FSEarthTiles - VFR Scenery

[sonjamichelle]

Creating VFR Land Textures with FSEarthTiles.

I came across this tutorial today and found it quite interesting. Especially for us GA folks who like to stay near the ground and take in the sights.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP1y7YASobM




It uses the program to pull satellite imagery from a couple of sources (Google Earth, etc) and place the textures on the mesh giving you photo realistic ground textures of the region.

I compiled the city of Jacksonville Florida, the process took a bit of time - about couple of hours or so for such a large area. I started about 13:15 and was ready to fly about 15:30. So not awful. The tutorial video was definitely sped up. It created about 3.7 GBs worth of BGLs in a AddOn scenery folder for me. Again not awful.

Getting into the air and seeing the difference was quite nice. Flying over my house and damn near seeing my car in the driveway was cool. I could make out the blob, maybe if I chose a higher resolution I could have picked it out. But I gotta keep performance in mind ya know. Seeing the local shopping centers and freeways certainly made VFR flight and navigation so much more pleasant. I could tell where I was without the need for the moving map on my tablet.

I did notice a few drawbacks though. Out in the Ocean where Google Maps didn't have good coverage there was grey splotches. Certainly a turn off. Then in the St Johns River I could see the Google copyright watermark on the textures. This of course because I used the Google Earth sources. (Figuring them to be better, maybe not) rather then the default Virtual Earth. I'll compile a set using Virtual Earth and check out the differences. But for the most part it was acceptable.

Another thing I noticed is the AutoGen seemed a bit light. Not sure if it was me or if it was a result of the new scenery. I'd have to double check my settings. I did fiddle with it after getting some OOM errors the other night.

Here are a few of screen shots:







Overall not a bad freeware product. I'll fiddle with it some more and add anything else I find.

[sonjamichelle]

I recompiled with Virtual Earth as the source. It's slightly older imagery, not AS up to date, a few years old, maybe 3 or 4 or so.

I still had grey splotches out in the Ocean. Something I'll have to deal with I guess. I'll try to find a work around. I also used a higher resolution so the imagery is a bit sharper. Gone are the Google Copyright Watermarks.

Again, here are a few more screenshots.











That's the same freeway interchange from the above post. The big field of trees NE of the shopping plaza just south of the construction work is now all housing development as well as the construction area. All of that has built up over the past three years since these images have been taken.

The airport is KJAX - Jacksonville International. I haven't been there in real life so I don't know if it is really out in the middle of nowhere. I do know that it is 20+ miles from the center of town.

Except for the grey ocean tiles, I'm pretty pleased with this add-on.