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Question regarding scenProc capability

Jim Stewart

Jim Stewart

Messages
7
Country
canada
While I realize that scenProc's primary purpose is to create autogen files for photoscenery, I was curious if it can be used to create .bgl files of (many) tree objects from polygon shapefiles.

I'm working with a set of shapefiles that designate both density and type of forest cover, and I thought it might be interesting to see if I could generate forests from those shapefiles, where I could specify the placement (density) of trees as well as their type.

Currently, I've been using the shapefiles to generate vector based scenery, but of course I'm limited by the land class ground textures available, which really don't have enough variety to match the forest cover I have data for. Plus, vector based ground polys also often have very noticeable edges of course, which can be slightly objectionable.

My thought was that perhaps I could just create a landclass file that specifies grass for the forest areas, and then create the forests to go on top via some other means, such as scenProc (I'm hoping!) . This would allow me to create forests that closely match the real world data available.

I've experimented a bit with scenProc thus far, trying to use EXPORTBGL, but although the feature count of my shapefile (single feature) is read according to the log, my lack of understanding of the interaction of the various options available are keeping me from being successful in actually having anything created.

Currently, this is what I was trying to run in scenProc:

IMPORTOGR|F:\Land Cover circa 2000 - Vector\073 Region\lcc2000v_csc2000v_073g_shp_en\split\LCC2000-V_073G_3_0_COVTYPE__222.shp|*|*|NOREPROJ
#
SPLITGRID|10|*
#
CREATEAGNPOLYVEG|FTYPE=POLYGON|{031de096-b541-42c3-8f90-373a723dc84a}
#
EXPORTBGL|FSX|test|F:\|KEEPXML

Notably, I get this message:
10:48 AM IMPORTOGR Information Read 24940 features from file
which is correct, and I also get:
10:48 AM CREATEAGNPOLYVEG Information Created 24947 autogen objects
which I'm not sure about. Also, I get:
10:48 AM BGLXWriter Information Finished writing of file F:\\test_0.bgl
but there is no .bgl file ever actually created.

Am I on the right path? Can this be done?
 
Hi,

You can't export autogen objects to a BGL file. The EXPORTBGL function is to create BGL files using BGLComp.

So what you could do is load your landuse data. Then use the PLACEPOINTSINPOLYGON step to place point features inside those polygons. Then with CREATEXMLLIBOBJ you can place XML objects at those points. And these can then be exported to BGL.

But I expect that you will get quite a performance hit if you place a lot of trees this way. You don't have a photo scenery for your area? Because than using autogen would be easier and better.
 
Arno, thanks for your reply, as well as an idea of how one could make such a thing work.

I was hoping such a thing could be accomplished with little performance impact, which is why I was hoping there'd be a facility to place autogen trees in such a manner. I'm pretty sure that you are very correct in that the method you've described would be pretty severe; especially as I'm looking at some pretty large forested areas.

I would use photo scenery if I could, but the available resolution in the area I'm working in (Northern Canada) is pretty poor.

I guess I'd be better off sticking to land class textures.

I suppose if I wanted to, I could always create a series of land class textures with the same ground texture and annotate them with the differing types of forest cover I wanted... different line of thought I guess!

Thanks again for enlightening me on scenProc operation and capability!
 
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