Scenery Tools available! [Old / For FC2]

[Blaze]

From the looks of that updated Nevada in Beta 02, I'd say so! ;)

[luckybob9]

Since so many people are asking about how to create runways and use the assemblescenes program, I have created a tutorial with a voiceover that should help. I recorded it yesterday but I need some time, (hopefully only a few days), to merge the video files with the audio file. The tutorial assumes that you already have the ground mesh created.

 

Included in the tutorial will be:

 

Assigning textures to the mesh

making sure/ verifying that the dummy/ helpers are linked to the mesh

verifying that the part that the runway on is flat

exporting the lsa2

exporting the .rn file by only selecting the spline and nothing else

exporting the .sup file by only selecting the only part

copying all the files into the correct folders

editing the assemblescenes.cfg with the correct information

running assemblescenes.bat to compile the .scn file

deleting the current .scn and replacing it with the one that has been newly created

and testing it ingame

 

Here it is. Quick notes. For now, do not create your own runway spline. Merge the existing one from the runway example file on the Wiki page and then move, resize, rotate as you wish. Second, always use the debug version of the plugins.

 

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql8lTUO1pSY

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M31_2-U-QI

[59th Ducky]

Here it is...

 

THX:thumbup:

[Blaze]

THANK YOU LB!!! :beer:

[Pirke77]

THNKS :)

[59th Ducky]

Here it is...

Pls send link usable assemblescenes apllication for FC2.

 

Thx

[Blaze]

Edit: Thanks again!

[luckybob9]

Pls send link usable assemblescenes apllication for FC2.

 

Thx

 

 

:)

assemblescenes.rar

[aaron886]

Wicked! Nice job and thank you.

[lanshad]

:)

thx

 

[luckybob9]

Oh, misread your quote. I do not know if it works for FC2 directory. I only have this version. Use FC1 directory.

[SilentEagle]

Wonder if anyone can think off the top of their head what might be wrong with my method.

 

I feel like I've missed something. I have a 40km terrain tile i want to test in game. It's in max with textures applied, dummies linked, semantics=land, material=surface&noise, and textures placed in the temp textures folder. It looks like it exports fine, but the terrain doesn't show up visually. I just run into the side of an invisible mountain.

[luckybob9]

Did you replace the current .lsa2? Did you place you aircraft in the right spawn point to test? Are textures in temptextures and not testtextures?

[SilentEagle]

yes, yes, and yes

[luckybob9]

Please email me your source files and output files.

[cctoide]

I've been trying to get into the terrain creation workflow for a while now. I first started a few months ago and then got frustrated with it, as the tutorial on the wiki gets rather confusing in certain parts.

 

I only got as far as setting up the DEM and Landsat imagery in Global Mapper before encountering a few problems. The color correction part of the tutorial causes each combined image to end up with a different overall color, so they don't match up. I couldn't find any mention of this in the tutorial. While I got a pretty close match by trial and error, it was a chore as GM takes anywhere from three to five minutes to recalculate everything once you make a change since it's handling five 500MB TIFFs.

 

Another problem I've found is that the Landsat scenes for this area have pretty bad cloud cover. I managed to more or less clean it up with the clone brush in Photoshop, but I don't know if this is the best solution.

Landsat imagery still seems a bit low-quality compared to ED's terrain, though, I so I thought about giving T-Bone's/ED's Terragen hybrid method a try, but I can't make sense of Terragen 2... I'm not sure if he meant the original Terragen since it was posted some time ago. Any help/tips on this front?

 

While I couldn't fix the above problems I did go ahead and sliced the DEM and imagery anyway and put it into Max to see how it looked. The area I want to cover features lots of small islands and islets, and even with the hi-res base mesh file that was posted it seems that they might disappear in the 3D model. Will I just have to manually cut them out later?

 

Thanks in advance for any input on the above. :)

[SilentEagle]

I've been trying to get into the terrain creation workflow for a while now. I first started a few months ago and then got frustrated with it, as the tutorial on the wiki gets rather confusing in certain parts.

 

I only got as far as setting up the DEM and Landsat imagery in Global Mapper before encountering a few problems. The color correction part of the tutorial causes each combined image to end up with a different overall color, so they don't match up. I couldn't find any mention of this in the tutorial. While I got a pretty close match by trial and error, it was a chore as GM takes anywhere from three to five minutes to recalculate everything once you make a change since it's handling five 500MB TIFFs.

 

Another problem I've found is that the Landsat scenes for this area have pretty bad cloud cover. I managed to more or less clean it up with the clone brush in Photoshop, but I don't know if this is the best solution.

Landsat imagery still seems a bit low-quality compared to ED's terrain, though, I so I thought about giving T-Bone's/ED's Terragen hybrid method a try, but I can't make sense of Terragen 2... I'm not sure if he meant the original Terragen since it was posted some time ago. Any help/tips on this front?

 

While I couldn't fix the above problems I did go ahead and sliced the DEM and imagery anyway and put it into Max to see how it looked. The area I want to cover features lots of small islands and islets, and even with the hi-res base mesh file that was posted it seems that they might disappear in the 3D model. Will I just have to manually cut them out later?

 

Thanks in advance for any input on the above. :)

 

I can relate to all of your struggles as I spent days on this so far and i feel like my work is sub-par work, which I hate to admit. The textures are not high quality and have terrible colors after following the guide. The terrain mesh looks awesome, however, but that's the easy part! The tiffs are just so large in size for how much quality is contained in them. I also couldn't be bothered to figure out how to use Terragen 2 without a tutorial from someone on a good method for combining it with this bad satellite imagery. I found some better imagery from USGS, but it would take a year and several terrabytes to get quality I want into the mesh textures. I 'm also sick of frequent computer freezes and hang ups from Global Mapper always re-rendering the view. New respect for terrain makers! Currently, I can't even get my test tile to export to the game and show up properly, so I put it on hold.

[cctoide]

Well, I'm not quite in business yet, but I did find a way to make the imagery handling part slightly less soul-sucking. At least it worked for the area I want to create, I don't know if it'll work for others.

 

Start by combining bands 3/2/1 as usual in Photoshop. Then grab the sea with the magic wand. Do it with "contiguous" enabled at first to make sure you're not getting anything inland. Check "anti-aliasing". Once you have the sea selected and are sure it's not grabbing any part of the land, hit delete and fill the selection with black, or whatever the background color of your file is.

 

Then apply the Exposure adjustment to make the composite brighter. I used a consistent exposure +2,75/offset 0/gamma -0,75 across all my files for the first pass. You can also apply the exposure adjustment before deleting the sea if the file is too dark and it keeps grabbing dry land instead. After the sea is deleted hit auto color, which should get much better results than before.

 

At this point, don't combine band 8 yet. It's easier to check that colors match across the files when you're still dealing with the smaller resolution files. The GeoTIFF data's been stripped out of these files by Photoshop, though, so it needs to be reinserted so you can more easily put them in Global Mapper.

 

Go here and grab "listgeo_GUI", a simple interface for the listgeo and geotifcp tools. Use it to copy the GeoTIFF data from one of the original band 3/2/1 files and apply it to the composite. At this point you can click and drag the composites straight into GlobalMapper without manual georeferencing. You'll probably need to edit some of the tiles to match the rest.

 

I recommend picking a tile with good colors and editing all the others to match it, rather than trying to make each tile match its neighbor. Note you need to apply the GeoTIFF copying tool each time you make a change - and quit GlobalMapper, as it keeps a lock on the loaded files. I mostly used the exposure and sat/hue adjustments to make my tiles match. I still had difficulty with Landsat scenes taken in different years, though.

 

Fortunately this is much faster than using the final hi-res files as in the tutorial, and it only takes around 10 seconds to re-render the composite view in GM on my computer.

 

Next comes pan-sharpening. I found this method useful. The basic procedure is as follows: convert your 3/2/1 composite to Lab color; enlarge by 200% to match the panchromatic (band 8) image; split the channels; load the band 8 image, and match its brightness/contrast to the original L channel; merge channels using the band 8 image as the lightness channel. After this you can use the GeoTIFF copy tool to apply the georeferencing data from the original band 8 file to the new pan-sharpened composite. Make sure to save the TIFF with no compression, in PC format, or the tool won't take it.

[SilentEagle]

Thanks for the tips cctoide! I will surely try them out later.

 

On a side note, I'm starting to wonder if I should just reinstall max and the plugins, because I still can't get an export to work. Any land.lsa2 file that I export with the debug version gives me a 5 kb sized file, and any lsa2 file I export with the release version will not allow my game to start. I've had no issue exporting airports and getting them to work, but this land stuff just ain't working. I've even tried importing the game's lsa2 file and reapplying textures to a certain section and checking all materials to make sure it's perfect, and that doesn't even export right.

[SilentEagle]

WOO! Finally got it working. Word of advice, don't follow the naming pattern of the .doc tutorials that show the texture files with spaces in the name. Make sure you use underlines. :(

 

Does anyone know what could be causing this issue?

[luckybob9]

Sorry, I have been out of town for the last few days. The tutorials are funky and bad in parts. I plan on making a land tutorial with a voiceover as I did with the runway part too. Check to make sure the parts have the correct material types and are linked to the dummy.

[cctoide]

I've got my imagery sliced up and ready to import into Max, but I've just realized nobody seems to have touched on the question of how to get the mesh to match up with the proper coordinates ingame.

 

All I can find about this is trujillostm's post which says that the X/Y coordinates in Max represent latitude and longitude, but I don't know what sort of relationship they have - is it linear, does it represent actual lat/long in degrees, or something else? The example maps I can find seem to have the terrain mesh in random places relative to the .max file's origin, or at least I can't find anything like it in the same place in the real world.

[luckybob9]

I am not sure that is possible in the engine. You can only replace terrain with custom, not add new coordinates...im pretty sure

[cctoide]

Ah. Well, that's one less thing to worry about... I hadn't noticed the coordinates were the same in my brief experience with the Nevada terrain in the beta. I suppose it means you can't follow real-world coordinate-based procedures on custom terrains though. Thanks for answering.

[luckybob9]

A10C has a theater changing feature that can support this :)