David Baron wrote: > So what indeed would/should go there. Three layers here, it seems. > > 1. Contour, the floor. This represents the ground elevations and such. The > aircraft model interacts with this one, taxis on it, takes off from it, flies > over it, lands or crashes onto it. > > 2. The terrain image, the carpet. This is laid or projected onto the > countour. > Here is where I believe the googleearth(-type) images should be used instead > of generics. Now, everything is there so when flown at altitude much greater > than the features heights, this looks realistic and no further furnishings > are required. That bridge is represented, buildings, roads, all should be > there without further editing.
Firstly there's no way Google are gonna give us access to the keyhole imagery at a price we could afford. Secondly there's currently no support for texture paging in flightgear - and neither NVidia nor ATI show any signs of producing a card that could hold a few hundred square miles worth of high res texture in memory yet ;-) It would be nice - but we're far from ready with either data or code to support the use of the data. > 3. 3D objects, the furniture. These are various buildings and other features > that we want to show heightwize. Needed near airports and major cities where > altitude much greater than features heights is no longer the case and > elsewhere for eye-candy and more realism. Mostly generics if there is a > sufficient library of building shapes and bridges. Distinctive buildings such > as for New York: Empire State, Chrysler, Statue of Liberty, Financial > district lower Manhattan structures and certain bridges, need be added. > > What tools are available for doing any of this and previewing it in a > reasonably visual manner? People are generally using either AC3D or blender. Once you've created a model it can be placed in the scenery using the UFO scenery editor. When you're happy with the positioning you can dump the details to an xml file, then submit the model and position data for inclusion in the scenery database. Details on how to do that can be found here: http://fgfsdb.stockill.org/contribute.php -- Jon Stockill [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys -- and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Flightgear-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-users
