complete & seamless NZ photoreal scenery

[antdavison]

not as detailed as Robin Corn's, (mine is lod 13 - 4.75m, no autogen, no buildings, no masks of any sort) but complete and seamless; excludes Kermadec, Chatham, Bounty, Snares, Antipodes, Auckland, and Campbell Islands

download the photoreal textures from
https://gumroad.com/antdavison
(edited 2015.12.18)


sample videos on my youtube page

maps virtual NZ road trip - Bluff Queenstown Wanaka West Coast Nelson Picton South Island 1371km
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YLSYs9l6Nw

maps virtual NZ road trip - Cape Reinga to Bluff via SH1 - 2091km - photoreal fsx
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7uBFOPY2Ak

maps virtual NZ road trip - Wairoa Rotorua Lakes Coromandel Auckland - 770km
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thqcPcivG8o

maps virtual NZ road trip - Picton Brunner Twizel Wanaka - 932km - fsx photoreal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-d3aJ7AgpQ

maps virtual NZ road trip - Akaroa Hanmer Springs Wellington Masterton Napier Gisborne - 1092km
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry3qgswNKdU

maps virtual NZ road trip - Northland Circuit 857km - photoreal fsx
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CRvPP1hxvk

maps virtual NZ road trip - Whanganui Otakeho Whakatane East Cape Gisborne Opotiki 1133km
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vujUT1WEd-8


or use this search
https://www.youtube.com/user/antdavison ... =road+trip





the same dataset is also in my car GPS 8)
maps iGo Primo car GPS virtual NZ national aerial dataset Raster NNG
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaUVYWDAmNM&t=187

[toprob]

That's just stunning. Really shows the sim as one of the best visualisation tools available.

[cowpatz]

That is impressive. Any plans to develope it further?

[antdavison]

maybe sell cheap on a couple of the sim markets, as an entry level product, if there is interest, but don't want to undermine Robin's work and income

my interest is more in the terrain, than building airports and planting trees, or marketing, distribution and support

As it stands it took 6 months to composite, and the data is out there to detail it up further, which I could do, and colour balance that against this data set, which was itself colour balanced against a NZ LandSat data set i built in 2012 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRt0OHUSpuI ); but Robin is doing such good work already

[Kea]

This is great Ant, especially, as you say, as an entry-level product. Rob's stuff is brilliant but by it's very detail takes longer to get out and I for one would happily have your work as a stop-gap in the meantime. I've noticed on the VRS forum there's talk of a similar project for other parts of the world, so-called "IFR" photoscenery (best viewed from higher altitudes) as some areas in the wolrd a horribly lacking in realistic scenery and probably will never get any attention (mainly war zones like parts of the Middle East, North Korea, China, Russia). I say it's high time we got some decent complete coverage and, while I won't stop buying Rob's work, you've definitely got a customer here too!

[deeknow]

Great stuff Ant. Wicked video by the way, even got the wife in to watch it for a few mins
Keep up the good work, hope you get something out of it for yourself.

[antdavison]

I have started to upload this dataset
it is very big, 24gb, so it wont be completely there until say 2015.12.12, assuming no issues
I had to split the complete dataset into 3 parts, each is taking a couple of days to upload, as my upload speed is slooow

when completed there will be 5 things you will need to download
1 - some sample areas and 38m dem
2 - the northern part of NZ
3 - the central part of NZ
4 - the southern part of NZ
5 - the documentation explaining how to install manually

documentation, evaluation samples, northern, central & southern parts, and a DEM if you need it are at

https://gumroad.com/antdavison

(edit 2015.12.18 all parts uploaded)

limited time beta tester pricing until 2015.12.31

[Kea]

Excellent news Ant! Looking forward to this!

[Kelvinr]

This looks awesome. Purchased Southern part, looking forward to remaining parts.

[Splitpin]

Not sure what to say I cant begin to imagine how you did this Ant ..... but its amazing (watched that clip twice)
Amazing ! Will follow Kelvin on this

[AdrianPetford]

This looks awesome. Purchased Southern part, looking forward to remaining parts.

Having been working on a 50cm photoscenery of Auckland for the last year, I can appreciate how much work has gone into this Ant, and it looks superb.

I've also purchased the southern part (in fact I think I fumbled it and purchased through Paypal twice... any chance of a credit against one of the remaining parts, as I will be buying them all?)

Looking forward to getting in some quality stick time with this scenery over the weekend.

Thanks,


Ade

[hoki1185]

Great stuff Ant.Is it easy to install in FSX?

[antdavison]

Adrian .. yeah i saw that, so i can send you a gumroad gift link to the another part once it is up.
right about that time, the central portion which was uploading from monday to wednesday stalled, it just sat at 99% for ages

no reason given, the size is less than the host site limit ... just one of those frustrating internet things, that wants you to throw something at your expensive lcd screen

so central is uploading again from the beginning, and , northern as well, speed is like modem speed 80k, even though i on ADSL... that has put me two days behind, so the complete set might not be there til sunday

if i get more failures, there could be further delays, or i may need to track down someone in AKL with unlimited fibre

cross your fingers

i also made auckland sub-metre a couple of times for fsx with local government data, and ported the v.2 to my car gps as well (v.1 fsx and v.2 gps are on my youtube page) ... it looks good, but there are quite a few seams to clean up, so you need either data from multiple years, or some good photoshop skills, to get seamlessness, and i never built any buildings, etc
it does however show up deficiencies in the available elevation data

[antdavison]

Hoki ... it is a manual install, easy

unpack the zip file, extracting its contained directory tree and contents to

\Microsoft Flight Simulator X\Addon Scenery\

or to some other desired location

the scenery doesn't have to reside at
\Addon Scenery\
thats just microsoft's default
it can be anywhere on your computer

you should end up with a structure that looks like ...
\Microsoft Flight Simulator X\Addon Scenery\nz2015\scenery\{BGL files are here}

add the area ( \Microsoft Flight Simulator X\Addon Scenery\nz2015\ or {some storage location}\nz2015\ ) into the Scenery Library,
working around the annoying & frustrating windows vista / 7 / 8 bug

described in

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17602

http://iblueyonder.com/video-tutorial-a ... windows-7/

https://youtu.be/C8kO1IsJMuE

the documentation I have written, available at
https://gumroad.com/l/vPbv
(edit 2015.12.18)

[antdavison]

splitpin ... how did i do this

i was looking at whether the fsx simulation environment had some broadcasting potential for documentaries etc
the problem is always going to be abrupt and visible textural and geometry changes, but even google earth pro, and nasa worldwind have this issue

you could use fraps to record flights, which is a software screen-scrape approach; i did that for the triple screen christchurch clip on my you tube page
you could take a hdtv video signal from your computers video card, and feed it into a capture card housed in another computer, like blackmagic intensity pro, and do a hardware capture - i did this for auckland v.1

but hand controlled flights can look a bit messy

here i used http://www.fs-recorder.net/ v2.18a
it can record and playback flights & additional cameras, AND screen-scrape to wmv
the flightpath files it saves can be converted from a machine-readable binary format to a human readable text format, which is a list of time stamps, lat, lon, pitch, bank, heading, altitude

so, if you can re-live your high school trigonometry lessons, you can make your own flight paths, or modify/smooth hand flown flights, export out in the same text format, convert to binary format, play in fsx

in my videos, i follow some roads
log in to google maps on the web, create a driving route between selected destinations, export as KML
open the KML, grab the thousands of 2D lat lons, created as the car turns around corners
get the elevation values for each 2D gps point from some DEM bitmaps, or upload the KML into http://www.gpsvisualizer.com and get that site to add in the elevations
add time stamps to the now 3D data to make it 4D
shuffle the 4D data around a bit to get a constant speed; new lat/lon/elevation values need to be interpolated from the non-constant-speed data
apply some moving averages to smooth out the path
add the aircraft's above-ground-level position to the elevation sub-coordinates, calculate the heading and set the pitch
add a header and footer to the path to give a smooth intro & exit
export as a text file, convert to binary-machine-readable,
play flight and capture as wmv, in fsx, with the http://www.fs-recorder.net/ software v.2.18a
i used a 4000km/h vapour-trailless glider permanently pitched towards the ground
post to youtube

[Kelvinr]

Adrian .. yeah i saw that, so i can send you a gumroad gift link to the another part once it is up.
right about that time, the central portion which was uploading from monday to wednesday stalled, it just sat at 99% for ages

no reason given, the size is less than the host site limit ... just one of those frustrating internet things, that wants you to throw something at your expensive lcd screen

so central is uploading again from the beginning, and , northern as well, speed is like modem speed 80k, even though i on ADSL... that has put me two days behind, so the complete set might not be there til sunday

if i get more failures, there could be further delays, or i may need to track down someone in AKL with unlimited fibre

cross your fingers

i also made auckland sub-metre a couple of times for fsx with local government data, and ported the v.2 to my car gps as well (v.1 fsx and v.2 gps are on my youtube page) ... it looks good, but there are quite a few seams to clean up, so you need either data from multiple years, or some good photoshop skills, to get seamlessness, and i never built any buildings, etc
it does however show up deficiencies in the available elevation data

I have unlimited Fiber and am happy to provide assistance for you to get the upload where you need it to be. PM me if you want any help with this. I'm very I.T savvy.

Cheers,

Kelvin

[AdrianPetford]

Adrian .. yeah i saw that, so i can send you a gumroad gift link to the another part once it is up.
right about that time, the central portion which was uploading from monday to wednesday stalled, it just sat at 99% for ages

Thanks, Ant - that would be great. Much appreciated.

i also made auckland sub-metre a couple of times for fsx with local government data, and ported the v.2 to my car gps as well (v.1 fsx and v.2 gps are on my youtube page) ... it looks good, but there are quite a few seams to clean up, so you need either data from multiple years, or some good photoshop skills, to get seamlessness, and i never built any buildings, etc
it does however show up deficiencies in the available elevation data

I've also started on Auckland several times now, but usually given up because of badly mismatched source aerial photos. The new LINZ 50cm dataset is pretty good though, with large areas shot consecutively and everything recent (2010-12). I've colour corrected the entire area and it's pretty even with no obvious joins. Just plodding through the phenomenal task of water and blend masking everything now. It's my first attempt at photoreal scenery, but I will release it eventually, if it ends up good enough.

Looking forward to giving your southern scenery a try later today.

[Splitpin]

Thanks for the reply and time taken .... Im amazed

[toprob]

That is pretty mind-blowing. You make it sound so easy:)

[Kelvinr]

I've purchased and downloaded all 3 parts for NZ. Just stunning how it is has no blemishes. We'll done Ant!