Quality of photo-textures

[bpahe]

(Note: this message is also posted in the PTSim forum, hope that noone disagrees with that - more readers here, and the Q is not really SBuilder specific. Thanks)

Hi!

I´m fortunate enough to have my photographs that are to be used as textures, in 1m/pixel resolution. I´d love to be able to make such textures as those used in the FranceVFR-sceneries! However, both Resample, and the method used by SceneryBuilder lessens the resolution to 4.75 (?) m/pixel, and this results in a quite big loss of quality.
I´ve tried leaving the picture "hi-res", and also lessen the resolution myself, before exporting with SBuilder, but both methods give me rather "chunky", though different looking, textures. Are there any shortcuts that I don´t know of, or should I try to cut-and-drag my hi-res photo to fit on the tiles/bmps made by SBuilder?

/hans

 

[spotlope]

Hi Hans,

Unfortunately, FS will only accept custom terrain tiles in the 4.8m/px resolution. So if you have a much higher res image, as in your case, it will have to be resampled down to that resolution at some point during the creation process. I prefer to use Adobe Photoshop to get my images as close as possible to the right size before running resample.exe on them, and this might be your best bet as well. But even with this solution, you'll probably find that you have to run some sharpening filters on the images once downsized before they look good enough. And no amount of tweaking on a dramatically resized image will make it as good as the original, because so much information is thrown away during the resizing process.

I hope that helps.

thanks,
Bill Womack

 

[arno]

Bill is right here. If you want to use the higher resolution like the French scenery you need to place them in a different way, with normal polygons. But this also means you have to flatten the entire area. So this is only an option near your airport, otherwise you will loose the mesh altitude.

 

[bpahe]

Hi!

Thanks for both replys. Too bad that you cannot control the output resolution, even if it would have meant a drop in framerate it would have been nice to at least be able to define the resolution yourself, perhaps with 2 options - one 4.8 and one, say 2m/px for areas close to airports. But now I don´t have to scratch my head anymore.

Luis have also posted a reply regarding this in the PTsim.com forum, which is quite interesting. Just as stated above, you can use other methods to achieve a higher resolution. The 2 sceneries that I have in mind right now are indeed flat, so I´ll give the textured polygon a try. These are not very large areas, so even if there are small height differencies in real life (we´re talking max 5 meters), I guess users can live with the area being flat. I´ll post more info after trying this out, should it succeed.

/hans

 

[arno]

Hi Hans,

Luis have also posted a reply regarding this in the PTsim.com forum, which is quite interesting. Just as stated above, you can use other methods to achieve a higher resolution. The 2 sceneries that I have in mind right now are indeed flat, so I´ll give the textured polygon a try. These are not very large areas, so even if there are small height differencies in real life (we´re talking max 5 meters), I guess users can live with the area being flat. I´ll post more info after trying this out, should it succeed.

As long as the area is small it is no problem indeed (unless you are working on a hilly area). There is one thing you should remember, when you place your photos with normal polygons (for example a simple SCASM grid) you can no longer design your airport with AFCAD, as the AFD scenery elements are always drawn before the 3D elements. The code you use to place your photos is thus drawn after the AFCAD airport and will bury it. But if you are using a tool like FSSC or Airport for your airport this is no problem of course.

It would indeed be nice if the resolution could be increase to 2.4 meters or so, but that also means that the amount of memory needed for the textures increases by 4. So I can image that that can become a problem (photoreal scenery already uses a lot of textures now).

For our Dutch scenery we are also experimenting with photos. We have tried to place them at 1 meter resolution and that works fine (only flattening the entire country gives too much trouble), but the performance is still rather good. Only when you turn too fast or change fews it happens that some of the textures are not yet loaded.

For Schiphol I also made a test scenery with even higher resolution textures (around 16 cm/pixel), I can tell you that Flight Simulator does not like this, even though it is only a very small area. Only the airport had around 1 GB of textures in that case and the only thing my PC did was swapping .

 

[Luis_Sá]

... There is one thing you should remember, when you place your photos with normal polygons (for example a simple SCASM grid) you can no longer design your airport with AFCAD, as the AFD scenery elements are always drawn before the 3D elements. The code you use to place your photos is thus drawn after the AFCAD airport and will bury it...

Hi Arno,

If the polygons are called with PerpectiveCall2() you could, in principle, place ground polygons (layercalled) and runways on top of them. This was the way we have done Madeira airport, whose runway sits on top of a 3D object (a sea platform called with PerspectiveCall2() )

Kind Regards, Luis

 

[arno]

Hi Luis,

Yes, with the old runway commands it will certainly work. Put the new Fs2004 runway commands (placed with the XML scenery) are always drawn before 3D objects. I have tried placing one on top of a building in another project and it does no longer work.

So with the new commands it is no option, you would have to use the older commands in that case.

 

[jvarje]

Here's the procedure I use for custom photoreal sceneries, to avoid the resampler softening the image, in case someone finds it useful. A bit more work initially, but editing later on is simple, as you can just split the image in to pieces, without the resampler messing the picture up.

1. Get FS Terrain Calc by Jari Kaskelin (from FSNordic.net) and the new Resample.exe from Custom Terrain Textures SDK.

2. Create your aerial photo.

3. Use FS Terrain Calc to create the inf file.

4. Throw away the BAT-file created by FSTC! The new resampler doesn't need it or any tmf tools. Insted use the command "resample file.inf". (use imagetool to convert the pictures to DXT1).

5. Open up FS, check if the picture is in right place. If not, adjust the offset values in FSTC and compile again. Otherwise move to phase 6.

6. Open the texture files (something like 011213030121121Su.bmp) and create a single, new picture from them (do not resize them, just attach them together!).

7. The resampler softens the image too much, cut'n paste the original picture to the newly created picture (with black borders) and resize the original picture to fit exactly. You'll have to make it a bit shorter in vertical direction.

8. Do any editing you want with the new picture; For example, fill the black borders with default texture to make the transition from default to your picture smoother.

9. Split your image into 256x256 bmps, convert them to DXT1 and rename back to the original names (like 011213030121121Su.bmp etc., compare them so that you'll get them right).

10. When the textures are finished, use autogen annotator. Remeber to set the properties in the File -> Properties -> Vegetation.

Using this method you don't have to use that resampler all the time. Once you get the picture in place you can just edit the composed picture and split it into pieces.

Many of the steps can be automated - image splitting in PSP at least, and a custom BAT script to rename the textures and then convert them (imagetool -e bmp -dxt1 *.bmp is the batch command-line usage).