V2 Landscapes (sceneries) : work in progress / intentions

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Jan Oorthuijsen
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Re: V2 Landscapes (sceneries) : work in progress / intentions

Post by Jan Oorthuijsen » Tue Sep 04, 2018 11:06 am

3 more.
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PH-722
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It’s Difficult to Soar Like An Eagle
When You’re surrounded By Turkeys

bluefang
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Location: South East, USA

Re: V2 Landscapes (sceneries) : work in progress / intentions

Post by bluefang » Fri Sep 07, 2018 9:48 pm

I am working on two local (to me - South East USA) sceneries:
  • Piedmont area of North Carolina (currently 6x6 - extends from NC/VA border down to Goldsboro, NC) - for the ultimate flatland soaring experience!
  • Appalachian Mountains of NC & VA (currently designed as a 17x14 scenery - but not sure I will have the time to make it that large - it currently extends from Asheville, NC to Harrisonburg, VA) - but have only textured out about 6 tiles.
Each scenery includes photorealistic aerial imagery along with manually painted textures where needed, hand painted tree placement (uhg) - plus custom designed airports for glider friendly airports.

Here are some screen shots:

*Edit: Updated with higher quality screen shots - file size limitation on this forum was too limiting...

Piedmont:
(The solar farms are actual 3D objects.)

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Falls Lake + Wake Forest, NC
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Last edited by bluefang on Sat Sep 08, 2018 6:17 am, edited 7 times in total.
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Get my scenery on condor.club: RDU-USA (Raleigh/Durham area of NC)

bluefang
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Location: South East, USA

Re: V2 Landscapes (sceneries) : work in progress / intentions

Post by bluefang » Fri Sep 07, 2018 9:50 pm

Appalachian Mountains (Blue Ridge Pkwy) Preview:

These screenshots are of the area around NCI / BRSS - Host of the upcoming Region 4 South SSA Regionals.

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Roanoke, VA
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Get my scenery on condor.club: RDU-USA (Raleigh/Durham area of NC)

Marpilot
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Re: V2 Landscapes (sceneries) : work in progress / intentions

Post by Marpilot » Sat Sep 08, 2018 2:24 pm

I am happy to see scenery developement for Condor 2:)
Thank you all the people doing this!

bluefang
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Location: South East, USA

Re: V2 Landscapes (sceneries) : work in progress / intentions

Post by bluefang » Wed Sep 19, 2018 7:39 am

Here is a preview video of the Piedmont scenery (North Carolina, USA) I am working on. Still have a few tiles to complete as well as few more custom 3D objects to model - but it is coming together. All water and ponds are modeled as water.

Check out the landing (at the end of the video) - to see an example of why I am pleading for better terrain editing support.

Sloped runways are not "officially" supported - but I have managed to get as close to smooth and as close to accurate as possible of the actual runway at this airport. Landing is pretty accurate - unfortunately taking off from this airport, though is possible, looks really wonky - as the tow-plane does not obey the terrain when taking off - when taking off downhill it will "float" above the terrain until the glider starts to climb. If taking off uphill, the tow plane will clip into the terrain until the glider starts to climb. Also, the tow rope is all over the place - and will clip through the cockpit.

I have also been flying a lot without the PDA - as one of the most difficult and intimidating parts I find about flat-land flying is orientation / getting lost. It is so easy to lose the airport - and this is where aerial imagery + trees + custom scenery objects really help with familiarization.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0946E73ktg

Will be sharing the completed scenery soon - if any is interested in some flat-land flying.
Image

Get my scenery on condor.club: RDU-USA (Raleigh/Durham area of NC)

Daveman945
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Re: V2 Landscapes (sceneries) : work in progress / intentions

Post by Daveman945 » Wed Sep 26, 2018 10:29 am

Are there some news about West Germany 3?

bloggerbert
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Re: V2 Landscapes (sceneries) : work in progress / intentions

Post by bloggerbert » Mon Oct 01, 2018 8:52 am

G'day Guys,
I am trying to generate scenery for Benalla, Victoria, Australia for Condor 2. I have downloaded the scenery kit for it but the instructions are out of date. I have downloaded the 15 sets of bil, tif, dt2 files for S34/E144 to S36/E148 and got them into QGIS but I can't merge them. They are 30m/pixel as indicated by the scenery kit. I have downloaded the QGIS software but the only version that I can get is V3.2 and the instructions are incompatible. I can't find where any version 2 QGIS resides. Can anyone advise how to merge these 15 files. I have tried to use 3DEM but the resultant file is too large.
Bloggerbert
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bloggerbert
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Re: V2 Landscapes (sceneries) : work in progress / intentions

Post by bloggerbert » Tue Oct 02, 2018 7:36 am

G'day again Guys,
Okay! I can now merge the sample files for Slovakia. I am getting errors when I am trying to merge the 15 tiles S34/E144 through S36E148. I still get the error when I am trying to merge only two of the BIL files. I may have to process further before attempting the merge.I remember when I was working on Condor1 that I had to fil in some gaps. I will try to resolve this but any help would be appreciated.
Bloggerbert

bluefang
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Re: V2 Landscapes (sceneries) : work in progress / intentions

Post by bluefang » Tue Oct 02, 2018 9:04 pm

I found out the hard way that the latest version of QGIS will not work "out of the box" when following the Condor Landscape Guide. The problem it seems is rooted in the fact that QGIS 3.2 defaults to using "float" data when exporting .bil files, while Condor expects 16bit Signed Ints (which is the default for QGIS 2.18). I spent some time trying to massage the .bil files in QGIS 3.2 to a format supported by the RawToTRN tool, but was not able to get it to work. It seems the easiest option is to just download the "Long Term" release of QGIS - 2.18.

To download the correct version (2.18), go to the QGIS site, select the "Download" button - this will then go to this page:

https://www.qgis.org/en/site/forusers/download.html

From there make sure you select the bottom of the two choices for your platform. It is in the section titled "Long term release (most stable)".

For windows, choose the 32bit or 64 bit standalone installer based on your OS:

QGIS Standalone Installer Version 2.18 (32 bit)
or
QGIS Standalone Installer Version 2.18 (64 bit)
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Get my scenery on condor.club: RDU-USA (Raleigh/Durham area of NC)

bloggerbert
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Re: V2 Landscapes (sceneries) : work in progress / intentions

Post by bloggerbert » Wed Oct 03, 2018 2:16 am

Okay , I've got the raster bil files loaded and merged with QGIS 3.2 but had to use >Layer>ADDLAYER>ADDRASTERLAYER>DATASOURCEMANAGERRASTER>RASTERFILE>Did file selection of the BIL files and the files loaded. I was then able to merge the files into one. I used LAYER>MISCILLANEOUS>RASTER and hit batch. I will continue with this until I can warp to zone South55. Mutter mutter!

bloggerbert
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Re: V2 Landscapes (sceneries) : work in progress / intentions

Post by bloggerbert » Wed Oct 03, 2018 2:20 am

G'day Bluefang,
Thank you for your most welcome input. I have been driving myself nuts trying to get the beast to work. I will follow your instructions as I was unable to find the earlier version of QGIS. I'll let you know how I get on.
Bloggerbert

bluefang
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Location: South East, USA

Re: V2 Landscapes (sceneries) : work in progress / intentions

Post by bluefang » Wed Oct 03, 2018 6:14 am

When merging your initial .bil files, make sure you select the Raster->Miscellaneous->Merge tool from the top menu. This will merge all of your .bil files into a single file. Also, make sure to choose each of your files to merge - merging by directory does not work with .bil files because .bil files are actually multi-file files (they rely on other files for other information).

It is possible that after merging all of your .bil files that the results looks like a flat gray square. If that is the case, double click on the merged layer that was added to your project, click on the Histogram tab on the left side menu, then click on calculate. Then in the min and max fields, set appropriate min and max values based on your histogram (usually 0 for min if you are near sea level, and whatever your max elevation is - I usually add some padding). Then click on the Style side menu item, and set Contrast Enhancement to "Stretch to MinMax". Note that this histogram action and the stretch do not actually change the underlying data of your layer, but only effect how it is rendered. By setting the layer to stretch it will scale the white-to-black gradient over the range of your data instead of stretching it over the entire possible range - which is something like -32768 to +32768 (the values of .bil file pixels are in meters)
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Get my scenery on condor.club: RDU-USA (Raleigh/Durham area of NC)

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Jan Oorthuijsen
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Re: V2 Landscapes (sceneries) : work in progress / intentions

Post by Jan Oorthuijsen » Thu Oct 04, 2018 8:20 pm

My last object, KauKau TV New Zealand.
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When You’re surrounded By Turkeys

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HanSchmid
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Re: V2 Landscapes (sceneries) : work in progress / intentions

Post by HanSchmid » Mon Oct 08, 2018 4:01 pm

Hi,
though i have seen that a lot of people are working in Europe and Germany, i will try to develop a Bavaria scenery. This is the part of Germany where people talk Bavarian, wear a Lederhosen and drink a lot of heavy beer. I included some parts which are obviously not Bavaria, but I want to have Swabia, Thuringja and Saxony also due to the middle range mountains.
I will use the How in the World Textures and try to model a little bit of airports and some Ground Objects. The Scenery will take at least one year to develop.

Greetings from Southern Bavaria
Han Schmid
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Jan Oorthuijsen
Posts: 491
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Location: Utrecht (Terwijde) - Holland

Re: V2 Landscapes (sceneries) : work in progress / intentions

Post by Jan Oorthuijsen » Thu Nov 22, 2018 12:03 pm

Hi all,

I want to start building the popular Omarama V2 (new Zealand) scenery photo realistic, is there someone who already works on this scenery?

Construction time will then last between 1 and 2 years, I want to make the airports as realistically as possible, better than Matamata.


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PH-722
WW
It’s Difficult to Soar Like An Eagle
When You’re surrounded By Turkeys

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