Board index FlightGear Development Scenery

TerraGear guide on Windows

Questions and discussion about enhancing and populating the FlightGear world.

Re: TerraGear guide on Windows

Postby lomar » Mon Feb 01, 2021 11:27 pm

Notice that not all linear features are supported by genapts!


it would help a lot if there was a list with the lines supported and not supported by Genapts
lomar
 
Posts: 479
Joined: Mon Jun 30, 2014 2:38 am
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Callsign: lomar
Version: nightly
OS: win 10

Re: TerraGear guide on Windows

Postby imaginifico » Tue Apr 19, 2022 4:32 pm

Hello Legoboy,
thanks for Your very helpful tutorial.
I used Your references to include a small aerodrome in the North italian scenery. I downloaded Terragear GUI and all accessories as in the Wiki page, but in the end I failed miserably. So I’m here to ask for suggestion.

My aim is to include a private aerodrome in the neighbourhood of the town of Bologna. The Bologna airport hub (Guglielmo Marconi AIrport) is LIPE, and it is already in FG Scenery. The aerodrome I want to include is the LIKO aerodrome of Ozzano dellEmilia (http://www.flyozzano.com/), at the East of Bologna. That is a very beatiful and small but very busy airport for flight school, refuelling, and private airplane sheltering. It is much more utilized than other small airports already modeled in FG but not equally “crowded” at all. I don’t know because it is not present in FG.

The WED file for LIKO exists for X-plane. Anyway I decided for the moment to draw a very simple sketch of the airport in WED, with just runway and helipads. This to avoid errors in the airport sketch import by the Terragear GUI.

I tested the airport with procedure in the Wiki, that excludes some scenery files, and it worked.

Assuming that the WED file is correct, I started to prepare the Terragear GUI.
I’ve downloaded Terragear and Terragear GUI executables as indicated in the Wiki page, and the required version of gdal12.dll, msvcp71.dll, msvcr71.dll files. All was OK and the GUI started properly.

LIKO aerodrome is inside the N44E011 tile, but the GUI requirs also the data for the N45E012 tile.

Then I downloaded both. I run the Elevation Data tag.

The 2 files appeared then in the SRTM-3 folder.

Also the other SRTM-3 elevation data appeared inside the work folder.

After that, I have downloaded the landmass data that You indicated. The download was OK and I exctracted with QGIS only the polygon relative to the N44E011 tile. The polygon was then saved as the new shapefile for landmass, as You suggested.

After the elevation data, I imported the airport data from the WED exported file, called LIKO.apt. The import operation was OK.

After the Landmass shapefile, I downloaded CORINE LAND COVER files and exctrated the shapefiles of the layers that are included in the previous N44E011 tile.

I exctrated about twenty of shapefiles from the CORINE LAND COVER files. I decided to not download instead the OSM shapefiles. This because they are no more available at the link. For the moment I omit to include streets and roads for the small area that I am going to model. But let me know if there is something wrong in this action.

Once all the shapefiles were exctracted, I stepped over the Materials tag page of the GUI. I’ve retrieved all the shapefiles and the data folder appeared to be filled correctly.

I set in the GUI all the Materials as indicated in the Wiki page for the CORINE material mapping. I left line width box empty, because it is automatically set to 10 by the GUI. Two materials I did not find in the pop-up menù. These were Shrub and Transport and were included manually by me. These two materials are included in the CORINE mapping on the Wiki page.

I’ve also seen that materials like Roads and other that You showed in Your tutorial are not present in my available materials list. What’s the problem with that? The version of FG that I’m using? Currently my PC has the 2.12 version in it, that is an old one.
Moreover to the Shapefile airports I’ve associated the Material “Airport”. Is that correct?
Anyway, decoding of shapefiles had taken some minutes but finally ended. In the command window appeared for the command ogr-decode the message “—continue-on-errors”. What does it mean? Is it good or bad?

The work folder appeared with ll the shapefiles correctly included.

Assuming that the decoding was OK, I’ve stepped to the Construct page. I reported the list of the Terrain Types in the default_priorities.txt file, moving the Default material to the end of the file. After that I clicked on the Generate scenery button. The blue colored bar went almost immediately to 100%, but in the output folder of the project I could not find anything.

I’ve read on the forum and on the Wiki that this result is due probably to a incorrect result in the decoding of the shapefiles and bad definition of the layers geometry.
Unfortunately, on my own, I can not find the solution to the porblem.

Do You have suggestions, if You please? Did You find something wrong n what I’ve odne til now?
Thanks in advance for the support and the job You have done.
imaginifico
 
Posts: 12
Joined: Sun Mar 28, 2021 5:08 pm

Re: TerraGear guide on Windows

Postby legoboyvdlp » Wed Apr 20, 2022 1:49 pm

When the blue bar goes to 100% immediately that generally means that you've included a shapefile which is not contained within default_priorities.xml. See the very last part of this post:

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=35618#p346886
User avatar
legoboyvdlp
 
Posts: 7981
Joined: Sat Jul 26, 2014 2:28 am
Location: Northern Ireland
Callsign: G-LEGO
Version: next
OS: Windows 10 HP

Re: TerraGear guide on Windows

Postby imaginifico » Mon Apr 25, 2022 7:33 am

Hi Legoboy,
thanks for Your fast reply.
I've checked all the default_priorities.xml file rows and tried different orders of priorities in it, but nothing happened.

I have a couple of doubts in the tracing of shapefiles.

When extracting shapeflies from CORINE, should the area that they cover be all included inside the area contained by the landmass polygons I selected? Does the same argument applies to the DEM (SRTM-3) files and between shapefiles and DEM files?

I ask this because some of shapefiles are so big that they fall outside of the landmass polygons.

Do You know some other check to do on the shapefiles?

I do not receive any indication of error form the GUI.

Thanks a lot again.
imaginifico
 
Posts: 12
Joined: Sun Mar 28, 2021 5:08 pm

Re: TerraGear guide on Windows

Postby legoboyvdlp » Tue Apr 26, 2022 8:41 pm

It's usually preferable to crop the shapefile polygons, it's not strictly necessary but it can simplify / speed up the data processing.

They do not have to be within the landmass polygon. Don't crop them inside the boundary of the landmass, because otherwise you'll be missing data. Crop them as much as you can, just don't delete the data that's inside the area you want to construct!
User avatar
legoboyvdlp
 
Posts: 7981
Joined: Sat Jul 26, 2014 2:28 am
Location: Northern Ireland
Callsign: G-LEGO
Version: next
OS: Windows 10 HP

Re: TerraGear guide on Windows

Postby imaginifico » Sun May 08, 2022 9:02 pm

Hi Lego.
Finally I did it.
I think that the problem was in the CORINE material mapping from the WIki page.

I found that some material cited in the Wiki are not applicable inf my FG version.

I have excluded many of the materials from the polygon not necessary to my small scenery, and others I changed. Then, the Terrain folder appeared with the result.

For example, instead of the "Transport" material, I have chosen the "Road" material applied to the "Trasport" shapefile of the CORINE land cover and it worked.

The airport is perfectly visible in the scenery.

Thanks a lot for Your suggestions.
imaginifico
 
Posts: 12
Joined: Sun Mar 28, 2021 5:08 pm

Re: TerraGear guide on Windows

Postby Lester-Boffo » Tue Jun 28, 2022 4:29 pm

@imagnifico. There's this little known airport near Bolzano called Lochar-Sarentino, It's also private and doesn't even have a ICAO from what I can tell..

Video of approach and landing.

Last edited by Gijs on Tue Jun 28, 2022 5:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Fix video
Lester-Boffo
 
Posts: 150
Joined: Mon Apr 18, 2022 9:44 pm
Pronouns: Me/Hey You!
Version: 2020.3[4]
OS: Win10

Re: TerraGear guide on Windows

Postby r.allen » Wed Jun 29, 2022 4:15 pm

Hi Lego,

Thank you very much for the guide, it is proving very useful. I am looking to add Spaceport America to FlightGear. I have been trying to do this for a number of days now, and the lack of up to date resources has proved slightly frustrating, so the guide is a bit of a godsend.

I am stuck trying to generate the elevation data. I have downloaded the relevant HGT files (N32-33, W107-108), so 4 files, and put them in Project/data/SRTM-3. When I click generate, the data is processed, but I am not seeing a new 'work' folder appear anywhere. I have tried different data sources, and a fresh install of Terragear GUI, but neither has solved the problem. This means when I go to generate my airport file, it kicks off about no elevation data. I believe my apt.dat file is working fine (at least, it is in x-plane).
Any advice? If you'd like to see logs just let me know.

Furthermore, as I am aware that elevation data isn't essential to proceed, I have generated relevant shapefiles in QGIS. As the terrain detail doesn't matter to me much, I have only created files for the airport itself, and a nearby lake and town. The rest of the scenery I have just created as one scrubland shapefile. I have then been able to load them into the 'Materials' tab in the GUI and assign some appropriate materials. When I decode and apply, it seems to work correctly, although I could be incorrect on that. Finally, when I go to the 'Construct' tab, and select 'Update list', nothing happens. Am I missing something? Any advice is appreciated.

Many thanks,
Robbie
r.allen
 
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Jun 29, 2022 3:55 pm

Re: TerraGear guide on Windows

Postby TheEagle » Wed Jun 29, 2022 10:23 pm

Maybe I'm talking nonsense, but from what I know TerraGearGUI is pretty much broken - you've got to use the command line. Are you on Windows or Linux ?
Cessna 210 (Wiki)
My other aircraft: my wiki profile !
Other: FGTools (GitHub)
World tour: View on SkyVector
Please consider donating $1 / €1 to help me finance a new camera !
User avatar
TheEagle
 
Posts: 3413
Joined: Sat May 01, 2021 3:27 pm
Location: France
Pronouns: You, he
Callsign: F-EAGLE
IRC name: none
Version: Git next
OS: Ubuntu Studio 22.04

Re: TerraGear guide on Windows

Postby r.allen » Thu Jun 30, 2022 8:48 am

Ah that's great haha, on Windows. Suppose I'll have to do some digging if that's the case.
r.allen
 
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Jun 29, 2022 3:55 pm

Re: TerraGear guide on Windows

Postby imaginifico » Thu Jun 30, 2022 3:04 pm

Hi Lester-Boffo.
Nice suggestion.
Sorry but I do not exactly catch what You are triyng to tell me.

If the message is a bit out of topic, write me a private message and I will answer to You for the better.

Bye
imaginifico
 
Posts: 12
Joined: Sun Mar 28, 2021 5:08 pm

Re: TerraGear guide on Windows

Postby wkitty42 » Thu Jun 30, 2022 4:48 pm

imaginifico wrote in Thu Jun 30, 2022 3:04 pm:Sorry but I do not exactly catch what You are triyng to tell me.

he was just telling you about another small airport... one that doesn't even have an ICAO... that's all, AFAICT...
"You get more air close to the ground," said Angalo. "I read that in a book. You get lots of air low down, and not much when you go up."
"Why not?" said Gurder.
"Dunno. It's frightened of heights, I guess."
User avatar
wkitty42
 
Posts: 9148
Joined: Fri Feb 20, 2015 4:46 pm
Location: central NC, USA
Callsign: wk42
Version: git next
OS: Kubuntu 20.04

Previous

Return to Scenery

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 8 guests