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Homogeneity of local detailed “mini zones”

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Homogeneity of local detailed “mini zones”

Postby GRod » Tue Oct 08, 2019 11:42 am

Hello,

Until now, my use of simulators has been primarily aimed at visual flight with general aviation aircrafts and helicopters. In these conditions the scenery aspect is a very important one not necessarily for the accurate reproduction of a real environment but especially for the likelihood of this environment in relation to its location (buildings, vegetation, roads, forests, ...). The aircrafts used must also be equally realistic in their representation and behavior. Not being a pilot, my assessment on this last point obviously has no value.

Although the latest versions of the simulators on the market, especially x-plane 11 (plus addons) and AFS2, were able to perfectly fulfill "my objectives" it is not easy to penetrate their internal mechanics (by using SDK) to try to understand more closely their functioning. This "easiness", all relative because it is time consuming, exists in FlightGear and that is why I undertook the discovery of this simulator.

There is, however, a point that leaves me a little disappointed and this is related to my practice of so-called classic simulators: it is the representation of the 3D autogen and only this aspect is concerned because the relief and vegetation in FG (mainly forests) are comparable to other simulators.

My concern is relative to local scenes mixing well-represented 3D houses/buildings and 2D spots at the supposed locations of other buildings or textures. I tried a lot of rendering options (shaders,…) without changing anything. I downloaded some “SceneryPack” from SourceForge but realized that TerraSync downloads led to the same result.

With my current settings le LOWI scene is really fine concerning this aspect of the homogeneity of a detailed representation of a local scene not only on the airport but also on the surroundings, the ideal (for me) being an area of about 10 nm around the airport
.
My questions are:
1) which airports have the same characteristic as LOWI in this aspect of the 3D autogen on a mini zone (excepted the presentation scenes) ?
2) There is certainly a way for constructing such “mini zones” but I guess it may be complex and out of my competences.

I’m sorry for being a bit too long and I thank you very much for comments.
Best regards
GRod
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Re: Homogeneity of local detailed “mini zones”

Postby wkitty42 » Tue Oct 08, 2019 12:06 pm

if i'm understanding correctly, your question #1 is asking about other cities with decent real life representation...
check out the areas around london, paris, boston, san francisco, honolulu... mainly the larger ones where the 3D artists have spent the time to create the buildings and objects in the area... FG also switches the default airport for each major release and the new default airports are given some love and attention to build them up and make them look better... since initiating the default airport changes, the following have been shown: Cycled default airports

on your second question, the wiki has information pointing to the tools and methods of creating buildings and other scenery objects and adding them to FG... there's also articles on creating custom scenery but this can be an involved process because of having to process all the necessary data... i don't know any article titles to point you to, though...

this google search might be helpful to you, too... https://www.google.com/search?q=flightgear+wiki+default+airports
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Re: Homogeneity of local detailed “mini zones”

Postby Thorsten » Tue Oct 08, 2019 2:34 pm

Well, the autogen things can in principle be configured for a location, but that never really took off. The strategy these days is mass-generation of buildings using OSM2City which basically creates a replica of every building in a city with building texture locally adjusted - so that tends to be superior to autogen stuff (I believe it has its own autogen mode where no OSM data is available...)

There's various projects in the forum you can use and download - since the involved data volume is rather high, FG doesn't have an official deployment method world-wide, so only Switzerland and Southern UK are currently populated using this technique and official scenery.
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Re: Homogeneity of local detailed “mini zones”

Postby GRod » Tue Oct 08, 2019 6:52 pm

Good evening,

Thank you for the information provided. Another question, however: what is the exact origin of the rectangular spots that often appear in local scenes, even in those supposed to be very complete? If the scene was built from an aerial photo I guess they come from that the autogen was not yet added except in a few places where appears a 3D building that makes it really bizarre.

So this "problem" should disappear with the generalization of the osm2city system?

I downloaded the "osm2city-worldbuild" example containing the e040s20 tile data but did not quite understand how to implement this example.
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Re: Homogeneity of local detailed “mini zones”

Postby Thorsten » Tue Oct 08, 2019 8:49 pm

Another question, however: what is the exact origin of the rectangular spots that often appear in local scenes, even in those supposed to be very complete?


I have no idea what you mean, sorry.
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Re: Homogeneity of local detailed “mini zones”

Postby GRod » Tue Oct 08, 2019 9:30 pm

Hello,
I hope this screenshot will explain better what I'm trying to say :
Image
Best regards
Last edited by Gijs on Tue Oct 08, 2019 9:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Fix screenshot (set ?dl=1)
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Re: Homogeneity of local detailed “mini zones”

Postby wlbragg » Wed Oct 09, 2019 5:22 am

what is the exact origin of the rectangular spots


It is a landclass texture that is supposed to be representing city or buildings. As far as I know the only way to replace it is to change the landcover data and regenerate the scenery. Or you could replace the texture used for that landcover definition with a different texture. But that will replace that texture everywhere it is used.
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Re: Homogeneity of local detailed “mini zones”

Postby GRod » Wed Oct 09, 2019 7:27 am

Hello,
Thank you for the explanation but is it normal to get such display after a TerraSync download. Most of times such displays do not cover a so large area but they are very frequent with smaller size. I was thinking that minimal corrections were done before but I'm discovering the simulator.
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Re: Homogeneity of local detailed “mini zones”

Postby Thorsten » Wed Oct 09, 2019 8:11 am

I hope this screenshot will explain better what I'm trying to say :


That's a city represented by a texture with no configured random buildings or objects - generally looks acceptable only from high altitude.

And yes, it it completely normal to see that - most cities aren't populated with dedicated buildings, and if the autogen is off, that is what you will see.

***

Here's an example of OSM2City scenery - it places buildings and roads on top of the texture underneath, so that they take over visuals as you get closer.

Image

But you have to install this separately, the Wiki is your friend

http://wiki.flightgear.org/Areas_popula ... ty_scenery
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Re: Homogeneity of local detailed “mini zones”

Postby GRod » Wed Oct 09, 2019 10:10 am

Hello,
Thank you very much for answering. What's the name of the city you gave as example ? I think it will be easier to try the installation by using FlightGear 2019.2.0 under linux (created with the d&c script) instead of FlightGear 2018.3.2 under W10 ?
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Re: Homogeneity of local detailed “mini zones”

Postby wkitty42 » Wed Oct 09, 2019 1:47 pm

the installation is the same for all FG flavors and versions... if it is custom scenery, you place it in a separate directory and point FG to that directory so it can find and load the files... otherwise it may already be available from the scenery server and one only need to enable to options for pylons, roads, and buildings in the sim's F10->View->Rendering menu...
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"Why not?" said Gurder.
"Dunno. It's frightened of heights, I guess."
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Re: Homogeneity of local detailed “mini zones”

Postby GRod » Wed Oct 09, 2019 3:27 pm

Hello,
Everything is OK now. I downloaded LKPR and SWISS from osm2city and it looks much more better than before. Thank you for all advises.
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