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FlightGear Newsletter April 2011: Difference between revisions
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== Scenery corner == | == Scenery corner == | ||
=== Terrain Creation === | |||
There are a couple different ways of creating shapefiles for terrain. Here is an overview and hopefully it will help those understand the scenery process a little bit better. | |||
==== Create the shapefiles by hand ==== | |||
This method has been used for St. Maarten in the World Scenery or Rio de Janeiro custom scenery. In this way, you download a satellite photo or an aerial photo and create the shapefiles by hand by "drawing" on top of the photo. | |||
==== Create the shapefiles using land cover data ==== | |||
Land cover data can be either vector like CORINE or raster like NOAA. However if the files are raster you will have to convert them into vector using a similar way described below. European CORINE scenery and most large-scale custom United States scenery such as Hawai'i or the Pacific Northwest were created using available third-party land cover data. | |||
==== Create the land cover data yourself ==== | |||
There is Switzerland land cover data available for both Bodensee and for most of Switzerland which has been created using land cover classification techniques. In this scenery, the developer takes a satellite photo and, using raster manipulation software such as GRASS, manually classifies each pixel in the satellite as a land cover type. After refining the data, the data is turned into a vector format and cleaned again, removing oddities such as cloud cover. This is probably the most difficult type of scenery to create, but can cover a large area most efficiently. | |||
A mix of the last two approaches is usually the most beneficial unless you are using an end-product such as CORINE. For instance, in the new Pacific Northwest sceneries, there are some oddities where rivers start falling under 30m wide. These need to be fixed by hand and then merged which can be a time-consuming process. | |||
If you have any questions about creating your own land cover scenery feel free to ask on the forums. | |||
=== New terrain === | === New terrain === | ||