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To save a national park...

Questions and discussion about enhancing and populating the FlightGear world.

Re: To save a national park...

Postby Thorsten » Mon Oct 15, 2012 5:16 pm

I copied the settings from the tropical South America zone, with the coordinates in a separate file. Is that preferred?


It looks more elegant at least... and is probably easier scalable once we get many more regions.

Speaking of which - once you're done tinkering with your part of the world, please submit to GIT...
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Re: To save a national park...

Postby sa7k » Mon Oct 15, 2012 5:38 pm

Yes, my intention was to submit it to git, at least while there aren't many regions because it's mainly for the trees and the random buildings. The main problem which cannot be resolved with this is that is mostly one landcover everywhere, so it needs other kind of work too.
http://mapserver.flightgear.org/map/?lon=-54.49519&lat=-26.70528&zoom=9&layers=B0000000TFFFTFFTFFFFFFFF
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Re: To save a national park...

Postby ot-666 » Mon Oct 15, 2012 5:43 pm

The Atacama looks a lot better with your magic applied :D

I had a look to the Antarctic and the continent could use (beside new terrain with elevation data) some better textures too.
Would it be possible to use something like the random trees / buildings to place iceberg’s and drift ice in the ocean depending on season and region?

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Re: To save a national park...

Postby Thorsten » Mon Oct 15, 2012 6:15 pm

Would it be possible to use something like the random trees / buildings to place iceberg’s and drift ice in the ocean depending on season and region?


I think the standard random object code will do just fine for icebergs (provided you have models for them...), the primary reason we need something special for trees and buildings is that there's so many of them in a realistic scene, so we need shader magic to be especially efficient.

For drift ice I think one could cook up something like the snow effect, just for water, so it'd go with the snowline. I'm not sure if I can cook up a good function to do that or if it needs an overlay texture.

The main problem which cannot be resolved with this is that is mostly one landcover everywhere, so it needs other kind of work too.


Well, how should it look like? Do you have any aerial shots which show what we'd be aiming for?
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Re: To save a national park...

Postby AndersG » Mon Oct 15, 2012 7:34 pm

Thorsten wrote in Mon Oct 15, 2012 6:15 pm:I think the standard random object code will do just fine for icebergs (provided you have models for them...), the primary reason we need something special for trees and buildings is that there's so many of them in a realistic scene, so we need shader magic to be especially efficient.

For drift ice I think one could cook up something like the snow effect, just for water, so it'd go with the snowline. I'm not sure if I can cook up a good function to do that or if it needs an overlay texture.


Standard random objects do work for icebergs. I did a small add-on for just that years ago.
At that time I had to add icebergs to all oceans and use some Nasal and a select animation to turn them on/off.. but with the new regional materials that is no longer a problem. The iceberg models could certainly be improved but my old stuff is all here (and it is GPL):
http://www.gidenstam.org/FlightGear/OceanImprovement/

Some icebergs at Svalbard in 2007. FlightGear visuals have improved some since.. :)
Image
(Another Svalbard one: http://sleipner.gidenstam.org/users/anders/FlightGear/.images/Arctic/fgfs-screen-104.jpg)

Cheers,

Anders

PS.
Here are some primitive regional materials for the North Atlantic isles (mostly just removing random vegetation trees): http://sleipner.gidenstam.org/users/anders/FlightGear/north_atlantic.diff
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Re: To save a national park...

Postby sa7k » Mon Oct 15, 2012 8:43 pm

Thorsten wrote in Mon Oct 15, 2012 6:15 pm:Well, how should it look like? Do you have any aerial shots which show what we'd be aiming for?

It would be mostly like this
Image
Image
(from simplementevolar.com)
with lots of implanted pinetrees.

But there are some areas, mostly national and provincial parks, that are like this
Image
(from flickr)
all with the same landcover.

Do you think I should handle it with many areas of regional textures?

Edit:
This is how it looks with your tropical south America changes, which is perfect for the national parks.
Image
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Re: To save a national park...

Postby Thorsten » Tue Oct 16, 2012 8:28 am

Do you think I should handle it with many areas of regional textures?


No :-( If something is classified as the same landcover but looks different in reality, we can use regional texturing to distinguish it only if we're talking about 150+ km sized chunks of scenery which are well separated by some unchanging landclass (making Kauai looking different from Hawaii Big Island works that way because there's ocean inbetween). But we can't do irregularly shaped small-scale structures that way, that needs edits in the landcover.

We can create look A, we can create look B, but not both of them on demand for the same landclass. Are they actually the same landclass on the server, or are they really two different landclasses which are just merged by materials.xml?

Another thing which occurred to me: I designed and tested the scheme essentially on Canaima - which is a fairly small region, and assumed it'd improve the look of things roughly everywhere in the jungle-covered (= bright green on satellite pics) part of South America, and based on that I chose the geographical limits. I am fairly ignorant about how scenery is like across most of South America, so it may be that these limits are too large and there's scenery which looks very bad with them, or that the limits can be expanded to cover a larger area. So feel free to play around with the size of the region - if it can cover more terrain to good effect, that's nice.
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Re: To save a national park...

Postby Thorsten » Tue Oct 16, 2012 8:43 am

Tinkering a bit with the overlay textures gives the desired more redish hue...

Image

... what a splendid desolation this place is...

Image
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Re: To save a national park...

Postby Thorsten » Tue Oct 16, 2012 8:46 am

Here are some primitive regional materials for the North Atlantic isles (mostly just removing random vegetation trees):


Well, how do you want them to look? Do we aim for something like the Falklands?
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Re: To save a national park...

Postby AndersG » Tue Oct 16, 2012 2:57 pm

Thorsten wrote in Tue Oct 16, 2012 8:46 am:
Here are some primitive regional materials for the North Atlantic isles (mostly just removing random vegetation trees):


Well, how do you want them to look? Do we aim for something like the Falklands?


My main impression from my very limited sampling of the area (a bit of Iceland, Greenland and most of the Shetlands - all in summer time) is one of fairly green grass, heather and for Iceland lava fields - old ones covered by lichen and more recent ones brown to black (IIRC there is a land class for lava fields). I'll dig into my photo archive when I get home - but an image search will probably give as good an impression. I might have something that could be useful for textures, though.

Cheers,
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Re: To save a national park...

Postby Thorsten » Tue Oct 16, 2012 4:42 pm

Let's do Iceland and Greenland properly then - as islands, they're the idea target for regionalizing. I'll have a look at a few images, if you can find anything which makes a good texture, additions to the library are always welcome. Also, I'll have a look at these icebergs. The advantage of a Nasal solution is that we could increase their density continuously as we go farther north, whereas regional texturing would suddenly switch them on.
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Re: To save a national park...

Postby sa7k » Tue Oct 16, 2012 7:19 pm

Thorsten wrote in Tue Oct 16, 2012 8:28 am:No :-( If something is classified as the same landcover but looks different in reality, we can use regional texturing to distinguish it only if we're talking about 150+ km sized chunks of scenery which are well separated by some unchanging landclass (making Kauai looking different from Hawaii Big Island works that way because there's ocean inbetween). But we can't do irregularly shaped small-scale structures that way, that needs edits in the landcover.

I supposed that, I'm already trying to get free sources for better landcover.
Thorsten wrote in Tue Oct 16, 2012 8:28 am:We can create look A, we can create look B, but not both of them on demand for the same landclass. Are they actually the same landclass on the server, or are they really two different landclasses which are just merged by materials.xml?

I can't show now because the server says the db is under maintenance but I'm pretty sure it's the same landclass (same color in mapserver).
Thorsten wrote in Tue Oct 16, 2012 8:28 am:Another thing which occurred to me: I designed and tested the scheme essentially on Canaima - which is a fairly small region, and assumed it'd improve the look of things roughly everywhere in the jungle-covered (= bright green on satellite pics) part of South America, and based on that I chose the geographical limits. I am fairly ignorant about how scenery is like across most of South America, so it may be that these limits are too large and there's scenery which looks very bad with them, or that the limits can be expanded to cover a larger area. So feel free to play around with the size of the region - if it can cover more terrain to good effect, that's nice.

I think it represented quite well what we have here, and I would guess also paranaense jungle in Brazil, except for the random buildings so for that I copied your changes and added the buildings part.
I think the worst thing here in south America is getting free imagery sources and non existent land cover sources like CORINNE.
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Re: To save a national park...

Postby AndersG » Tue Oct 16, 2012 8:29 pm

Thorsten wrote in Tue Oct 16, 2012 4:42 pm:Let's do Iceland and Greenland properly then - as islands, they're the idea target for regionalizing. I'll have a look at a few images, if you can find anything which makes a good texture, additions to the library are always welcome. Also, I'll have a look at these icebergs. The advantage of a Nasal solution is that we could increase their density continuously as we go farther north, whereas regional texturing would suddenly switch them on.


Ah, not quite - they are/were random objects that are switched on/off by a Nasal script that monitors the user's location. To fine-tune the density one would need to make different iceberg types be selected by different properties (or different values of the same property) - to progressively show more and more of the different types. It could be done, though.


I don't have much of a bird's view of anything but I have put some images here to give an idea of what that tiny part of Greenland I have seen looked like. It is an extension of an old collection of images in that directory - that's why the selection is a bit varied.. and most are from Greenland despite the directory name.
http://www.gidenstam.org/FlightGear/.images/Iceland/
It may have felt greener than it actually was too.. :)

Cheers,

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Re: To save a national park...

Postby macnab » Mon Oct 22, 2012 2:14 pm

Excuse me asking a stupid question, but which file do you edit to add regional textures?

EDIT: Its materials.xml :D
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Re: To save a national park...

Postby Ernest1984 » Thu Nov 29, 2012 1:29 am

Today i found this image file here on forums:

Image

Don't you guys think that the trees are too big? Me thinks!
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