Hello, > Anyway, I am going to give this also a shot and contact some companies > that provide aerial/satellite image data, could anybody here provide the > details concerning the requirements that need to be met for an image > to be suitable to be used as a texture for FlightGear ?
I've been lurking on this list for some time ( => pilot-wannabe :-) ), and as the question for more accurate or more realistic scenery seems to be quite recurrent, I'd like to present you our little terrain rendering project at the University of Bonn (see [1]). Unfortunately, we do not have a very informative webpage up yet, but you can download some old demo videos and a paper describing the algorithms involved. As part of the project, we have developed a terrain rendering engine which we will probably release under the GPL (or similar) in the near future, and I would be willing and interested to do some work on integrating it with flightgear. Please tell me what you think. To give you an overview, the main features of the engine are: - out-of-core rendering of large datasets in realtime - LOD approach with one pixel accuracy regarding geometry, shading and textures - compressed textures and geometry - per-pixel normal map shading - occlusion culling - implemented in C++ / OpenGL - currently runs under linux and win32 We are also currently building datasets out of the publically available LandSat ETM true-color (28.5 m resolution) and SRTM-3 elevation data (~90 m resolution) [2], which both have almost worldwide coverage. It probably would be a good idea to integrate more accurate textures (if available) near airports, or to add procedural details for low-altitude flights. To see what detail to expect from these Landsat datasets, here a few screenshots of the Alps / Rh�ne valley + Lake Geneva, Corsica, and Cap Of Good Hope. [Rhone valley] http://terrain.warped-space.de/rhonetal-lacleman.jpg [Corsica] http://terrain.warped-space.de/corsica.jpg [Cap Of Good Hope] http://terrain.warped-space.de/capetown.jpg To give you an idea, such a dataset including textures, normal maps and geometry for a single UTM zone (see [3]) is about 250 MB in size. Geometry size is negligible at about 5 MB per UTM tile, the corresponding normal maps eat away about 60 MB, the rest is used by textures. The engine can also handle higher resolution datasets, but they're not as easily and consistently available for such a global setting (nor is it practical looking at the amount of data), so adding localized detail is probably a good solution. There would still be a fair amount of work left to integrate such an engine into flightgear, even after the release of the engine, but given enough interest, I'd like to work on the remaining issues (I guess on the flightgear side e.g. defining and implementing a more loosely coupled API for the terrain subsystem; scenery creation toolchain etc.). Please tell me if that sounds interesting / useable! bye, Manuel ---- [1] http://cg.cs.uni-bonn.de/projects/project.asp?id=10&language=en [2] http://glcf.umiacs.umd.edu/index.shtml [3] http://www.dmap.co.uk/utmworld.htm _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
