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Buildings 2021-22 Your location? Have a camera?

Questions and discussion about enhancing and populating the FlightGear world.

Re: Buildings scenery 2021 What's your location? Have a came

Postby Volador » Wed May 05, 2021 10:02 am

Hi pb321, Welcome to the mini project and thank you for representing the US - you're first from the area (I think)! I'm going to give some more details soon for everyone, together we should be able to make a noticeable difference to the building textures in the sim.
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Re: Buildings scenery 2021 What's your location? Have a came

Postby portreekid » Wed May 05, 2021 10:52 am

Volador wrote in Tue May 04, 2021 10:10 pm:
portreekid wrote in Mon May 03, 2021 11:19 am:I'm in Leipzig, Germany . If you look at most of the OSM2City screenshots you'll see work by me.
https://gitlab.com/osm2city/osm2city-data/-/commit/4b356edede44b96e1ddeed4908c1b93f34e4f1f9
Wow five years. I'm afraid I don't actually have the time, but I just wanted to point you towards existing data.


Portreekid, this is great work :) the plan will be to get some updates from around the world and integrate then into flightgear :D


As you see from the directory structure my original plan was also to have regions, but that sadly panned out.
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Re: Buildings scenery 2021 What's your location? Have a came

Postby Volador » Wed May 05, 2021 11:24 am

Portreekid - just PM'd you - we should aiming build on what you've done here
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Re: Buildings scenery 2021 What's your location? Have a came

Postby Isi_C » Thu May 06, 2021 11:45 am

Hi Isi_C - great! Are you happy to share the region? or you can say what type: town/city/countryside


Currently based in Yorkshire but may eventually relocate to south west England, so able to cover industrial and local countryside - happy to collaborate with other contributors
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Re: Buildings scenery 2021 What's your location? Have a came

Postby Volador » Thu May 06, 2021 2:15 pm

That's great Isi_C, thank you. Variety is a good thing if you can manage that.

I'll share a little more with everyone at this point to try and keep the momentum. Those of you with photography knowledge, please add points you feel will help us:

We need a variety of buildings in your area: roofs, houses, apartments, flats, shops, industrial units. Try to go for standard/common types of buildings (fancy architecture will be easy to spot if it's used in different places in flightgear)

OK, top tips for your new flightgear texture photographs:

1. It's got to be a cloudy day (or buildings / roofs that are in the shade)
2. Get as square on as possible (position yourself directly in front of your scene as best you can, not off at an angle). Extreme perspective angles will not work well, flat or nearly flat images work best. Looking down from bridges or apartment balconies can get great shots of roofs and tiles, take care and use a camera strap :)
3. Use a longer lens on your camera if you have one or zoom in. For mobile phones, digital zooms work differently so avoid using digital zoom. Do leave a bit of space around the building in your picture (but see the part about exposure)
4. Use manual exposure if you know how, for mobiles it might be possible to 'raise' exposure - watch out for automatic settings reducing your exposure especially if there is some sky in the picture (this can cause the texture to be too dark). Avoid HDR (High Dynamic Range settings)
4.5 [edit] forgot this one - set your 'white balance' manually if you know how or on mobiles set to daylight/shade or cloudy. This will help get accurate colours on your device.
5. Get as clean an image as possible. This can be quite tricky when cars/people/trees get in the way) but use your judgment and take the photo if you think there is a part of the picture we could duplicate to clean up the texture and hide the obstruction.
6. Massive bonus: If possible take the exact same picture at night too (you might need a tripod as the slightly longer exposure times required introduce motion blur)

There is no reason you can't start now or this weekend (if it's cloudy) :) we'll also need to release photos under creative commons (CC0 would be best) but we'll get to that and also decide where we can upload our textures for the next part of the process.

Roofs
Houses / rows
Apartment blocks
Flats
Shop fronts
industrial units

Please keep us all updated here about how you get on with your photographs of buildings or if you need some more tips just ask.

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Re: Buildings scenery 2021 What's your location? Have a came

Postby Volador » Fri May 07, 2021 5:44 pm

This is what the random scenery looks like at the moment:

V12 wrote in Sun Oct 04, 2020 8:14 am:Random buildings density compare
FG 2019.1.2 :

Image

Location :
Old Quito (SEQU), model shader switched off in both cases for better buildings visibility. Same scenery from Terrasync, building-density parameter set to 10


The first part of this mini project we will be updating and creating new regional definitions of this bitmap... later we hope to be contributing to the other world scenery with all the resources we build up.

Image

This file sits in Flightgear/Data/Textures/buildings.png There are actually only two for the entire globe at the moment, a generic one (this one) and one for the Caribbean. We can create one for each part of the world you are in - The inportant thing is to match the layout of the doors windows and texture breaks with your new photos so we don't break the visuals in Flightgear. Have a go in Gimp or Photoshop with your photographs but as this is quite low resolution I suggest doubling the size (Scale Image 200% in Gimp) so the dimensions will be 4096x4096 while you work on it. We'll down-sample to 2048x2048 for use in Flightgear. Down sampling also has the benefit of getting a better result than working at 2048x2048 in the first place. If you're not confident about tiling brick textures etc just post your photographs and someone else can have a go. I'm going to see if we can upload to a shared GitHub or similar - I'll update everyone.
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Re: Buildings scenery 2021 What's your location? Have a came

Postby wlbragg » Fri May 07, 2021 8:11 pm

Hi Volador, I just briefed through this post. I can provide some Central USA images, both city and rural of building facades. Unfortunately I have no time for much processing but would be willing to take the time to gather the raw resources. If interested, let me know when and if your ready to proceed and I can start gathering. I think this is a really valuable project and we need more projects like this.

Edit: Potentially some low altitude drone images of rooftops as well.
Kansas and Ohio/Midwest scenery development.
KEQA, 3AU, KRCP Airport Layout
Intel i7/GeForce RTX 2070/Max-Q
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Re: Buildings scenery 2021 What's your location? Have a came

Postby Volador » Fri May 07, 2021 11:27 pm

Hi Wlbragg, that's great you're going to contribute from your neck of the woods - I know that Vanosten (I'm working with him and he's guiding me on aspects of this) is keen to get hold of roof textures so that would be a big help, thank you. There will be a short delay before we finalise the repository for everyone's images but it will be coming soon so get snapping everyone :D

While I write, if there are any coders (Gimp can be scripted I understand) out there who can see a way of semi-automating the generation of these regional bitmaps (to match the current layout) do chime in! We could tailor the textures for so many regions that way.
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Re: Buildings scenery 2021 What's your location? Have a came

Postby Ysop » Sat May 08, 2021 9:37 am

Nice idea, nice project!

Smartphones seem to be perfectly alright for the pictures taken.
Often the internal image processing works for the best impression, not for a natural reproduction. So it might be worth experimenting with the settings, until you have a neutral image.
This mainly refers to colors, white balance and contrast.

For those, whose camera delivers such, it is of course possible to go through the complete raw-editing process, but this is definitely not a must.
It will not always be possible to be exactly square to the object and it might be necessary to do small repairs. For such things I often use snapseed on the mobile (would love to recommend a true open source app...)

My area does seem to be covered already, but certainly I'll be able to contribute.
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Re: Buildings scenery 2021 What's your location? Have a came

Postby Volador » Sat May 08, 2021 7:44 pm

Good points Ysop. Everyone, do your best to turn off all the filters and 'enhancements' and HDR settings etc. If the pic looks less vibrant then that's a good thing.

You can fix perspective in Gimp (guide here) but hopefully you won't need to be this extreme.
https://gimplearn.net/viewtopic.php?t=1421
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Re: Buildings scenery 2021 What's your location? Have a came

Postby Oswald » Thu May 13, 2021 5:42 pm

Hi Volador,

I didn't quite get it. Could you post an example of a well done picture?
Would you want us to post images or rather to create a .png with gimp like the one in Flightgear/Data/Textures? Is there a "Howto"?

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Re: Buildings scenery 2021 What's your location? Have a came

Postby Volador » Thu May 13, 2021 6:20 pm

Hi Oswald, all,
It would really help if people created their own for a region *but* I suspect we'd have to have some quality control (or standards eg in the UK there are around 27 courses of bricks for a 2 meter high wall (2m is standard door height)) and you are right there should be a how to (or an example) before you start spending time on post processing. I'm still waiting on others to get access to a repository to keep all our images centrally. In the meantime I've tried creating an image similar to that png but the resolution is so low we'd loose lots of detail. A developer has told me we could double the res of these regional texture 'maps' but I'm also suggesting we double the facia and roof sizes too (for example brick work becomes viewable as bricks). If you're still with me it would mean we get half the facia area on double the bitmap size but with more contributions this could really enrich the scenery and have more variation on building type according to land-use data (OSM and other sources) for example.

Here's a section of the texture bitmap doubled in res and the facia area doubled also (note the brick now distinguishable) (note widows need to be changed as this is just a test) ...and yes, if you're that close to a building maybe you're parked/flying too close/low but on buildings near airports etc it will add to the feel.

Image

In answer to your question, please hang in there for the example template and please do keep taking pictures whenever you get the opportunity. I suspect we could share a Gimp and Photoshop template quite easily (with guidelines set) for those who wish to populate them but I just need to run the proposals past the developers first to make sure we get it right. It's taking a little time but please do keep snapping ...on a cloudy day :)
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Re: Buildings scenery 2021 What's your location? Have a came

Postby pb321 » Thu May 13, 2021 6:47 pm

Agreed, templates would be very good. I'm confused about the layout of the .png. Those shown so far are for multi-story buildings. What would one look like for a simple one-story house, for example? And are we trying to get several combinations of textures for a single structure (i.e. several colors of siding and/or windows for a house type) on one .png?
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Re: Buildings scenery 2021 What's your location? Have a came

Postby Volador » Fri May 14, 2021 7:42 am

pb, the layout is currently strict and allows the code to decide on an area of the png to use for a building facia also weather or not it can repeat (tile) on the x or y axis. So for a 2 storey building the metadata for the building will indicate this (or guessed based on the building footprint) the code will know to only take the first two rows (which will be a set number of pixels). I hope that makes sense. Deciding pixels per meter needs to be set as a standard.
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Re: Buildings scenery 2021 What's your location? Have a came

Postby Volador » Sat May 15, 2021 4:43 pm

Work in progress, here are two of my pics (I hereby release as CC0 if you want to use them). I couldn't fit the whole building in one - notice how I've placed the lamppost in front of a solid part of the building which will make it easier to remove than if it was in front of the windows. Use multiple angles if you have tricky subjects or waiting for traffic and people to move out of the way etc.

Use lots of guide lines in your photo editor to line up the horizontal and vertical features of your texture. You may also need to apply lens correction if you notice the image is bulging (pillow effect) . If you have a perspective filter you might try that too - in this example the windows at the top will be shorter because they are further away from the camera. Here I'm using Distort in an old Photoshop version.

Image

Image

Image

A further step would be to make the texture tile, those interested in finding out how to do this should look at the offset filter.
Later, once we have agreed pixels per meter with the developers and the format of the regional texture map we can just scale our flattened textures in to the regional textures.
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