(Work in Progress) Creating Custom Scenery For Australia

I am working on 2 projects at the moment for FSX as at 2018 as well as FSX as at 1962.

I have started a 3rd project which should work with both FSX and P3D where I am creating photoreal scenery for the big and small airports and surrounding areas.

Have started the first project creating Lord Howe Island and am now building the high definition scenery and texture files to be added to FSX.

I have already tested a low resolution version of Lord Howe Island and it looked great.

This is still the testing stage of my first attempts at scenery design and my next step will be to create photoreal water around the island and then merge my new scenery with the stock FSX or P3d scenery.

Will add screenshots over the next day or so.

Estimated size of Lord Howe Island is around 5 gig.

The addon scenery for Lord Howe Island will take at least 2 and a half hours to compile and I will be away when it finishes and not back for next 24 hours.

So in the meantime I am going to show a screenshot taken from my first test of Lord Howe Island.

- This test was before adding elevation data so the island is completely flat in this picture

- This test is before adding a transition with FSX base scenery... hence the rectangle top of the picture

- Water is not photo-realistic in this picture

- Pictures here are low resolution. Will be using this resolution in areas where you will be at high altitudes.

As I have never created addon scenery before this test was to make sure the photoreal imagery lined up perfectly the with runway and island...which it did.

Still testing the new scenery and as I am using photo-real scenery the next step is to add the trees and buildings autogen.

Looking at how to do this using examples from the Internet as shown below.

The photo-real scenery needed some work as the satellite picture had a few clouds in the picture which needed to be removed and the large areas of shadow seen at the south end of the island, and to a smaller degree at the top end of the island, did not look good in the Addon Scenery.

Looking at the island in FSX there were areas of dark shadow on the hills overlooking the water and they looked like black rectangles and not shadows in FSX.

Below is the before and after shots I used for the scenery.

I also look for aircraft, boats and cars which also need to be removed.

I have seen professional scenery pictures where the photo real scenery contains the satellite view of aircraft , boats and cars and they do not look good when included in the picture.

Lord Howe Island after applying photo-real water and merging with FSX scenery.

This is a huge improvement in the scenery for Lord Howe Island when compared to my first test picture at the top of the page.

The weather is from this Monday morning at 11am on Lord Howe Island and was generated by Active Sky Next.

The BGL scenery file for the above picture is a staggering low 103 mb which though small at the moment will increase with auto-gen added.

My aim at this stage was to get the water right and now I can concentrate on adding detail to the island.

Great work. This is really starting to look good. Loking forward to screenshots once autogen is added. Photoreal is good but for me if there is no autogen then i prefer Orbx with autogen.

Cheers

Stinger

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In the next 24 hours I am redoing the photo scenery and I am looking at the autogen option where and when to use it.

Trees do spoil the photo scenery from the air but when you are at an airport you don't want the area around you to be flat. So a compromise is needed.

When you are descending towards an airport is photo scenery better or autogen.

Lots of testing to do.