How to add realism to a landscape?

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Soarhead
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Joined: Sun Aug 29, 2021 8:04 pm

How to add realism to a landscape?

Post by Soarhead » Mon Dec 27, 2021 4:47 am

I'm a newbie to C2. Please forgive my ignorance. So far, I've flown two landscapes, the Slovenia 'scape that comes with C2, and the Tucson 'scape. I live in the Tucson, Arizona area. The mountains and forests in the Slovenia landscape are quite realistic. There are 3D-appearing buildings in the towns. The Tucson landscape on the other hand, particularly the forested areas in the mountains, look nothing like the reality. And, buildings appear flat, as in an aerial photo shot from directly overhead.

I apologize to the guys who created the Tucson landscape, as I'm sure it was a lot of work to create, and it is very useful. I thank you! I'm not trying to be critical, just well informed.

My questions are:
Is the level of realism merely a function of the available imagery, or are there operations the landscape builder performs that influence the degree of realism?

Would it be possible to improve the forests in the Tucson landscape using available tools, and is there a way to submit such mods to Condor Club?

Thanks and Happy Holidays!
Waid Reynolds

bluefang
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Location: South East, USA

Re: How to add realism to a landscape?

Post by bluefang » Wed Dec 29, 2021 3:59 am

There are basically 2 different ways to "paint" the texture of a landscape. You can use procedurally generated textures that approximate the look and feel of an area, or you can use satellite imagery which is just that - satellite images that need to be carefully scaled, translated, rotated to match the coordinate system used by Condor.

I am pretty sure that the Slovenia imagery is procedurally generated - or much of it is some type of repeatable but slightly randomized texture.

Both trees and 3D buildings have to be manually placed by the landscape builder. The Slovenia landscape makes use of a small set of building types that are copied and pasted in a way to mimic the look and feel of Slavic towns. Likewise, all airports have to be manually modeled in a 3D program and manually placed at each airport location (unless you don't care about having smooth grass or asphalt runways).

The Slovenia landscape has a lot of detail because it was created by the authors of the program and by its nature, the creators are getting paid for that work. All other landscapes, except those few commercially available, are created by landscape builders on their own free time. It doesn't matter whether you are using procedurally generated textures or aerial imagery, creating a landscape takes A LOT of time and effort. Adding details like 3D buildings and proper placement of trees, exponentially increases the amount of effort needed.

Sometimes you can get help from publicly available data sets, for things like tree / forest coverage - but at least in the US, these data sets are not that accurate and if you don't do any manual editing, you end up with trees in lakes, trees on roads, and trees in many other odd places.

If you have free time, and are somewhat familiar with image editing software like Photoshop / GIMP - you could reach out to the Tucson landscape creator and offer to help fill in the gaps by painting tree masks - it is quite labor intensive, but at least for a place like Tucson, tree areas are rather easily distinguishable from other "green" areas on aerial imagery. For my scenery (RDU-USA) - there is really no easy way to automate the process of trees - as differentiating between trees, swamps, farms and low lying brush is very difficult.

So, in short, as it currently stands, creating landscapes is not only computationally difficult, but also massively labor intense.

Hope that helps,

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

Soarhead
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Re: How to add realism to a landscape?

Post by Soarhead » Tue Jan 04, 2022 6:30 am

Bluefang, thanks a bunch for your clear and concise explanation. That was exactly what I wanted to know. I suspected that adding features such as trees, buildings and airports to a landscape is extremely labor intensive. You confirmed that.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Waid

Soarhead
Posts: 9
Joined: Sun Aug 29, 2021 8:04 pm

Re: How to add realism to a landscape?

Post by Soarhead » Tue Jan 04, 2022 7:27 am

Hey BF, I downloaded RDU. Wow -- phenomenal job! Very impressive! Any idea how many hours went into creating this? It has to be huge!

Thank you!

Waid

bluefang
Posts: 85
Joined: Thu Jun 11, 2015 2:55 am
Location: South East, USA

Re: How to add realism to a landscape?

Post by bluefang » Sat Jan 08, 2022 3:46 am

A long time... from not knowing anything to final landscape was over a year...

Creating a repeatable workflow to get images from EarthExplorer (USGS web site for US data) -> qGIS -> Condor - probably 2-3 months (a lot of this was just learning qGIS - the mapping application used to process satellite data).

RDU is only 6tiles wide x 6 tiles tall - but that is 36 total tiles. Each tile is about 1GB of compressed image data - which usually takes overnight to download from USGS. The process of performing computations of merging all images and doing the translation from image coordinate system to Condor's takes about 8 hours per tile. The computation and processing of each tile takes about 50GB of HD space - so you need a lot of HD space. but once the computation is done, you can erase the intermediate data.

The super labor intensive part was color correcting the satellite imagery. It is possible to end up with some images taken at different times of the year, and with different imaging settings - and they look really different than other parts of the scenery - and trying to get everything to color match takes a lot of trial and error. Some landscapes are lucky to not have to deal with this - and many just don't even take the time to color correct for mismatched color data.

Painting of tree masks - probably takes about 8 hours per tile - which is obviously too monotonous to do all at once - so a little bit here and there whenever I was bored.

3D modeling of objects - probably a good entire weekend for each airport (if the airport had custom buildings and custom runways) - but my 3D modeling skills are not super strong.
Image

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

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EDB
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Re: How to add realism to a landscape?

Post by EDB » Sat Jan 08, 2022 4:19 pm

You forget the thermalmap...
And GUI/PDA maps.

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