SceneryDesign.org Since my last blog post about the autogen I have mainly been working on adding autogen buildings as well. This went quite well, I can now add the generic autogen buidlings as well as the row houses from my tool. There are still some issue that some of the buildings don’t get the right shape, that’s because in the autogen you don’t use the total footprint. I need to derive a orientation and size from the footprint information. But once those few issues are out, I think I can make the tool available to others for testing as well. Let me know if you are interested.
In have made a video to demonstrate the workflow of making autogen from GIS vector data.
I’m only a relative newbie to FS scenery design Arno, this is great stuff.
Earth Simulations and FranceVFR have worked on their own autogen projects probably along the same lines, but I don’t know how advanced they are with them.
One thing though, the openstreetmap data for the rest of the world isn’t anywhere as detailed as you show here. In the UK for example built up areas are simply shown as grey with no individual building outlines, so in order for this kind of process to work some other source of individual building vector data would be required.
will be very interesting to test
Count me in for testing! 😉
Andy
Hi Kevin,
The tool is not only for OpenStreetMap, any other vector data can be processed as well. So then the challenge becomes to find the right data for your scenery project.
The output shown in the video is very promising indeed!
I note the buildings are 2 stories high… Given a 3D Shapefile (or simply a Shapefile with a attribute like “buildingheight”) could this be used to control the number of stories??
It would be great to have a GUI with all autogen types (for all the different buildings, vegetation and roads) listed and the ability for user to select which attributes relate to each of these.
Hi Andy,
You can’t specify the height of each individual building. There is setting to specify the distribution of the amount of floors. In this case I set it to 1-2 floors since the island has no big buildings.
I think it should be possible to set this distribution by analysing a shape attribute. But I don’t have data with such an attribute yet.
Arno
Specifying building and vegetation heights does seem to be possible though Arno, looking at this…???
http://www.earthsimulations.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=900
Hi Kevin,
Trees are done by vegetation groups, so you can set the height roughly. The buildings I am not sure they are using autogen. They mention generic buildings, which can also be with XML code. For the autogen format I see no way in the AGN file to set a height.
Arno
I had a look at autogen a couple of months ago, really just to look and see whether I _could_ generate any! I managed to get the autogen annotator working at first (that was hard enough just by itself!) What I tried to do at first was take just one agn tile and add autogen in to make it as dense and realistic as possible. I used the polygonal tool for this. When I loaded it into FSX my autogen was there, but it wasn’t very dense at all. So I looked at Earth Simulations treescapes files and made a discovery. Obviously with annotator you can create rectangular vegetation as well as polygonal shapes. What ES had done was instead of using polygons just created their vegetation using very small squares tesselated to form polygonal shapes. In FSX this results in a much denser autogen placement. If each tiny square could then be assigned a different vegetation group relative to its actual size I believe you could get almost complete control of vegetation height, provided you had that data to begin with!? Or are there just not enough vegetation groups to allow this? Would it be possible to create different vegetation groups consisting of vegetative objects of different sizes as well, or is that unachievable? I don’t know?
Hi,
to increase the density needs to modify the data in regional groups.
My experience tells me that I saw the polygons vegetation slows the simulator.
In my scenario I use squares or rectangles of different sizes: this system does not affect the framerate.
Would definitely be interested in this! You’re awesome, Arno! 🙂
It is a pitch of giant to cover quickly our photographic scenery grace also to osm or other data vectorial. Perhaps would be necessary you it to make the difference between the large houses and the small ones to apply a different guid to it, is what it is possible?
In the NL2000 scenery we used the polygon vegetation, without seeing to much performance decrease. Also the density I get now seems fine to me. But that depends on the vegetation type you choose I guess.
I’ll do more experimentation with other types. It seems if you use FS2004 vegetation rectangles you might indeed have more control over the height. One I figure out how that works, I’ll add it to the tool you that developers can choose their technique.
About the houses. I did now split up long buildings into smaller ones as an option. But if you make sure the data has attributes to select from, you can give a different guid to different size buildings. Maybe I should automatically add some attributes like area or length when importing the data.
What happened to your tool? Are you still working on it? It sounds very interesting and i like the results of the vegetation. The houses still need more refinement 😉
I am looking forward to seeing more OSM data in FSX.
Cheers,
Sebastian
Hi Sebastian,
A beta version of the tool is available for download. For the houses it is indeed not perfect, I am still working on it.
Arno
Arno,
I would really like to test your beta release – I couldn’t find a download link though. I will test some MegasceneryEarth areas as well as Washington DC by Newport Scenery.
Hi,
You can find the beta version here:
http://www.scenerydesign.org/development-releases/
Arno