NZFF

Well, the last 2 days I've been working on a Taranaki wide photo scenery. I'm surprised how easy and quick it was to convert the geotiffs from LINZ to Flight Sim! And very fun too!

I've gone through and created the mask around the coast and inland. Also colour corrected all the images. I think colour correction is VERY important when it comes to photo scenery. It looked nasty when I stuck the photo scenery uncorrected into FS. So washed out and the images have a blue tinge to them, especially in the shadows. It's especially noticeable uncorrected when autogen is added.

I used the 0.4m from LINZ, though I used the 1/2 res instead. I'd love to use the full res but the file size would be MASSIVE! So the scenery is effectively 0.8m resolution.

Next step is to add the autogen. I looked at the LINZ vegetation polygons but they aren't very detailed. The scenProc detect feature didn't work that well to extract the vegetation from the images, and it kept crashing. So I've come up with a way to extract vegetation from the images using Photoshop and Illustrator which works FANTASTICALLY.

Oh yeah, I'll add some land marks too when I get time. Like the Chimney, Windwand and all the other Naki landmarks! I'm debating if I should add a night texture as well, I've figured out an automated process to add night texture which looks great, but then I'll have to recompile the whole thing.


Che

HELL BELLS that looks pretty ! how dose the older AGN fit onto it ?

That is looking good. That's one big mother of a mountain, stuck out there all on its own.

Looks good.

What's your recolour process?

Fantastic Ridlez !!!

You've certainly "got the knack"

Thanks everyone! It's getting there. I'll keep posting the screenshots as I progress with them. Next is Autogen which I'm getting my head around ScenProc to create autogen from polygons. The programme is a bit daunting for me

A question for everyone, what vegetation autogen type do you typically use for New Zealand? I've been using the group; "Regionalization Of Small City Suburban No Grid Dry" It seems to work alright in FSX but it looks completely different in P3D.

NZ255 wrote:Looks good.

What's your recolour process?

I use photoshop for all my recolouring work. Though the exact correction depends on the imagery themselves. Typically they have very low contrast so that is usually fixed first. Then colour correcting them to look "normal" is next. For this particular work I had around 30 different various adjustment layers in photoshop to correct the imagery in different ways. Since I split the imagery into 42 different files I had to set an Action to correct all the files automatically. Beats doing it by hand over and over again!

Ian Warren wrote:HELL BELLS that looks pretty ! how dose the older AGN fit onto it ?

I haven't yet Ian! I'll see how this goes; I'm working on a new technique to extract the vegetation autogen from imagery which is working pretty well. This screenshot is of the vegetation from around the Stratford area. The filter I created is pretty detailed, it seems to have picked up every forest, bush and punga tree!

Looking at the area, when autogened Rob's Taranaki, I look and a tree was a tree, never got into the tree thing other when I was a kid build tree huts in pines, me trying to figure out a punga tree for AGN , be interesting to see what it picks up on.

It is quite impressive how it is picking this stuff up but it also quite mild boggling to see how near a perfect circle around Mt Egmont and stayed that way even space it a unique photo.

Riddlez wrote:A question for everyone, what vegetation autogen type do you typically use for New Zealand? I've been using the group; "Regionalization Of Small City Suburban No Grid Dry" It seems to work alright in FSX but it looks completely different in P3D.

Oops, got side-tracked playing that other simulator, you know, the one where you get points for licking a car...

Sounds like a good choice for autogen, do you plan to stick to the one type? I guess that it's tricky for your cool vegetation extraction technique to differentiate. Although I tend to do a lot of autogen by hand, first I run Scenproc on the LINZ data for Native (the default rainforest, or these days my own custom bush), Scrub and Exotic (mainly pine, which isn't a sim choice). If you don't have a lot of pine plantations in the area, I guess you could skip that.

You can see why NZ needs its own custom vegetation, I don't know if I'll ever get around to this, I've had to scrap my plans to do some Otago/Southland-type trees for Dunedin. But default autogen really lets the sim down, that's for sure. I use FTX HD trees, which helps a lot, but still not close enough. For Dunedin, I could just about get away with half a dozen tree types for larger stuff, lots of eucalyptus (default one is horrible), macrocarpa and various other wind-swept conifer, ubiquitous poplar, willow on the riverbanks. None of these are well-depicted in the sim, except maybe poplar.

toprob wrote:
Oops, got side-tracked playing that other simulator, you know, the one where you get points for licking a car...

Sounds like a good choice for autogen, do you plan to stick to the one type? I guess that it's tricky for your cool vegetation extraction technique to differentiate. Although I tend to do a lot of autogen by hand, first I run Scenproc on the LINZ data for Native (the default rainforest, or these days my own custom bush), Scrub and Exotic (mainly pine, which isn't a sim choice). If you don't have a lot of pine plantations in the area, I guess you could skip that.

You can see why NZ needs its own custom vegetation, I don't know if I'll ever get around to this, I've had to scrap my plans to do some Otago/Southland-type trees for Dunedin. But default autogen really lets the sim down, that's for sure. I use FTX HD trees, which helps a lot, but still not close enough. For Dunedin, I could just about get away with half a dozen tree types for larger stuff, lots of eucalyptus (default one is horrible), macrocarpa and various other wind-swept conifer, ubiquitous poplar, willow on the riverbanks. None of these are well-depicted in the sim, except maybe poplar.

I haven't seen that game for a while!

I was going to be lazy and do one tree group for the whole thing. I guess I could intergrate LINZ data with my own. There is a way to subtract vector polygons from other vector polygons, like "punching" holes in a sense. So I might subtract the LINZ from my own and do something similar like you with the pine, shelter belts etc.

How would you go about creating your own autogen vegetation? I think it would be awesome to have NZ specific trees. There are a lot of trees and combinations you could include in a package like this that would enhance NZ tremendously. I could see a "New Zealand Trees HD" product that would be great for NZ. You could even go as far as having tussock grass autogen, like what you would find in the Mackenzie country. Hmmm might be something to pursue...

I guess if you have the data all ready to go, then you can give it a go with one type and see how it looks -- only you can judge whether the result is ok. For some areas, it might be the way to go.
Custom tree autogen has always been a bit out of reach, simply because you have to hack the autogen config files, and as these are global, you can only have one set active at once. The problem has been that someone like Orbx then comes along and replaces the config files without checking whether or not they have custom entries. Orbx does this every time you install something, or run FTX Central.
Now, with Arno's autogen config merge tool, anyone can customise these files without Orbx stomping on them. The tool checks to see if the custom entries are there, and if not it adds them each time the sim is run. There is one small issue with it, if it does find that entries are missing (happens now and then, not all the time) you will need to exit out of the simulator and restart it to use the fixed config files. If you are a big fan of Orbx, and often switch regions or install new scenery, this can happen quite often, but for people like me who just flies in NZ it doesn't happen more than a couple of times a year.
I've always imagined a custom NZ autogen which could be used by any developer, Orbx had their own NZ autogen but other developers are not able to call it. The autogen package could be payware or freeware for the user, but there wouldn't be many restrictions of using the autogen. This way you could fly the entire country and have a consistent vegetation, provided everyone gets on board.
This is one of those things which I always wished someone would do, and in the end I decided I'd have to do it myself, but it isn't really an option for me at the moment, maybe when I retire....

I've been having a play around with seasonal textures. A lot of New Zealand has little variations in seasons in terms of what they look like. Unlike here in North America. Especially a mild place like Taranaki which looks the same all year round (except if there is a drought which makes everything brown!). I had to however include a snow capped Mt Taranaki with the photoreal scenery. It really isn't winter in the Naki without one! I made it so only the national park area has the seasonal textures. If I didn't do that, the photo scenery size would be pushing 10gigs! and would be pointless since the surrounding area is exactly the same anyway.

Seeing it look so real makes me home sick!

Looking very flash, and good solution to realism/file size issue.

That is seriously looking So good , one thing i did notice from all the books here with aerial photos, the farm land always appears green.

I like it ... oops ... just arriving in Wales from Ireland ... gotta scoot ...

That is absolutely gorgeous! Bravo! Bravo! Simply stunning.

Thanks everyone!

The size issue sucks! That's the major problem with photo scenery. I worked it out, roughly about 1Gb per 1,814.25km² at 0.8m res! Puts an end to my idea of doing the whole country Well one day....

Is that the compressed (zip) file size?

cowpatz wrote:Is that the compressed (zip) file size?

Nah that's raw size before I compress it.

As I always said, and it is with many regions now its also fully AGNed , , that would an interesting test and play, I have never used the automated annotator, a good test would be that Irish Mega Scenery - I honestly cant see how that sells without AGN ... this is were NZ is in the forefront regard to photo real scenery.