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Pacific Northwest Screenshots

Screenshots, videos, sound recording etc. taken in/with FlightGear.

Re: Pacific Northwest Screenshots

Postby statto » Sun Apr 10, 2011 7:25 pm

Thorsten,

I'm really glad you're enjoying it! This scenery is different from "plug in the CORINE data and fly" as I created it after the Hawai'i scenery, so the toolchain to generate scenery from the US Government land use raster files had matured well by that point. Thank you for the screenshots, they show me this was worthwhile. Also please let me know where you find problems. The Olympics and SRTM-1 elevation are not best friends it seems. There are also some problems with land cover bleeds, probably in TerraGear, problems with centroids I guess.

I am currently re-generating the scenery to include the San Juan Islands and to fix the airport problem.

Kyokohama, I currently am in the process of hand-creating Vancouver scenery.
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Re: Pacific Northwest Screenshots

Postby statto » Mon Apr 11, 2011 1:12 am

Thorsten: If you have a GPL evergreen needle forest texture, I would commit that to GIT as well. The current texture is ... well, strange.

I am uploading a new version of scenery now, including the San Juan Islands.
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Re: Pacific Northwest Screenshots

Postby Thorsten » Mon Apr 11, 2011 10:29 am

Thorsten: If you have a GPL evergreen needle forest texture, I would commit that to GIT as well. The current texture is ... well, strange.


Sadly, I don't - I just decided to ban the evergreen needle forest texture and replaced it by the standard forest texture from the alternative summer textures editing materials.xml - but unfortunately those are not GPL compatible. Maybe simply banning evergreen needle forest, or at least darkening it with gimp would do the trick? It's mainly that the color is very bad...

I'm not really in a position to create a database of pictures for textures like for clouds (clouds can be done from the ground) - but if some folks who regularly fly their own planes could consider simply donating a number of aerial shots of whatever terrain, I think that'd help a lot.
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Re: Pacific Northwest Screenshots

Postby adrian » Mon Apr 11, 2011 11:33 am

Statto, i4dnf has made several dds textures with mipmaps from a couple of my photos. One them is evergreen forrest.
Here it is, seen from close distance: http://ompldr.org/vODdzdA
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Re: Pacific Northwest Screenshots

Postby statto » Mon Apr 11, 2011 9:23 pm

Thorsten, apologies if you thought I was asking you to create a new texture. I just saw the odd green wasn't there in the new photos and thought there may be a fix. I want to keep using that material type in the future.

Yoyo: that looks really nice, is it GPL, and if it is GPL and looks good, may I ask someone to push it to git?

Cheers
John
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Re: Pacific Northwest Screenshots

Postby adrian » Mon Apr 11, 2011 10:22 pm

John, stand by, i4dnf will have a semi-complete texture pack mipmapped and all that, for the most used materials. Most of them are sourced in my photos which I have released into the public domain for this purpose, the rest I don't know but will be most likely GPL compatible.
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Re: Pacific Northwest Screenshots

Postby Thorsten » Tue Apr 12, 2011 12:37 pm

Thorsten, apologies if you thought I was asking you to create a new texture.


No, I didn't think that - it's just... I've come to realize how important textures actually are for the visual impression, and if I had enough raw material (= aerial photographs) to work with, I'd experiment myself a bit, because compared with the sky work, that's fairly easy to do since it all lives on the texture and xml level. I've been trying to get others interested in a coherent texturing effort, but so far not with great success (?). So mainly I just try combinations of various existing textures and edit materials.xml.

So it's not so much that I had the impression you asked me, it's more that I'd like to do it :-)

In other matters: Since you expanded the scenery to the islands, will you expand it even further? Are you limited by available GPL-compatible data or by manpower? It'd be really great to slowly expand one continuous bit of scenery and perhaps also get a few other folks to push for more detailed airports and objects, just as currently happening for Innsbruck.

Apart from the airfields which should be fixed, I haven't seen big problems so far - there are cliffs here and there for which I don't know if the terrain is as steep there in reality (see my screenshot of the valley leading up to Rainier for an example) or the river seems to be interrupted in my last screenshot but that's not really bothersome in any major way - I guess if you manually try to correct all these small issues, you'd be busy for the next 10 years...
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Re: Pacific Northwest Screenshots

Postby Thorsten » Wed Apr 13, 2011 12:06 pm

I've been to the Olympics yesterday, and there appears to be more of a problem.

Big one: Heading 270 degrees out of KRNT, just before the mountains I cross the last stretch of water. There's a big area of rock where my map shows just water.

In the Olympics - couple off minor elevation glitches, some strange rock formations and cliffs - somehow more noticeable than around Rainier.
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Re: Pacific Northwest Screenshots

Postby statto » Sat Apr 16, 2011 12:06 am

I don't think the SRTM-1 data is as good in the Olympics as it is in other places.

There are also some glitches with land cover bleeding - if you follow the Willamette south, it turns into land for a little while.

I can't necessarily control those things, much less vmap0 quality - I would love to be able to do so.

Also, the data set I am currently using is only coastal. I can't go much farther east, but I can go south down to San Diego. The New England stuff is the same data set. There is a national land cover data set but it is not quite as detailed, but still would be useful.

Currently I am limited by my own laptop's crappiness and the web server's quasi-inability to work with grass 7 and Martin's current work to make it easier to get files onto the mapserver, which has caused a backlog of files waiting to get onto the mapserver :)
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Re: Pacific Northwest Screenshots

Postby statto » Fri Apr 22, 2011 4:50 am

Thorsten wrote in Sat Apr 09, 2011 6:10 pm:Image


Image
That second photo as of my camera, last Sunday.

If anyone gets a chance to fly Alaska Airlines... take that chance :)
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Re: Pacific Northwest Screenshots

Postby Thorsten » Fri Apr 22, 2011 2:33 pm

Amazing :-)
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Re: Pacific Northwest Screenshots

Postby Thorsten » Thu May 05, 2011 8:59 am

Statto, I've been experimenting a bit with your dec_evergreen.png texture sheet. I've changed the hue to a less bluish version and increased brightness by 10% to blend it better with the other forest textures - the result is, I think, fairly credible.

Here's a patch of mixed forest without the new texture:

Image

Here's the same patch with your texture being used for evergreen needle forest:

Image

I've been wondering if the size in materials.xml shouldn't be altered from 2000 to something smaller, but I haven't quite made up my mind about that. Also, maybe the tree density should be fine-tuned for best effect... but it's clearly an improvment to the original texture, so I hope someone will commit your version to GIT.
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Re: Pacific Northwest Screenshots

Postby statto » Fri May 06, 2011 4:39 am

From what I can tell, that looks closer to real life. I would try moving the meters down just a bit as it sort of looks like the urban shader. I might also darken it just a very small touch. Thanks for fixing up the texture.

Hopefully someone will merge some of these new textures into git.
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Re: Pacific Northwest Screenshots

Postby Thorsten » Fri May 06, 2011 7:57 am

Do you happen to have good aerial shots of the area? I know textures should work globally and everywhere, but maybe it'd be beneficial to make a blend of textures work for one area faithfully and that may improve also what is shown elsewhere.

Like I often use webcams to see how the weather described by a METAR string actually looks like compared to what Flightgear makes of it - it helps tuning the results to be more realistic.

I've tried 1500 m for the size - that seems to work better. Basically, I guess one of the texture trees should be of the size of one of the actually drawn trees. I'll experiment a bit more and then post a new screenshot...
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