Räyskälä WGC 2014 landscape : Patch for v1.1 available!

[Kekelekou]

Update 26th February 1835 ECT :

The landscape and its v1.1 patch (improved airfields for EFNU, EFLA and EFOP) are available at CondorClub : https://www.condor.club/viewscenery/242/?id=532



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Hello!

After my modest Kanta Häme scenery, I have bit the bullet and been working on a larger map that covers all the tasks flown during the 2014 World Gliding Championships in Räyskälä, Finland.
The scenery is 11x10 tiles which is enough to fly all the tasks with a sufficient margin with the map boundaries.

The imagery was collected through is the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service’s Very High Resolution mosaic (through the proposed WMS in QGIS). The creation of a Condor2 map is well within the CLMS terms of use (https://land.copernicus.eu/terms-of-use)
The mosaic is advertised as 2m/px [not 2,5], but due to the heavy post-processing (by Copernicus) required to get rid of the clouds and to uniformise the colours, the rendering is definitely not that sharp.

I am done with all the textures work (pictures in the next few days). Forest and thermal maps will follow soon.

I will reuse the Räyskälä EFRY airfield model from Kanta Häme, of course, along Hyvinkää EFHV and Forssa EFFO. Bur since the main point is reenacting the Räyskälä centered competitions, I will not design new « complex » airfields with asphalt, paintings and grass polygones. For the time being.

So stay tuned for updates! (and for some pictures too )

[Kekelekou]

Soooo, here are two maps showing the extension limits of the landscape :

2FEA6474-303C-4447-8F9A-1F273B0393BC.jpeg

EA7149B6-39C5-4212-819B-5FFB35D52F88.jpeg

The green line depicts the flyable zone.
The « not that square » look is due to the fact that Finland is located North of the 60th parallel, so even if the North and South sides of the map are the same length, the projection distortions do have an impact.

[Kekelekou]

And two screenshots to give you an idea of the imagery quality :

From 1500m MSL :

Shot83.jpg

And from 1000M MSL :

Shot84.jpg

Not the top notch quality of some other landscapes, but definitively no showstopper as far as I am concerned.

[6266]

That looks very good, thanks for the pictures. That's my 10m/px landscape from 1000 m height

10m.jpg

Do you have a description to share, how to get the texture? I'm using the description from soaringtools.org, where a maps downloader is used. I believe you use a very different method. I would like to try to replace my textures with your source.

Thanks for your answer

[6266]

Hm, I'm a little bit irritated. Found maybe the source you use

https://sdi.eea.europa.eu/catalogue/srv ... 4c130deffe

Last sentence: Due to license restrictions, VHR Image Mosaic 2012 is only available as a web service (WMS), and not for data download.

But you downloaded it via WMS. WMS is ok, downloading not? They don't make it easy to understand ...

[Kekelekou]

Hello Peter!

Your link to the EEA is blank.

I got the WMS address from the following link (web services tab) :

https://land.copernicus.eu/imagery-in-s ... -colour-2m

I think I can use the WMS data for Condor since the Copernicus’ terms of use state that :

Terms and Conditions applicable to data and products of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service

The Copernicus component is governed by Regulation (EU) 2021/696 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 28 April 2021 establishing the Union Space Programme and the European Union Agency for the Space Programme and repealing Regulations (EU) No 912/2010, (EU) No 1285/2013 and (EU) No 377/2014 and Decision No 541/2014/EU. Within the Copernicus programme, a portfolio of land monitoring activities has been delegated by the European Union to the European Environment Agency (EEA) and the DG Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. The Copernicus land monitoring products and services are made available through this website on a principle of full, open and free access, as established by the Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) No 1159/2013 of 12 July 2013.

Free, full and open access to the products and services of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service is made on the conditions that:

When distributing or communicating Copernicus Land Monitoring Service products and services (data, software scripts, web services [highlighted by me], user and methodological documentation and similar) to the public, users shall inform the public of the source of these products and services and shall acknowledge that the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service products and services were produced “with funding by the European Union”.
Where the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service products and services have been adapted or modified by the user, the user shall clearly state this.
The user has all intellectual property rights for the products he/she has created based on the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service products and services.
Users shall make sure not to convey the impression to the public that the user's activities are officially endorsed by the European Union.

https://land.copernicus.eu/terms-of-use

So using the mosaic for the ground textures does look permitted as long as the CLMS is credited appropriately.

[Kekelekou]

And you are correct, I don’t rely on the process described in the Soaring Tools tutorials.
- The mosaic is added as a WMS in QGIS
- Topographic data (land use areas, roads, railways…) are imported, reprojected ans clipped as needed
- A grid is created so that each cell corresponds to the required tile (or patch)
- The « print as atlas » function creates all the tiles/patched as per the grid layout

I then rename all printed files with a simple batch file.

This works with all required files : ground textures, water alphas, forest maps, depending on the displayed layers.
Since the coastal waters are white on the mosaic, I had to write a simple GIMP script to select all white areas on the bmp and to bucket fill them with dark blue.

[6266]

I'm in holiday on the boat now, will look at the link when I'm back in a week. It's blank here too, checked it at home where it worked. Strange

[6266]

on the phone your link shows a 2m mosaic from 2018, haven't seen it on the pc before. My link is to a 2,5m mosaic from 2012. So your text is surely more actual

[Kekelekou]

I mixed things up with the resolutions. The one used for this landscape is the 2018 VHR mosaic in 2m/px from the Land Copernicus Monitoring Service.
I have just corrected my first post.
Thanks Peter, happy and safe sailing!

[6266]

After a very lazy day with a lot of reading about making landscapes with QGIS I think I have understood a lot in theory, to do it in practice remains. Thanks to all for all hints so far. The description and method from soaringtools is very helpful, because you get a landscape. When I first read the landscape guide from the Condor download side I didn't understood anything. But now after making the first landscapes and knowing more about all the things to do, it was nearly easy to read. Can't wait to try it in practice ...

That is not a critic on the landscape guide. I know how difficult it is to explain something. It's so easy to explain too much and too less. After reading it today again I think it's written nearly perfect. Thanks for that too

[Kekelekou]

You are right that the landscape tutorial is quite intimidating at first glance. It’s very detailed as it should to allow beginners to complete the scenery, what is the main point of the tutorial.
I do think that a quick overview of the different elements (height maps, textures, forests, etc) and of the successive steps to model a landscape would help to follow up the process. You can easily lose the big picture when you get deep into details.

Anyway, back to Räyskälä 2014 : I am fine-tuning the forest maps. Their resolution is pretty poor, so many trees end up in the water of the many many lakes. On top of that, the topographic vector data for coast line don’t match the mosaic background on a few spots, so more manual adjustments required.
When all coastal mismatches are fixed, I’ll reexport as bmp files the water vector data with a thick, black outline which will trim all the trees that are too close to the lakes.
The GIMP plug-in by Shamit Som comes in handy : I’m modifying it so that altered sXXXX.bmp files can be imported and merged with existing .for maps.

Then adding the general aviation airfields (without any 3D item) will be the last step. The recycling of the airfields from Kanta-Häme was a walk in the park thanks to Marc Till tools!

Stay tuned!

[Kekelekou]

Sooooo, forest maps done! Hurray!
The process was a bit complicated as mentioned above :
- On the few locations with large errors, the forest maps are manually reworked with GIMP and Shamit "solidxsnake" Som's Condor2 utils Python script
Regarding the general issue of trees standing just on the wrong side of the shore :
- in QGIS : all vector water bodies are filled in black and outlined with a 0.3dot black line. This outline makes the water bodies on the forest maps slightly wider than what they really are, hence erasing all misplaced trees. All 1760 patches are exported as 512px PNG files.
- A fairly simple GIMP script is run in batch mode to replace all white pixels in the PNG files with transparent ones.
- Shamit "solidxsnake" Som's Python script for GIMP was (very) painstakingly adapted to my needs : load each FOR file, import the corresponding PNG file on top of the FOR, merge the visible layers and save the result.

I would have liked that the "trials and errors" phase of the script writing was shorter, but I am really pleased to have achieved what I wanted to do : finding a way to export all forest maps without losing manual modifications made on a few FOR files. I am pretty sure it was longer than just reexporting maps from sXXXX.bmp with the LandscapeEditor and fixing the large errors again, but hey! never too late to learn new skills and to enjoy the "I did (partly) myself" feeling.

It's all downhill from now on!

Stay tuned!

[6266]

Very interesting to see the different ways to solve the same challenges. Thanks for sharing it

[Andy1248]

viewtopic.php?f=37&t=18847

Peter this link to heroiclemon guide is a very good guide to using Qgis and grids/atlas.