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FSXA Optimal design strategy

bina

bina

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217
Country
azerbaijan
Hello,

I'm planning to make an airport which you can see on the attached image. It's located on an island. The image resolution is not bad but not the best one would expect. Therefore, before I start I would like to know what is the optimal strategy and workflow considering these factors:

# Shall I make it fully photoreal?
The island itself is not big but since I would like to include the neighbouring city also, the covered area is a bit more than 100 sq.km. The resampled BGL file (with water mask and color matching applied only) made from 14Kx12K px size image makes approx. 60 megabytes. The bitmap taken with SBuilderX is >600Mb. Not sure about the BGL size when I add ground polygons though.

# Looking at the image, is it possible/less troublesome to make the airport area photoreal (ground polygons) but work out the island and the adjacent city using SBuilderX capabilities including road vectors, landclass, ponds, autogen etc.?

# Are these questions enough for a start?! :)

Thank you!
 

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TL;DR: It all depends on your time/level of patience and the capabilities of your hardware (especially RAM).

I have made sceneries at 1.2m/px covering approximately 750 sq/km using images that I combined and cleaned up in Photoshop. The resulting file size was over 22K x 25k pixels and 1.55GB in size. Closer to the airport, I have dealt with 28,000 pixel wide images at a zoom level of 0.5m/px. As you can see working with these file sizes is limited by your RAM, and I often used almost all of my 12GB.
If your RAM is the limitation, you can always chose to split the terrain into more manageable sizes before running them through resample and have them overlap a bit.
Also creating water masks and blend masks for these wide areas can also be slow depending on the method that you use and the accuracy you require, due to the large number of pixels on display.
If your RAM is not a limitation but your time/patience is, you can always use vector scenery to recreate simple terrain, but I always prefer photoreal as the result is nicer.
The upside of vector scenery is that you do not have to recreate the autogen yourself. Creating convincingly placed autogen can be even more time consuming than creating photoscenery in the first place.

 
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