Durango

I guess I always assumed there was one airport in Durango, Colorado, that'd be KDRO, but the other day I did a flight from KDRO to KAPA, departing from a 5-min photoreal I'd made prior to the flight. Naturally I wanted to do a flyover to see how my photoreal looked and in the process I caught another airport out of the corner of my eye which turned out to be 00C, Animas Airpark. KDRO and 00C are both parts of the FTX Global freewrae airports BTW so both are nicely done. After arriving at KAPA I downloaded a few more imagery tiles to extend the Durango photoreal out to include 00C and the city of Durango.

I did some quick color corrections (still WIP at this point), and with the new Colorado mesh I posted about earlier, I was rather pleased with what I saw. I've had some limited success with scenProc recently so I downloaded some building footprints from MS/Bing for Colorado and added autogen buildings. That's a very simple task with scenProc when data is available but I wanted trees too. I haven't been able to find any tree coverage data for the area, I'm too dumb to figure out "feature detection" in scenProc, and TBH I'm a little skeptical anyway having looked at some autogen that was produced that way.

I decided I'd try my own "feature detection" in PhotoShop using the "magic wand" tool, I selected all the trees with basically one click and made a black layer, did some cleanup where the magic wand tool mistook some shadows and water areas for trees, and then exported a .tif - all white - with a million little black specs each representing a tree or group of trees.

Next I used gdal_polygonize to turn the .tif into a .shp (shape) that ScenProc could read. It took like 3 hrs for gdal_polygonize to crunch the data and write a .shp. That worked but scenProc was giving me like one tree per autogen poly for some reason, not nearly dense enough, I did some experimenting, had a little better luck with veg rectangles than polygons, but still not dense enough.

Finally I used SbuilderX to slice all the polygons at QMID 20 boundaries, slicing it up quintupled the number of polygons to almost 410,000 and then I finally got the tree density I was looking for (and more). It took SBuilderX forever to do the slicing, I don't know how long actually, I went to bed and when I woke up this AM it was finally done.

I passed the new sliced up .shp through scenProc and it generated 111 autogen files in about 15 seconds, 414,686 autogen objects in total including the buildings. Frame rates delightfully suck, lol. I'm stunned. That's probably a month's work if a person were to do autogen the old fashioned way using the SDK annotator!

Anyway, sorry about the lengthy back story, here are a few shots:

Thanks for looking! :)

Jim

Hey Jim,

Nice Shots!! And don't ever apologize over a long story full of good info!! It looks like you really know what you're doing!!

We share, and everyone learns!! ;) That learning is as much what thie type of site is about as the razzing we sometimes give and get!!

Michael

Some really nice shots but enjoyed the detail of how you created the 3D scenery even MORE. Thanks for the detail of how long it took you and the tools you used. Hopefully someone will figure out a way to efficiently time wise create the mask for creating the 3d objects.

I have been using the FSEarth Tile program and downloading scenery like crazy (166 gig so far). The details of how to use the program are not detailed and "how to" videos at YouTube are few (enough so to get you going). I have however figured out how to download 4 times faster with the program. As an example I recently downloaded the state of Georgia (4 meters/pix) which would take you a little over 9 hours but was able to download it in 2.5 hours (excluding the coastline). Ocean coastlines do go quickly as you create really small areas to download but you need to set up each one separately. But I believe I might have a way to speed that up as well, I just haven’t taken the time to try yet.

Thanks gents, I really appreciate all the nice comments! :)

It looks like you really know what you're doing!!

Thanks Michael, the credit really belongs to Arno Gerretsen for scenProc though. It's been available for a few years now but TBH I was a little intimidated by it so I avoided it up until now. It's all new to me, I'm just beginning to see where it could really open some doors with some of the scenery development stuff I've been doing the hard way all these years. It can do almost anything and Arno's adding new things all the time. One user over at fsdeveloper suggested it may even be able to help us understand women! :)

Great work with the mesh Jim. As real as it gets! :cool: :cool: :)

Thanks Larry! BTW I just noticed you're from Albuquerque, I recently did mesh for New Mexico too, if you want it let me know, I could upload it! :)

Some really nice shots but enjoyed the detail of how you created the 3D scenery even MORE. Thanks for the detail of how long it took you and the tools you used. Hopefully someone will figure out a way to efficiently time wise create the mask for creating the 3d objects.

Thanks David, glad you enjoyed it! I'm playing around now with dividing the data up to speed things along. One large photoreal I did a while back I divided into 4 chunks, now I have 2 OSGeo4W Shell windows open at once and I'm running gdal_polygonize on two of the 4 chunks at the same time. CPU usage is still only running about 25% so I think I could really process all 4 chunks at the same time in 4 OSGeo4W Shell windows. One of them that just finished appears to have some problems though, too early to tell, I haven't figured out what went wrong yet, maybe I'm not giving things enough time to load, lol. I think I'll have to break down and learn the feature detection in scenProc eventually. If the result needs a little cleaning up it's possible to do that by opening the .shp in SBuilder or probably even easier on the finished autogen using the SDK annotator.

Just for S&GS I made the flight myself. I used the ORBX advanced scenery for that region and set my sliders at max. Even in the small format we have to downsize to post, your scenery blew the commercial product away!!

WELL DONE!

Michael

Just for S&GS I made the flight myself. I used the ORBX advanced scenery for that region and set my sliders at max. Even in the small format we have to downsize to post, your scenery blew the commercial product away!!

 

WELL DONE!

 

Michael

Much appreciated Michael!

I have to say Durango seems to be a place Orbx completely overlooked in OpenLC NA, I'm thinking nobody actually looked at it in the sim, they've got irrigation circles where there's desert ITRW and residential areas growing out of the tops of mountains. Nothing like a photoreal to reveal the discrepancies in the landclass, lol. I know the granularity with landclass is coarse af but it's not that coarse. Even Vector wasn't right as Nighthorse lake reflects something from a time before the reservoir completely filled up, which I guess is understandable since they just got the go-ahead on the Ridges Basin dam in 2005 it probably wasn't full when Vector was made (it was completely missing in default FSX & P3D). I ended up fixing that, in clicking out the poly for the new lake I had a hard time with where exactly the shoreline was because there were so many submerged and partially submerged tree crowns in the imagery around the edges, they made it difficult to determine land from water.

If there were a "TrueEarth Colorado" available from Orbx I'm sure my scenery wouldn't have stood up against it, lol. I hope there's not one in the works because I'm thinking about releasing the whole damn state as freeware and that'll probably take some of the wind right out of their "sales" :).

If there were a "TrueEarth Colorado" available from Orbx I'm sure my scenery wouldn't have stood up against it, lol. I hope there's not one in the works because I'm thinking about releasing the whole damn state as freeware and that'll probably take some of the wind right out of their "sales" :).

If you're doing freeware that damn good, I'll certainly "buy it!!" ;):cool:

Jan, apparently I missed your reply, Thank you! :)

Jim