Photorealistic scenery tutorial

Everything related to creation of new sceneries for Condor...

Moderators: Uros, OXO

pstrzel
Posts: 328
Joined: Sat Sep 08, 2012 2:02 am
Location: Utah

Photorealistic scenery tutorial

Post by pstrzel » Mon Jun 30, 2014 2:45 am

Hi all!
I have been asked by few people to share some of the methods I used to create my scenery. As I was learning the process myself, I took notes with each successful step. After some revisions I'm now happy to share my notes in a form of a simple tutorial. Unfortunately, it doesn't go into the creation of forests, thermal maps, or airport objects. At that point, I wasn't diligently writing things down anymore so as not to be distracted. I hope you nevertheless find it useful. You can view and download it from here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxvG7U ... sp=sharing

Cheers!
Last edited by pstrzel on Mon Sep 01, 2014 5:51 am, edited 1 time in total.
Image

brking546
Posts: 9
Joined: Mon Mar 19, 2012 4:18 am

Re: Photorealistic scenery tutorial

Post by brking546 » Wed Jul 23, 2014 4:13 am

I have downloaded the necessary landsat images but the band 80 images are 4 times the size. Do I resize them or are there others that can be used.?


Thanks

Bill

pstrzel
Posts: 328
Joined: Sat Sep 08, 2012 2:02 am
Location: Utah

Re: Photorealistic scenery tutorial

Post by pstrzel » Wed Jul 23, 2014 7:42 am

They are supposed to be 4x larger. Use them as they are with the smaller R/G/B bands. Pan-sharpening works by combining smaller color bands with a higher resolution 80 band image.
Image

seisdude
Posts: 9
Joined: Tue Dec 10, 2013 11:37 pm

Re: Photorealistic scenery tutorial

Post by seisdude » Thu Jul 24, 2014 5:29 pm

Thanks much for the info as I have been stuck for a while trying other methods. Question: Will all these different programs run on windors 7?

Thanks in advance,
ks
Image

brking546
Posts: 9
Joined: Mon Mar 19, 2012 4:18 am

Re: Photorealistic scenery tutorial

Post by brking546 » Fri Jul 25, 2014 2:49 am

I was able to get it to work by reducing the size by 1 pixel. The instructions has the size of the RBG as 1/2 the P80. This seems to work but the colors are a bit dark. I am guessing I can brighten that up in GIMP.

Thanks for your help. Now on to the next step. :)

pstrzel
Posts: 328
Joined: Sat Sep 08, 2012 2:02 am
Location: Utah

Re: Photorealistic scenery tutorial

Post by pstrzel » Fri Jul 25, 2014 5:53 am

seisdude wrote:Thanks much for the info as I have been stuck for a while trying other methods. Question: Will all these different programs run on windors 7?

Thanks in advance,
ks
Yes, I did all my work in Windows 7 64-bit.
Image

seisdude
Posts: 9
Joined: Tue Dec 10, 2013 11:37 pm

Re: Photorealistic scenery tutorial

Post by seisdude » Mon Jul 28, 2014 4:38 pm

Hi PY,
Great work on Utah. I had a chance to fly it a bit this weekend. I am try to do something similar for Northerm Michigan. There seems to be a lot of different data available. I have found Digital Orthophoto Quads. Would you recommend these? They are from 1998 in MrSID format. It would be a lot of Quad even for one county.

Thanks,
ks
Image

pstrzel
Posts: 328
Joined: Sat Sep 08, 2012 2:02 am
Location: Utah

Re: Photorealistic scenery tutorial

Post by pstrzel » Tue Jul 29, 2014 1:36 am

seisdude wrote:Hi PY,
Great work on Utah. I had a chance to fly it a bit this weekend. I am try to do something similar for Northerm Michigan. There seems to be a lot of different data available. I have found Digital Orthophoto Quads. Would you recommend these? They are from 1998 in MrSID format. It would be a lot of Quad even for one county.

Thanks,
ks
Hi seisdude,
I don't see why you couldn't use them if your computer can handle the amount of data. What I worked with was 1 meter resolution for the entire state of Utah in MrSid format, so I started by downloading 250 Gb of data.

You can download all quads you need and then open them all in Lizardtech viewer (freeware) and the software will tile them for you into one preview image. Unless you have special commercial Lizardtech software (expensive!) to work with MrSid files, you'll need to covert those to TIFF before proceeding using my methods.

I was a little vague in my tutorial on how to do that, but basically you need to use the free Lizardtech viewer to take overlapping snapshots of your scenery area and save each as a TIFF file. Lizardtech will only save files less than 4 Gb, so you need to play around with the zoom level until you can take a snapshot that's as large a file as possible but less than 4 Gb.

If I recall correctly I had to zoom in to about 3.4% and took dozens of overlapping snapshots of 3.7 Gb each. Once you have all those TIFF files you can proceed to using GDAL to re-stitch the scenery to your defined boundaries and resolution. Enjoy!
Image

seisdude
Posts: 9
Joined: Tue Dec 10, 2013 11:37 pm

Re: Photorealistic scenery tutorial

Post by seisdude » Tue Jul 29, 2014 3:51 pm

Hi PY,
Thanks again for your help. I have gotten to the point I can fly my "ghost scenery" but am having trouble getting FWTools2.4.7 and fusion.py. Just says page can't be displayed when I try to download. Somehow I managed to get FWTools Shell OK and fusion.py but just in a txt. Are there other links available or can you provide those utilities?

Much appreciated,
ks

Turns out I have FWTools2.4.7 it was just buried deep in windows. The only piece left is copying fusion.py. I only see it in notebook as .txt file. If you could help with that I think I'll be off and running!

Thanks again,
ks
Image

pstrzel
Posts: 328
Joined: Sat Sep 08, 2012 2:02 am
Location: Utah

Re: Photorealistic scenery tutorial

Post by pstrzel » Tue Jul 29, 2014 6:56 pm

seisdude wrote:Hi PY,
Thanks again for your help. I have gotten to the point I can fly my "ghost scenery" but am having trouble getting FWTools2.4.7 and fusion.py. Just says page can't be displayed when I try to download. Somehow I managed to get FWTools Shell OK and fusion.py but just in a txt. Are there other links available or can you provide those utilities?

Much appreciated,
ks

Turns out I have FWTools2.4.7 it was just buried deep in windows. The only piece left is copying fusion.py. I only see it in notebook as .txt file. If you could help with that I think I'll be off and running!

Thanks again,
ks
I would recommend that you install FWTools into C:\FWTools2.4.7 directory rather than "buried deep in windows". It will make things easier for you since you'll be doing some work inside that directory.

Regarding fusion.py, you just need to open the link in the tutorial. The file fusion.py opens in the browser so all you need is "Save Page As" and place it in FWTools2.4.7\tools directory. To be honest with you I didn't even find it in my directory, so I think that I ended up not using it in my final process. Perhaps it's necessary for the Landsat RGB image pansharpening process. I don't recall anymore. It certainly won't hurt having it there.
Cheers,

PY
Last edited by pstrzel on Sun Aug 03, 2014 3:37 am, edited 1 time in total.
Image

seisdude
Posts: 9
Joined: Tue Dec 10, 2013 11:37 pm

Re: Photorealistic scenery tutorial

Post by seisdude » Tue Jul 29, 2014 7:07 pm

Ok. I saved it to tools (still a .txt) and moved everything to \programs. Wish me luck!

Thanks,
ks
Image

pstrzel
Posts: 328
Joined: Sat Sep 08, 2012 2:02 am
Location: Utah

Re: Photorealistic scenery tutorial

Post by pstrzel » Tue Jul 29, 2014 9:21 pm

Just rename to .py
Image

seisdude
Posts: 9
Joined: Tue Dec 10, 2013 11:37 pm

Re: Photorealistic scenery tutorial

Post by seisdude » Thu Aug 07, 2014 11:59 pm

Hi Py,
Had to drop back and use Landsat...Orthoquads for MI are not pieced together well. Have made it to gdalwarp but when I type info in and enter it just gives me the usage information. Does the Scenery_mosaic.tif need to be somewhere other than \bin. Also in the command line, I don't understand the +45 and -45 for the x and y's. Do I add/subtract from coordinates?

Thanks,
ks
Image

pstrzel
Posts: 328
Joined: Sat Sep 08, 2012 2:02 am
Location: Utah

Re: Photorealistic scenery tutorial

Post by pstrzel » Sun Aug 10, 2014 5:32 am

seisdude wrote:Hi Py,
Had to drop back and use Landsat...Orthoquads for MI are not pieced together well. Have made it to gdalwarp but when I type info in and enter it just gives me the usage information. Does the Scenery_mosaic.tif need to be somewhere other than \bin. Also in the command line, I don't understand the +45 and -45 for the x and y's. Do I add/subtract from coordinates?

Thanks,
ks
Scenery_mosaic.tif stays in your \bin directory. You add and subtract from the values in your Scenery_name.hdr file. It's just a text document, so open it in Wordpad and use those values.
Image

seisdude
Posts: 9
Joined: Tue Dec 10, 2013 11:37 pm

Re: Photorealistic scenery tutorial

Post by seisdude » Wed Aug 13, 2014 3:50 pm

Still stuck trying to run gdalwarp. I get ERROR:4 scenery_mosaic.tif is not recognized in file system and is not recognized as a valid fileset.

Thanks much. Just about to throw in the towel.
ks
Image

Post Reply