FSX VogelTree, new tool for detecting vegetation like AgenT

[Vogel]

Hope it can help you VAEjonp and thx for the link Flugwerk.

just a new update cause of a slow-down on last update.

VogelTree 1.4b

 

[Vogel]

Oups ! With help of Chris, I find a bad use of "Areaxxxxxxxxxxxx.bmp" name by my tool VogelTree, All the AGN out are shifted to One Tile North !!!

the outcome is a bad result in FS...

If you use it, download the last version which correct this bug: VogelTree 1.5b

 

[whitav8]

Something like VogelTree for buildings?

Since I already use FSET for the imagery of an airport area, VogelTree is a perfect tool for generating vegitation. I see that sceneproc is being utilized impressively for Autogen buildings but it requires an Openstreetmap set of data. For use in North America, there is very little OSM data. I wondered if a modified version of VogelTree could add some reasonable buildings (size and orientation)to an AGN

 

[arno]

Hi,

Scenproc doesn't require openstreetmap data, any vector data source is fine. S if the usgs has some good vectors you can use those as well.

 

[Vogel]

Since I already use FSET for the imagery of an airport area, VogelTree is a perfect tool for generating vegitation. I see that sceneproc is being utilized impressively for Autogen buildings but it requires an Openstreetmap set of data. For use in North America, there is very little OSM data. I wondered if a modified version of VogelTree could add some reasonable buildings (size and orientation)to an AGN

Hi whitav8,

First Thanks for your nice words.

For your ask, if i understand well you wish that VogelTree detect building like Tree... right ? If yes, it's not planned at that Time and I think it would be much harder to do. And since program like Scenproc, I'm not sure that it become very necessary but may be I'm wrong ?!
As Arno said, better way would be to search for other building Vector data of your area to use with scenproc, or may be use Annotator to add building manualy to AGN. After that you could Merge vegegation and building data in the same AGN with Scenproc or AGN Merge Tool.

What is your mind ?

 

[kevinfirth]

Building detection

Hi Vogel, I haven't tried your tree detector yet but I have used your autogen merger utility on a couple of occasions and it's worked just fine thanks for that

I'd love to find a way to add building related autogen in places where OSM vector data just simply isn't available (apart from at huge cost!) in such a way as to avoid having to hand annotate 1000's of photo tiles...but if it isn't doable then heh-ho!

Thanks for the other utility though its been very useful.
K

 

[Vogel]

Hi Kevin,
Thx for your feedback on this... Be sure that If i find a "way", i will share it with all of you.

Vogel

 

[whitav8]

No vector data but generic buildings are needed

As I and another fellow are saying, we would love to generically repopulate large areas of Photoreal textures (like the new Megascenery V2 or our own FSET areas) with trees and buildings. I would think that an easy to use processor like VogelTree could look for rectangles of edges of a certain size and just place a simple choice set of autogen buildings - just as if a tree were to be placed there using your current filters. We really don't have the time or energy to try to use Annotator - I have tried it for vegitation and it was OK for large areas but still very painful in terms of many hours. I realize that the building placement might not be precise but the idea is to quickly and easily add back 3D objects to otherwise very flat, photoreal textured large areas. The cities would still have their individual custom buildings as already provided or augmented by Instant Scenery 2, SbuilderX, or other such tools.
Also - a second question. Would it be possible to add to VogelTree a user generated "rubberbanded" rectangle area that the user adds to inhibit trees - say for taxiways and ponds, etc.. that we can quickly see as inappropriate?

 

[Vogel]

Hi whiteav,

One more... Noted

For your second question, as you said the Tool is used to generate tree on big area. So if you need to remove Trees on ponds, roads or other, you should better use an automatised way to do it.
Personaly, i use AGN Merge Tool(AMT) to do this. I just need Vector data of roads(lines), ponds, sea, buildings in shp files. And with Scenproc I generate AGN files(with only Polyvegetation features) from those data to use as Mask in AMT.
But since Arno add the IMPORTAGN step into scenproc, i think that you can do it with it. The step should be something like this:
- IMPORTAGN files issued from VogelTree => trees features
- IMPORTSHP with Vector data of roads, sea, ponds... => Mask features
- SPLITGRIDSTEP
- add filter to CREATERECTANGULARVEGETATION from only trees features outside of Mask features.
- WRITEAGNFILES

Ps: for roads Vector data you Will need to add a step to generate "polygon" from "lines"...
More infos here

 

[whitav8]

Thanks much for your help

Vogel,
Thanks very much for your help. I will look into using sceneproc as you indicate - still I think that a quick graphical indication by a user of vogeltree that an area shouldn't have trees would be very quick and easy. Thanks for your value support!

Dave

 

[Clutch Cargo]

Am I mis-understanding how to use this? I installed and tried to select a .bmp file and program crashed.

Would be awesome if this program could use tiff files like others have mentioned. This looks just what I was looking for. Good luck on the project.

 

[Vogel]

Hi Clutch Cargo,
In fact i didn't have updated this tool since scenproc integrate vegetation detection from GeoTiff. May be you should watch on this side into the pdf documentation included into last build of scenproc.

 

[Clutch Cargo]

Yea, saw that... getting caught up, thx.

 

[Wills]

@Vogel This tool looks excellent!

Is there any possibility that it could use photoscenery bgl's as input instead of raw textures? I want to create autogen for England for MegaSceneryX's England & Wales product so I of course don't have the input images to feed into VogelTree

 

[Vogel]

Hi Wills,

Sorry but I do not have the ability to decode the BGL in vogeltree because the format is protected

I still managed to get around the problem by grafting Vogeltree on Tmfviewer but for now, even if it work, it is not very stable and I'm not sure that it is properly ethical ...

 

[Wills]

Hi Wills,

Sorry but I do not have the ability to decode the BGL in vogeltree because the format is protected

I still managed to get around the problem by grafting Vogeltree on Tmfviewer but for now, even if it work, it is not very stable and I'm not sure that it is properly ethical ...

Hi Vogel,

As I suspected I didn't think you'd be able to decode the bgls . The integration with tmf viewer sounds very interesting. Regarding the ethics of this sort of integration I understand your concerns. However isn't tmf viewer part of the official SDK? If you somehow extracted a plain image version of the bgl and then allowed your tool to save that I blieve that would be unethical as your bypassing the protection int the bgl to effectively get at the to source files. However by using the image data internally in your tool to run the tree detection algorithm on and having your tool output the agn files I don't see how anyone can claim this to be unethical.

Anyway I'm no lawyer and this is just my opinion . Interested to see if you can improve the stability and if you will release it..

 

[Flywell]

Hi all,

When I load BMP images into VogelTree on a Win10/64 PC , the system returns the following message
saying a "Generic error occured in GDI+". If I ignore the error, and start the detection process,
the program seems to fall into an endless loop.

Did someone else experience this error ?

Thank you in advance for any help

 

[Flywell]

Hello again,

Did some testing with BMP files from different sources. Same problem as before :-(
until I suspected that the filesize might cause the error
Downsized the images to 4000 pixel, and then it worked fine )

Now I ask myself, what would be the optimal image size to perform accurate tree detection ?

 

[GaryGB]

Hi Wills,

Sorry but I do not have the ability to decode the BGL in vogeltree because the format is protected

I still managed to get around the problem by grafting Vogeltree on Tmfviewer but for now, even if it work, it is not very stable and I'm not sure that it is properly ethical ...

Many thanks for your efforts with VogelTree.


FYI: Sean Isom is working on a very capable de-compiler utility for FS SDK Resample BGLs ...here:

https://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/threads/bgldec-a-resample-bgl-decompressor.433789/

GaryGB

 

[LasaGames]

I need a tutorial...I'm very new to this. I have created a realphoto scenery and I would like to add autogen and roads so that ORBX light works in that area