Identifying scenery with trees?

[Capricorne]

Thanks guys -

I wasn't referring to it for photorealistic scenery, just for possibly importing boundaries for trees.

Do you ever come out of your room and see real trees? It seems like you live in an artificial world...

[turner]

Thanks guys -

I wasn't referring to it for photorealistic scenery, just for possibly importing boundaries for trees.

Do you ever come out of your room and see real trees? It seems like you live in an artificial world...

Sorry, I have no idea what you're saying.

[dgtfer]

I think that Capricorne is saying that for high-resolution photo-textures, realistic integration of trees is very difficult, and sometimes the effect is not very pleasant. This problem is not simple at all to solve. One choice may be good for high flight but not so if you are close to the ground, and the problem is not the same with photorealistic textures, especially in very high def like the excellent "Big Pyrénnées", and "synthetic" ones.
And of course, we must remember that creating forests maps needs a huge amount of time.
I think that each scenery maker is free to choose the best compromises and we all can see and appreciate the results.

[turner]

Hi,

"realistic integration of trees is very difficult, and sometimes the effect is not very pleasant."

Surely a less-than-perfect integration of trees is still better than none at all!. Most people flying over an area probably won't know the exact placement of every grouping of trees anyway.

In relation to what it looks like in photoreal scenery, I've never had an issue with it... but I'm not a scenery developer. Photoreal scenery is great, but in my opinion, something "plausible" (as promoted by X-Plane) with objects and trees, combined with some custom landmarks and airports, is pretty good...

For example, for the X-Plane community, someone made an add on (tree lines and farms) that adds tree scenery that is not precise, but very realistic/plausible:



I have no idea if anything like this is possible with Condor, but for me, the exact placement of my house isn't that important, as long as major visual landmarks are there.

[janjansen]

xplane way is the ideal way. Take an openstreet map, generate roads, houses, trees, pastures, textures, .. Anyone can build a scenery. In fact, you dont need to do much more than enter the coordinates.

But xplane is supported by a large company, I dont know how many devs they have, but they have sold at least 100000 copies and a large number of commercial simulator licenses. You cant expect condor, with one part time lead developer to compete with that on scenery toolkit features.

The list of "wants" is very, very long, so I fear advanced tree/building/road/texture generators for sceneries is not something you should expect to happen. Not from condor developers at least. Maybe some day someone will create it for us? Fortunately, you can create your own forest maps if you want to. Its just not nearly as intuitive as I would like it to be. Makes me even more grateful there are so many people who have invested the time in learning the tools and using them to create many wonderful (and sometimes less wonderful) sceneries and providing them for free.

[JBr]

Just one note, if you modify forest map of a downloaded scenery, you won't be able to use it online. The server will kick you out because the scenery will differ from the original one.

[Alanm]

When developing lake keepit scenery I developed a script for GIMP that isolated most of the trees in the sat imagery. This worked well for about 80%, the rest were edited in landscape editor. Saved me 100's of hours.

The script took the image and isolated a range of colour. This was then processed into the veg images that C2 uses. This worked for Australian landscape, but I don't know if it would work elsewhere.

If anybody wants a copy I'll give it to them.

[pstrzel]

When developing lake keepit scenery I developed a script for GIMP that isolated most of the trees in the sat imagery. This worked well for about 80%, the rest were edited in landscape editor. Saved me 100's of hours.

The script took the image and isolated a range of colour. This was then processed into the veg images that C2 uses. This worked for Australian landscape, but I don't know if it would work elsewhere.

If anybody wants a copy I'll give it to them.

I'm very interested.

[Alanm]

Sent via PM

Al

[KipperUK]

Forest maps look much better than photoreal 'flat' trees, likewise I'd rather have a few 3D buildings with a rough idea of what I was flying over, than a photoreal town which looks unpleasant if you get too close.

The problem I have found is that away from towns/buildings and forests, photoreal is just what you want - so now i'm faced with trying to remove traces of settlements and trees from a photoreal map, or generating a completely synthetic map.

I'd kind of go for the synthetic map since the heightmap exists, and it would seem easier to re-draw major roads, railways and rivers but I'm not sure that it's very convincing unless you can spend a great many hours on doing just that and nothing else with your life.

Somewhat of a quandary.

Now there are firms out in some parts of the world that do image processing for very cheap (I don't know exactly how cheap) and that does provide a thought.... "here's a bunch of photorealistic landscape, give me a passable synthetic texture....."

[Andy1248]

Have you produced the forest map for all of North UK?

Jbr guide is best guide for producing synthetic scenery.

[KipperUK]

Not yet, I did the much of the immediate area around Sutton Bank and it does look good, but then I got distracted with building the airfield buildings; caravan park, trailers and cars all added in basic form

The method I used for doing the forest map was to use paint.net and try to select all of the "deep green" associated with trees, not perfect but seems to broadly work, but before I can do that on a tile, I have to stitch the textures together to make each tile texture again from all of the patches (unless you would happen to have the source files).

Then I think the plan has to be to tackle 'planting' the towns, the local landmarks around airfields and turnpoints, and seeing how that all ends up. It's a slow process because work, family, and real life gliding all come first.

[OXO]

Cant you export forest from openstreetmap?

[KipperUK]

Not something I'm familiar with!

[OXO]

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