Using TerraGear: Difference between revisions

[[TerraGear]] is a software project which supports [[FlightGear]], by producing the data files used by FlightGear to represent the texture of Earth's terrain, including airports, cities, fields, forests, rivers, roads and so on.

TerraGear reads data files containing ground elevation data, airport locations and layouts, geographical land cover information, and more, and produces the scenery files used by FlightGear to represent the terrain of the world.

For a variety of reasons, you might want to create your own terrain files, rather than downloading the standard FlightGear scenery. For instance, if you use [[TaxiDraw]] to modify/improve information about an [[:Category:Airports|airport]]'s taxiway/apron layout, you might wish to see how that modified airport would look in the scenery before deciding you're happy with the results. Maybe the official scenery is too detailed for your slow machine, and you'd like to build terrain using a digital elevation model (DEM) with poorer resolution, to decrease the number of polygons and thus improve your framerates. Or maybe you've got a fantastically fast machine, and you want to build your own terrain using higher-resultion vector data (vmap1, Tiger, osm) to get better roads/streams. For all these reasons, learning how to use TerraGear is a good idea.