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Australian scenery project updates

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Australian scenery project updates

Postby frtps » Sat Jul 27, 2019 9:31 am

An Australian scenery project was set up on Gitlab last month. Here is a quick list of what is now available and what progress has been made. The gory details are available in the issues tracker.

Available

* Executable script (in Julia) for building arbitrary-size terrain tiles using a combination of OSM, ViewfinderPanorama and GeoDataBase data with ALUM (Australian Land Use and Management Classification) codes.
* Textures for bush (ie EvergreenBroadCover) terrain and sandstone cliffs
* Partially improved regional materials specification for south-east Australia (work in progress)
* Two eucalypt trees

Some issues solved

* Cliff down to sea level near Katoomba - fixed error in cliff height calculation in terragear
* Moved Sydney Opera House back to rightful position
* Changed lake and reservoir extraction to use GDB datasource as ogr2ogr didn't recognise the closed areas

Many more issues
See the issues tracker.

Milestones
Two milestones dreamt up: Sydney International Airport (YSSY) up to Flightgear default airport standard; basic regional definitions for all of Australia

Contributors
One (me). All welcome.

Two gratuitous screenshots related to the above work

Image
Warragamba dam: Sydney's main water supply

Image
Dawn over Katoomba.
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby legoboyvdlp » Sat Jul 27, 2019 1:21 pm

Nice work on the cliffs in particular!
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby wlbragg » Sat Jul 27, 2019 4:56 pm

Oh, we so need a modern world scenery build, this is nice though. I suppose the entire continent could be updated and added to the current world scenery including in the terrasync repository. That would be a lofty but wonderful goal.
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby frtps » Sun Jul 28, 2019 6:16 am

legoboyvdlp wrote in Sat Jul 27, 2019 1:21 pm:Nice work on the cliffs in particular!


Thanks. The cliffs are still just a single texture derived from a photo of these very cliffs. I would like to at least get the full texture + overlay + detail +grain + dot thing happening, but that requires a little tweaking of the shader, which (1) calculates overlay noise in terms of lat and long (not up + along the cliff) and (2) varies on scales that are too large for cliffs, which do not suffer from tiling at large distances because of their relatively small vertical extent and constant change in direction.
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby frtps » Thu Oct 03, 2019 3:18 pm

Here's a short update for the last couple of months:

  • Developed a Grass script for converting raster vegetation data to areas with smooth boundaries (see line 134 of the linked Julia script)
  • Created Australian summer grassland and dry pasture texture squares from CC-BY QImagery aerial data
  • Completed definition of Australian summer natural landcovers

These are all available from the project pages.

First image: showing how the raster step (100m square raster) is almost completely removed: this is a 6km square around Port Hacking (blue), south of Sydney, showing different types of vegetation as different shades of green.
Image

Second image: looking west from Wollongong airport (YWOL). This demonstrates the new summer grassland and dry crop landcover textures. The fields aren't usually this brown in summer in this part of Australia, but further inland they are. I've been experimenting with putting trees along watercourses, looks a bit more realistic than a bare stream. All of these landcover shapes were derived either from OSM or the rastered vegetation data.

Image
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby radi » Fri Oct 04, 2019 11:01 am

That is looking amazing! Really like the trees along watercourses!
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby Thorsten » Fri Oct 04, 2019 11:39 am

Yes, this looks pretty nice!
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby frtps » Mon Nov 04, 2019 1:49 pm

A short update:

With the discovery that CC-BY-SA imagery is not compatible with FlightGear, I've generated new summer textures for dry crop from CC-BY-4.0 imagery. Here's a screenshot of rural Western Australia using these textures, which replace the brownish ones in the previous post (ie less drought-stricken).

Image
Looking WSW from YBOP.

Plans for the rest of the year

  • Generating a 2x2 degree section of Australia (NSW or WA) and uploading it for Christmas: I'm thinking the area around Sydney would be good.
  • Finishing the summer landcovers
  • Getting an Australian regional materials definition into fgdata together with the new textures.

Anybody out there with an interest in Australian scenery is welcome to contribute in whatever way they feel most comfortable. Just go to the project page and have a look at ideas for contributions.
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby merspieler » Thu Dec 05, 2019 5:37 pm

Too bad, that I've found this just a few days after I left Australia...

I'd be really interrested in the FNQ (Cairns) area...

If you need a powerful machine to run bigger generation tasks on (assuming, you generation methods are well fitted for multi threading), let me know.

Oh... and if you'd like osm2city for your "Christmas release", let me know as well ;-)
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby frtps » Sun Dec 15, 2019 1:36 pm

I've just finished a 4-tree swatch of eucalyptus trees. Unfortunately none with snow on them. Here is a screenshot showing how they look in the landscape:

Image

I'll submit them as an update to fgdata "presently", if nobody sees any obvious problems. They are available for download in the textures/Trees subdirectory of the australian_scenery repository.
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby frtps » Wed Jan 08, 2020 1:54 pm

Some demonstration terrain to show where we're at in the project has been posted to a special Gitlab repository at https://gitlab.com/flightgear_australasian_scenery/demo_scenery. The scenery covers a 2x2 degree area around Sydney airport (YSSY). As it is all automatically generated there may be all sorts of issues, fly around and let us know! See instructions in the repository for how to install and some ideas for scenic flights. I think you will need a Google/Gitlab/Github/Twitter/Bitbucket login in order to access it. The scenery is quite detailed, so you might have some trouble with low-end graphics cards. I somehow manage with an integrated intel GPU.

Also provided is a set of new materials for Australia as a whole and for the south west/south east corners, which you are welcome to install separately from the demo scenery. These are still a work in progress but I think better than the default. Note that the demo terrain includes some relatively new materials (e.g. Cliffs) so you will want to install the new materials if using the new scenery.

For those who are a bit vague about how scenery works, if you install this scenery you can fly in and out of the area (YSSY etc.) as usual. FlightGear will seamlessly switch to stock scenery at the boundaries, although there might be "steps" in the terrain at the edges (haven't checked).

At some point this will be updated with osm2city buildings courtesy of merspieler. Also, after a few months we will probably switch the demo to some other piece of Australia, so download it while you can.

Below are some before/after pictures.

Image
Stock scenery and materials

Image
Roughly the same view, new scenery and materials

Image
Looking towards Sydney International (YSSY), stock scenery

Image
Looking towards Sydney International (YSSY), new scenery and materials
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby merspieler » Wed Jan 08, 2020 3:01 pm

Looks awesom... but... there's still the flickering texture (like i reported before) when flying towards the blue mountains... and streets ;-)
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby vanosten » Wed Jan 08, 2020 4:04 pm

Wow, that really is motivating to also keep pushing osm2city
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby frtps » Thu Jan 09, 2020 9:45 am

merspieler wrote in Wed Jan 08, 2020 3:01 pm:Looks awesom... but... there's still the flickering texture (like i reported before) when flying towards the blue mountains... and streets ;-)


Would you mind posting a lat/long and view direction with instructions on how to duplicate this? I've never seen it in my flights around and unfortunately I didn't have the exact Cairns scenery on my laptop so I haven't reproduced that other issue yet. While it might indeed be a problem with the scenery, it might also be possible that the integrated graphics GPU was having trouble holding all textures in memory (if you are using integrated graphics). Also, if you did not have the new textures installed then one of the street material types and the cliff material would not be defined, and so could appear strange.
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby merspieler » Thu Jan 09, 2020 12:24 pm

I've got the latest textures and definitions...

Coords: 33* 55' 16.6"S, 150* 42' 08.5"E

Big black areas in addition to the flickering landcovers (video)

It's unlikely that it is due to intgrated GPU is overloaded as it affects always the same part.
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