NZ Photo Scenery with a cool surprise!

[Kelvinr]

So I've been working on auto-gening Ant Davison's Photo Scenery, i've taken a break to come and let you know that i've been working on something just as cool!

I've been able to get the Data (courtesy of L.I.N.Z) of "nz-8m-digital-elevation-model-2012", converted it and put it in Prepar3d (should work in FSX too).

See below of some screenshots. The first two compare ORBX mesh with this one and the remaining are compared with default mesh. I'll post a couple of screenshots of Vector Landclass Geographix sourced mesh with this one, soon.

I'll make the mesh available at some point soon for you to play with, and advise of any issues, but I haven't found many I had to fix.

[Splitpin]

My goodness ...i really must get my a into g , and get this installed and running.
Great post Kelvin ... you clever bugger

[toprob]

It shouldn't be too different from FTX, as I think they used this data for NZ? I have been working with this to improve the mesh around Dunedin, especially the coast, for those who don't have FTX NZ or VLC. Great to see all this great data available now, compared to the old days!

[Splitpin]

And your another clever bugger Rob .... just been reading about you in the pc pilot mag

[toprob]

That was the old me, now I'm happy to let another generation make some scenery:)

[Kelvinr]

:o My goodness ...i really must get my a into g , and get this installed and running.
Great post Kelvin ... you clever bugger

Thanks, I've been basically using it to learn more about scenery design.

I am currently compiling tree and building autogen to go with the scenery using "LCDB v4.1 - Land Cover Database version 4.1, Mainland New Zealand" as well as combining shelterbelts.

I'm experimenting with Water Masking from Raster Image, converted from Shapefiles, we'll see how that goes

Tree placement over this scenery is pretty accurate after an initial NZ flyover, to look for issues, very few have been found.

Anyway, the reason I've done the mesh is that people love VLC as a product and with this mesh it improves upon the 20m mesh currently available.

[AdrianPetford]

Brilliant... looking forward to both the 8m DEM and new autogen!

[cowpatz]

How do the airfield elevations tie in with this mesh? Similar to ORBX I assume?

[Kelvinr]

How do the airfield elevations tie in with this mesh? Similar to ORBX I assume?

I have compared with Orbx and their elevation fixes do correct some issues.

Although, the goal is to resolve these without needing Orbx to correct elevation issues.

[Timmo]

A couple of potential 'gotchas' to check Kelvin: Check the boundary between tiles in case there are issues there (i.e. 0 elevation pixels); ensure you use the fractionalbits setting in your .inf file for resample exe to ensure you are getting the full vertical resolution

It looks like a good dataset, I had actually downloaded a sample myself but simply haven't had time to get it in

[Kelvinr]

A couple of potential 'gotchas' to check Kelvin: Check the boundary between tiles in case there are issues there (i.e. 0 elevation pixels); ensure you use the fractionalbits setting in your .inf file for resample exe to ensure you are getting the full vertical resolution

It looks like a good dataset, I had actually downloaded a sample myself but simply haven't had time to get it in

Thanks Timmo, I'll take a look at it. I have recommenced my autogen for now but will continue on the Elevation after this.

[toprob]

Very interesting FB post from SceneryDesign.org (Arno from FSDeveloper.com) showing some huge improvements in feature recognition, laying down buildings for areas where there is no footprint data. It would be a big job to do the country, but now there's a lot which can be automated,

[dbcunnz]

I am also running ScrenProc for all the new Zealand vegetation agn I don't know how long it is going to take but it has now been running for over 12 hrs and is now working on the splitting features.
How it will turn out I don't know yet but will be interested to check it with what Kevin has done.

[Kelvinr]

because I haven't got the textures I'm using scenproc.

the data im using combines two sets of shelter belt shape files also. im very impressed at the automation.

some more beta shots of the vegetation.

[Splitpin]

Kelvin and Doug ... Im fascinated by this vegetation thing .
Doug , you made it sound (to my non scenery building mind) like this thing just goes off and puts trees and things where they should be ... you said its been running for 12 hours now ...what is it ?

[dbcunnz]

Its a program that you use with linz NZ shapefiles I have used it for the latest of my scenery Stuart Island and MarlboroughX2015 which I have just uploaded to flightsim.com should be available for downloading in the next couple of days also some of Ian's Wanganui and Waiuoru.
Rob also uses it for his scenery.

[Kelvinr]

yes, it's a great program. Would save months on manual labour!

A few more screenshots.

a few areas need a minor tidy up and adding trees where the data didn't but overall, what, a, brilliant, product!!!


So far this is all automated (apart from the initial prep procesess) and raw, out of the box, no annotation at all yet.

Next, to add autogen buildings.

[toprob]

Kelvin and Doug ... Im fascinated by this vegetation thing .
Doug , you made it sound (to my non scenery building mind) like this thing just goes off and puts trees and things where they should be ... you said its been running for 12 hours now ...what is it ?

Yes, there's a guy in the Netherlands, Arno, who runs the FSDeveloper.com site, and he builds some tools which revolutionise scenery development. In this case, the main tool is Scenproc, which is a procedural scenery builder -- you feed it data, and it creates autogen, or non-autogen placed objects. I did a blog post about this toola long time ago, but since then it has had a lot of features added. Arno is constantly working on these tools, and he is always finding ways to improve the automation.

It does rely on available data, to a large extent, and there isn't always data available. For instance, for Wellington I used Scenproc with the Wellington building footprint data to place nearly every house in Wellington automatically. Normally I'd do this by drawing a footprint for each house, which can take months for a typical scenery, so being able to automate this is a godsend. However there are only building footprints for Wellington and Christchurch, so the rest either need to be done in Annotator, one by one, or we need to find another way.

One other way is to have a way of determining what's what from the aerial imagery. Arno has been working on this for ScenProc, and he is getting to the point where it can be very useful for placing buildings automatically. I haven't tried this yet, as I still tend to hand-place, but one day we'll get to the stage where you can feed it an image, and it'll create all the buildings and vegetation.

LINZ does have some very nice vector data for vegetation -- for instance, you can download a vector file for all the major native bush coverage in NZ, and Scenproc will create autogen from this. I use this for the Subscription -- there's always a 'first pass' where I use scenproc to place the large areas of vegetation, then add the rest by 'hand'.

[Kelvinr]

Finally, after many hours of trying to make this work, i've managed to add shelterbelts.

I had to add a buffer to the LINZ shelterbelt POLYLINES data, from there I converted back to lines giving me nicely tied ends on my tree line ends and a width for the shelterbelts. At this point I converted to polygons with 2 meters from the shelterbelt centerlines, and, walaaa!

Beta shot.

[dbcunnz]

I have struck a problem with senproc I have done all the northland down as far as about Welsford incorporating all my Bay Of islands agn but the next section of Auckland I get no agn created when it finishes done about three or four goes at it and still finish up with nothing.