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A few high-resolution ground textures

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Re: A few high-resolution ground textures

Postby erik » Wed Oct 07, 2020 2:26 pm

vnts wrote in Wed Oct 07, 2020 2:08 pm:Sourceforge shows (link) the first california-grass2.png texture I submitted before your texture matching . I edited that California.xml post and added a second (link) which was a modified version of your darker texture. Shouldn't the second one be used, unless you are going back to the original?

That must have been a misunderstanding then, I thought it was the other way around: the one I have included now was a modified version of mine.

Erik
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Re: A few high-resolution ground textures

Postby vnts » Wed Oct 07, 2020 3:42 pm

Hmm, can you repeat your colour change adjustment on my 1st detiling of the bright texture here (link). If not, maybe I can try to match it.

There is some subtle liney-ness when detiling your darker version - that's hard to get rid of in the darker version without making it unnecessarily uniform - even this texture has some parallel line-ness (v3).

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Re: A few high-resolution ground textures

Postby erik » Thu Oct 08, 2020 7:23 am

One way I have found that did the trick to remove those lines nicely is to copy the current texture into another layer. re-synthesize it and then use the "Lighten Only" blend mode.

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Re: A few high-resolution ground textures

Postby vnts » Thu Oct 08, 2020 10:00 am

That worked nicely to remove lines (v4), but it's a bit brighter needing darkening, and some of the definition of green bits was lost. I also tried manipulating the 1st detiling of the bright image which contains more structure, by rotating the soil colours and darkening to match overall brightness, (v5 Edit: v6) - if this matches the color correction(s) you used then it can be used.

Have not seen the ukcountryside in-sim yet (but I wonder if the textures are used in other places and might clash, will check).
----
Also:
Checked PAJN Alaska, no visible issues (no real change)

Checked OMDB - a reddish tinge in the sand seems brown now. Quick glance at google and instantstreetview confirms the (fairly common) red desert sand is fine [1]. Sandy terrain overall seems darker as well, probably should remain the original lightness. The OMDB results are at the bottom of the album: link.

The landclass block is in question Landmass, SomeSort, Island, Default. By experimenting, the file responsible is california-airport2.png.

Is the intensity goal for deserts to be darker? There are several desert type definitions when text searching the regions folder (some aren't classified as desert like this one). africa_desert.xml, middle_east.xml, UAE.xml probably should have brighter intensity for all textures(?). Maybe it won't clash if the city textures are unchanged (?). The terrain textures all seem to refer to various small PNGs. Rock/sand files also shouldn't change in hue for desert regions(?).

Possible approach:
Maybe the old brighter small files should be restored, have desert appended to the names, and the file names ajdusted to match in material definitions for landclasses in these areas. Depends on the intensity goal, which is something I can't say for sure how it should be. (Boundaries of the regions are edge cases that will clash anyway, so not sure if it matters there's an intensity difference across desert and non-desert regions - it will be more noticeable if the soil on both side is sandy perhaps.)

Looking at this, it reminds me there was some pretty nice, almost complete, WiP desert improvements by hamzaalloush a few years ago (link). There was some some minor rock landclass that was still left to-do or something.

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Re: A few high-resolution ground textures

Postby erik » Thu Oct 08, 2020 10:51 am

vnts wrote in Thu Oct 08, 2020 10:00 am:That worked nicely to remove lines (v4), but it's a bit brighter needing darkening, and some of the definition of green bits was lost. I also tried manipulating the 1st detiling of the bright image which contains more structure, by rotating the soil colours and darkening to match overall brightness, (v5 Edit: v6) - if this matches the color correction(s) you used then it can be used.

Ok I'll take a look.
Have not seen the ukcountryside in-sim yet (but I wonder if the textures are used in other places and might clash, will check).

You can find it around EGPF
Checked OMDB - a reddish tinge in the sand seems brown now. Quick glance at google and instantstreetview confirms the (fairly common) red desert sand is fine [1]. Sandy terrain overall seems darker as well, probably should remain the original lightness. The OMDB results are at the bottom of the album: link.

The landclass block is in question Landmass, SomeSort, Island, Default. By experimenting, the file responsible is california-airport2.png.

Is the intensity goal for deserts to be darker? There are several desert type definitions when text searching the regions folder (some aren't classified as desert like this one). africa_desert.xml, middle_east.xml, UAE.xml probably should have brighter intensity for all textures(?). Maybe it won't clash if the city textures are unchanged (?). The terrain textures all seem to refer to various small PNGs. Rock/sand files also shouldn't change in hue for desert regions(?).

There certainly was no intention to get the deserts darker. So it needs to be fixed somehow.

Erik
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Re: A few high-resolution ground textures

Postby vnts » Thu Oct 08, 2020 1:24 pm

I meant that I had not downloaded from sourceforge and create a new textures folder to test. I had a look at the new intermediately brighter textures, near EGLL they look fine [1].

Going through desert, it's mostly that darker brown texture that gives the impression the new version is dark. The rest of the textures seem similar brightness.

I had a look at South Africa, near killimanjaro, the Congo, East Africa etc. There's no noticeable difference. South America looks ok too, though there are a bunch of regional definitions. I added to the album.

After the darker desert texture is restored, and whatever else (?) is fixed, this might be ready to be cherry picked into 2020 LTS if no-one has any other comments. It's always possible to bugfix any edge cases that slipped through. The album could be linked to the mailinglist if people there want to check.

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Re: A few high-resolution ground textures

Postby erik » Thu Oct 08, 2020 1:58 pm

The darker texture has been restored in FGData.
uk_countryside is only used in the UK custom definitions I found.\

You might want to check the new airport summer definitions (if you didn't already) to see whether this is what you intended.

It seems fine for most summer airports, just not for my local airport. But they use a special mowing scheme to preserve the habitat for some bird types living in the area which have become very sparse in the country.

Erik
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Re: A few high-resolution ground textures

Postby vnts » Thu Oct 08, 2020 3:56 pm

erik wrote in Thu Oct 08, 2020 1:58 pm:It seems fine for most summer airports, just not for my local airport. But they use a special mowing scheme to preserve the habitat for some bird types living in the area which have become very sparse in the country.

The fallback airport keep should be mostly green (not sure what shade of green, but maybe there will be comments once it hits LTS RC or gets released).

More Northern EU airports could possibly use the green/brown summer texture. D-ECHO probably has a better idea. BIKF often seems to have no real grass cover, or a light amount of grass? The green/brown texture seems more suitable. Not sure what's appropriate for continental Europe, but probably varies by country and summer rainfall. Possibly the shade should be more towards a greenish-yellow, and probably people will comment once the topic hits the mailing list.

One thing I noticed is the smaller resynthesised 1024 airport structure texture seems to show a bit of subtle diagonal parallel line (tiling) when viewed close up from certain angles [1]. These aren't the parallel lines along the runway direction that are present in the base texture [2]. This other re-synthesis of structure fixes [3] it: link. There is a negligible amount of tiling left, but resynthesising to make it more homogeneous would probably further break up things like clumps of plant leaves.

Other than that, the overlay scale could be tweaked more I'm using the default 8.0 (16.0 for 1024 texture) - I initially calculated lower 5.0/10.0 but it seemed too big, and not sure about the precise size/scale of grass structure as I didn't take the grass photo and I'm not sure about fov/zoom etc.).

If your country or sizeable region has the same style of airport and summer colours then it should have a keep regional definition that uses that texture.

It is technically possible to create special file just for keep definitions. This would allow possibly small regions and single airports to get their keep definitions without making the other parts unwieldy. This also would affect Greenspaces too in cities too since that seems to be bundled. The file would be called airport-keep.xml and be added it to the bottom of materials.xml. The bottom most entry in materials.xml overrides all the above ones. The whole definition doesn't need to be restated just the changed parts like using a different texture or overlay settings - but that will probably make it harder to track where things are coming from unless all AirportKeep definitions are moved into the new structure. Light concentrations for cities are done this way e.g. "large_cities_illumination.xml". If necessary these XML files could call even more specific area XML files to keep things clean. If single airports are done this way, it's probably important to have some notes with written description of what conditions are like for people working on it in future.

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Re: A few high-resolution ground textures

Postby erik » Fri Oct 09, 2020 8:39 am

Okay, I've updated the overlay texture and also pushed it to 2020.2
I'll leave it at that for now until users have had a chance to look at them.
Thanks for your work and help vnts.

Erik
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Re: A few high-resolution ground textures

Postby vnts » Fri Oct 09, 2020 8:54 am

Edit: I was typing this before you posted, few odds and ends

I see california-grass.png has been updated. My detiled darker version was called california-grass-2.png. The darker version of the california-grass.png still exists. Was this kept for airport keep? I see California.xml was modified to use california-grass-2.png for non-airport keep grass, but cit seems California-grass.png is used for things other than airport keep in UAE.xml and mexico.xml and these should be modified too.

(I'm using a text search utility called astro-grep in windows that displays the context in the file for each search result, but in Linux there is probably builtin commandline tools or diff tools which might do that. This seems to be the easiest way to work with materials.)

----

Since the new smaller 1024 structure files are used for airport keep, replacing the old version, the <overlay_layer_magnification> needs to be doubled to 16.0 for all materials with 8.0. None of them set <overlay_alpha> so the global-summer value holds.

Some materials use the old grass structure set to much larger grass size (lower <overlay_layer_magnification>). Some values were as low as 1.3. Even an 8.0 looks too big. What to do about these?

<overlay_layer_magnification> already set to 16+ is used by definitions with sand and gravel overlays, and these files are fine to leave alone: africa_desert.xml (32.0), africa_mediterranean.xml (16.0), brazil_caatinga.xml (16.0),

<overlay_layer_magnification> set to 8.0: , africa_rainforest.xml , azores.xml,brazil_amazon_forest.xml, brazil_pantanal.xml, jan_mayen.xml, mexico.xml, southeast_asia.xml,

<overlay_layer_magnification> lower than 8.0: ascension.xml (4.0),brazil_pampas.xml (4.0),corse.xml (set grain layer magnification), jan_mayen.xml (0.6),mexico.xml (set grain layer magnification), southeast_asia.xml (4.0), southern_europe.xml (set grain layer magnification), tropical_south_america.xml (set grain layer magnification), global-winter.xml (2.0)

Edit: in corse.xml, southern_europe.xml, mexico.xml, and tropical_south_america.xml: the overlay is used in the n="15" slot. So <overlay_layer_magnification> should be left untouched. <grain_layer_magnification> should be set to 16.0 or whatever.

The old grass structure was based on airport-grass2.png (link. It's a much finer / zoomed out grass type. I think the intention was to try to large display leaf structure which the new grass has anyway. The new grass structure is more appropriate for these tropical areas.

Jan Mayan probably has more moss than grass when it has vegetation at all. So the older grass structure is more appropriate(?).

So the older grass structure file should be kept as it's probably suitable for mossy or bare airport keeps in very northern areas. If this approach is taken then the filenames need to be changed too. I think airport_grass_structure_overlay1.png and airport_grass_structure_overlay2.png is a bit more descriptive than airport_grass_overlay.png as it's unclear what type of overlay this is for newcomers.

----
In azores.xml: the old green (summer) airport-grass-autumn.png is used. Probably airport-grass-summer.png is more appropriate.

The current airport-grass-autumn.png (link) probably should be renamed airport-grass-summer2.png to avoid confusing future people - as there's no use for autumn textures.

In current global-summer.xml (link), airport-grass-autumn.png is called in <texture>Terrain/airport-grass-autumn.png</texture>. That's normally overridden by n="13" for ALS, but maybe it's useful for some other renderers or something as definitions seem to all have a <texture> element that seem redundant. The reference should be changed to airport-grass-summer.png, or otherwise fixed.

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Re: A few high-resolution ground textures

Postby erik » Fri Oct 09, 2020 9:15 am

This isn't working.
Why don't you sent me a zip file with all the proposed changes instead?

Erik
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Re: A few high-resolution ground textures

Postby vnts » Fri Oct 09, 2020 10:07 am

Yep that seems quicker. I'll download the latest FGData and send at least the materials folder.

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Re: A few high-resolution ground textures

Postby vnts » Sat Oct 10, 2020 3:39 pm

I'll play with a bunch of things (including defining airport keeps in greenland, california, correct structure magnification, possibly adding a for control grain alpha, etc.) and send you the files.

I'm working on replacing the airport keep for BIKF/Iceland (instead of using the green generic one), but while it's possible to reproduce the non-summer keep which is bare by mixing textures, the grass&moss in summer needs to match the colour of the base texture otherwise it looks odd. To do this properly it seems that a new 1024 texture is needed, so maybe best to wait until the colours of the keeps and detail gets some feedback or is otherwise finalised. I'll go with the brown-yellow-green autumn variant. Also, Europe other than Mediterranean regions has no keep defined and is just using the placeholder one, so I'll make the placeholder green grass a bit more suitable. (Right now the greens look too saturated/bright for the default summer keep in most places as it contrasts with a lot of the dimmer textures, so I'll reduce that and see what feedback we get. Another issue is the parallel lines are dark in this version whereas they were light in the old summer keep - the darkness makes it look a bit muddy - I may switch that around, as grit_alpha adds dark patches anyway.).

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Re: A few high-resolution ground textures

Postby erik » Sun Oct 11, 2020 8:11 am

It turns out I had forgotten to add the alpha channel to airport-grass-autumn.png and airport-grass-summer.png

You can add them with the following commands:

Code: Select all
convert airport-grass.png -alpha extract /tmp/alpha.pgm
convert airport-grass-autumn.png /tmp/alpha.pgm -alpha off -compose copy_opacity -composite airport-grass-autumn.png
convert airport-grass-summer.png /tmp/alpha.pgm -alpha off -compose copy_opacity -composite airport-grass-summer.png


This changes the color of the texture between summer (June) and autumn (October) for the northern hemisphere (and vice versa for the southern hemisphere). And makes the colors match a little closer.

Erik
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Re: A few high-resolution ground textures

Postby vnts » Mon Oct 12, 2020 2:59 pm

erik wrote in Sun Oct 11, 2020 8:11 am:It turns out I had forgotten to add the alpha channel to airport-grass-autumn.png and airport-grass-summer.png

You can add them with the following commands:

I was using one created for the texture. I tried using 'Colors > Components > Decompose > RGBA' to break it into 4 greysacle layers and then edit it. 'Components > Compose' to re-build. I used 'Colors > Color to Alpha' to make the colors similar to the selected color more transparent, and then messed with 'Colors > Linear Invert' and 'Colors > Levels' to map it into the range of the 'Colors > info > Histogram' for the original autumn which is 200-225 (GIMP 2.10.2 tends to default to perceptual mode when messing with greyscale in all the tools so need to click the little linear icon each time it seems). The final results was this which looks roughly ok when range is expanded and follows the new texture (new). (I think convert is a Linux application?)

As for the summer textures, I experimented with changing the hue of darker areas to be more green and look less brown (muddy) using 'Rotate Colors'.
For now the summer texture has a yellower shade to the lighter areas like the old autumn. I selected the lighter areas by by destaturating to greyscale and saving to a channel, then selecting 'similar colours' by value with a low threshold. I changed saturation to match original airport-grass-autumn.png as the old one was strongly saturated. The bright pixels were also darkened.

Current:
Image

New:
Image

I'm not sure about the final intensity, saturation etc. It would need to be matched to the texture set I guess. I'm not sure about the precise colours, aesthetics, and larger scale detail of the keep. This is an ok summer texture for people to give feedback on.

This is probably more suitable for parts of Europe (europe.xml has it's own regional definition now). A texture with less yellowish hues could be used as the global default.
-----

Here are the changes to the material regional definitions and some new textures compared to the nightly branch: version 1

The textures to add and delete are in a text file. There were some linux line ending issues and changed XML files probably have windows line endings.

There's a changelog to material definitions for 16 issues/misc cleanup/fixes (included in the zip file too): link

BIKF, Iceland, and greenland are using the brown-grey-green autumn airport-grass texture. BIKF probably should be given a separate texture with spotty grass, which can be done after getting some feedback for textures.

----

There are some extra misc controls to airfield/grass effect that would be useful, like grain_alpha or autumn_strength to suppress the autumn effect to reuse textures without needing to create copies. But that should probably not be pushed straight to FGData as it very mildly touches shaders, or maybe it can be discussed in the effects/shaders forum first. I can post a second zip file after adding some controls.

Kind regards
Last edited by vnts on Mon Oct 12, 2020 3:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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