One of the fantastic enhancements in FSX is the possibility to run very high resolution terrain models. Yes, FSX allows us to use meshes of just 1 m resolution and aerial photography of an incredible 7 cm resolution. Getting hold of such detailed terrain data is almost impossible unless you are very, very rich, but there is the rule that if you put down a challenge, someone is bound to pick it up. And we know of two people who have.
Oahu will have an unbelievable 30 cm/1 foot per pixel ground imagery. Furthermore, the mesh will be derived from a 10 m DEM elevation model.
Dean Mountford from FS Dreamscapes in the US is currently developing several ultra high resolution photo-scenery and terrain mesh products. The initial product will be the Island of Oahu, otherwise known as "The Gathering Place", in Hawaii. Oahu will have an unbelievable 30 cm/1 foot per pixel ground imagery. Furthermore, the team from Beachcomber Entertainment anticipates deriving the mesh from a 10 m DEM elevation model with an accuracy of 10 cm vertically. They are also concurrently working on coverage for the State of West Virginia at 60 cm per pixel and with incredible 2 m elevation data. Simply amazing.
As with other imagery, Dean and his team are facing challenges with the aerial photography, especially cloud cover. The team is editing out not only the clouds but also the cloud shadows, as well as cleaning up dust and scratches from the scanner. Another problem with aerial photography is that individual tiles don't colour blend well, and all tiles are manually color corrected for seamless integration. Finally, the tiles get further enhanced to match the real thing as close as possible, and at the same time the final textures will be as memory light as possible to avoid blurries. The final set of images is of an amazingly high standard and looks phenomenal in the sim.
Tim Barnes is building a model around the Rotorua lakes. The resulting mesh has incredible detail including every tiny hills and valley - and even road cuttings are visible.
On the other end of the world, Tim Barnes from New Zealand is in the very lucky position of having access to LiDaR (Light Detection and Ranging) data. Tim describes LiDaR data as an an exciting technology that uses airborne systems that fire Lasers towards the Earth 33 000 times per second - sounds almost straight from a Tom Clancy novel, he reckons. He's building a model around the Rotorua lakes from raw data that consists of the amazing amount of 67 million data points. The final ground terrain will have a resolution of 5 m, and the vertical accuracy is 6 cm. The resulting mesh has incredible detail including every tiny hills and valley - and even road cuttings are visible!
Enough talk lets have a look at some mind blowing shots!
