Background texture using ADE

[VulcanDriver]

Hi All

I want to make a background textured poly from a Google Earth image using ADE. How do I do it. An idiots guide would be most useful. Its for FS9.

TIA

[JohnTenn]

John

There is no way to do it with ADE. All you can do is scale it using ADE.

Read this thread as a start to using Sbuilder:

http://www.militaryaiworks.com/forums/9 ... cs#p155143

John

[VulcanDriver]

Thanks John interesting read. Have downloaded Sbuilder and will have a play over the next few days.

[VulcanDriver]

Still as baffled. Could someone produce a photo scenery .bgl for me please of RAAF Edinburgh so I can include it in a scenery package using ADE? PM if you can. Many Thanks

[Joecoastie]

John,
There's series of tutorials by Ed Wells (falcon409 on SimOuthouse forum) on how to use SBuilder.
It's seven or eight videos where he shows step by step how to make photoreal backgrounds and
the use of the FSX Annotator for placing autogen.
They are in the download section on the SOH site.
I've used them quite a few times.
Joe

[JohnTenn]

John

Doing Photo tiles with Sbuilder is a pain. A huge pain. The image gets distorted and involves a lot of touching up.

I would happily make a background for you, using one the default grass textures. All I would need is the afcad or ADE bgl.

The process involves importing the bgl. Loading a background texture into ADE. Scale the image relative to the main runway.

Mark the top left and bottom right corners of the image with position markers.

Use the same image in Sbuilder only in bmp format. Scale it in Sbuilder using the points in the position markers, and draw in the polygons. Assign the texture or landclass as you wish to the polygon. Compile it.

The FSX tutorials are helpful but there are one or two functions not available for the FS9 version.

Send me a PM if you are interested. I know there are a few more here that can do the same.

John

[Joecoastie]

John and John,
Forgive me. I totally neglected to realize you were working in FS9.
Joe

[JohnTenn]

John

This is what photo tiles look like before the work starts.

The file is too large to send in the PM system

John

[VulcanDriver]

wow, thanks, that's great. Have you got Dropbox or similar?

[JohnTenn]

John

I have no such thing. I will break it up and send it in smaller packets via the PM system.

John

[Firebird]

John, you could pm John an email address for yourself and he could send it that way. It would be quicker and easier.

There are far too many Johns in this conversation.

[VulcanDriver]

John, you could pm John an email address for yourself and he could send it that way. It would be quicker and easier.

There are far too many Johns in this conversation.

Good idea Steve will do.

[MIKE JG]

John Stinstrom got pretty good at doing photo backgrounds for his scenery using SBuilder I believe. Shame he's not around here any longer.

[JohnTenn]

To be brutally honest.

Making these photo tiles is dependent on your source image. I could not get the recommended way to get and calibrate the image to work. I thus developed my own work around.

The image you use needs to have a filter applied to remove glare or white shade in the simulator.

Lastly the airport layout and photo tiles do not always fit over each other even if the source image is the same. This requires touching up the individual tiles.

This takes time and patience.

This is what is, and what is possible.

John

[John Young]

If you are going to include the photo-image in the scenery package for publication John, you will probably need a license for it. The last one bought at ACG (higher definition for FSX) was around £30, from Get Mapping I think.

John Y.

[VulcanDriver]

Hi JY

The one I'm using is a Google Earth image.

Cheers

[VulcanDriver]

Hi JT scenery tiles look great and work with default FS9 scenery and the VOZ scenery. Next question is how do I import the scenery into ADE so I can match the airport to it?

[clickclickdoh]

Be very careful using Google Earth for scenery images. Google Earth adjusts the images you are looking at for 3d deformation, hills, mountains etc. Unless you force the program not to do that, the edges of images captured at different locations won't line up... for example, if you are making a large area mosaic, streets, rivers etc won't connect in the right places.

[VulcanDriver]

Be very careful using Google Earth for scenery images. Google Earth adjusts the images you are looking at for 3d deformation, hills, mountains etc. Unless you force the program not to do that, the edges of images captured at different locations won't line up... for example, if you are making a large area mosaic, streets, rivers etc won't connect in the right places.

Thanks for that. It seems OK as it's only the airfield area.

[rocket_26_]

To be honest if the imagery is to be used for Fs9 I wouldn't bother with the hassle. FS9 only displays 4.7m per pixel which is very low resolution and looks poor in my opinion. Creating the tiles is also more time consuming than for FSX onwards.

The only way to make it look good is to do it the way John Young did it for his Waddington and Coningsby scenery and that was using scasm code. Despite the fact that scasm code is old it still works very well but the downside is you would have to build custom taxiways and runways etc as the default hard surfaces will be under the ground image. If you did that it would look as good as it would in FSX.

For our ACG sceneries we used 1m per pixel imagery for the FSX versions but the same imagery looked poor in the FS9 versions. So much so for the Twin Bases and Coningsby I heavily edited out the hard surfaces and in some cases the buildings to make it look respectable.

In terms of permission, like John said you need a freeware licence if you intend to release properly on one of the big sites as the image provider may ask them to have the files removed.