC.
have found Alaska DEM for the entire area (PANC+PALH) and now everything is fine. Thank again !
 

Paavo

Resource contributor
Messages
192
Country
estonia
Thank you!

v0.52 is out:

It switches to the new version of OSGeo4W tools and needs to re-download them. To speed up downloads, we've set up our own mirror server that cuts OSGeo4W install time from 25 minutes down to 3 minutes.
 
Messages
16
Country
denmark
Thank you!

v0.52 is out:

It switches to the new version of OSGeo4W tools and needs to re-download them. To speed up downloads, we've set up our own mirror server that cuts OSGeo4W install time from 25 minutes down to 3 minutes.

Hello Paavo,

Thank you for the update. While v0.51 works fine and without any errors, v0.52 is unusable, there are a bunch of error messages that appear and it tells me that GDAL cannot be found.

I'm not sure what might be causing this, I've tried to troubleshoot this, and yet these error messages persist.

Best regards,

Anna
 
Messages
214
Country
unitedkingdom
I appreciate this tool isn't designed for creating bespoke elevations for large areas, but I'd like to give it a try anyway. Because of so-called "LOD popping" I've like to create multiple LOD for my elevations, based on DEM I've down-sampled the way I like (e.g. preserving ridge lines and valley bottoms) in 3rd party software. I see I can re-run the tool with different output resolutions, but is there anything else which needs to be modified (e.g. XML, file structure etc) to enable such a multi-LOD approach please? Any advice is welcome
 
Messages
11
Country
norway
Hi, @Paavo - i took the opportunity to report an issue related to heightmap lines in the xml being too long. Seems to be an issue related to the latest SDK (0.14) as I have not seen it before. Issue is reported on github.

Thanks for updating the tool often with new features!
 
Messages
64
Country
italy
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:
Code:
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:

LaGomera.png


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

2021-08-28 17_39_13-Greenshot.png


2021-08-28 17_40_13-Greenshot.png


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
 
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