Scenery improvements

Even with GenX photoscenery installed, the base imagery looks pretty uninspiring and low resolution.  GenX's resolution is 1.2m per pixel, which looks great from several thousand feet but not so great from a few hundred!  I was looking at Google maps this morning and it was obvious that the level of detail in the imagery was over and above that shown in GenX.  So, I decided to look into whether I could find some similar imagery and include it into my scenery areas as a basemap.

My approach was to try and place it on a flat plane in Sketchup, then include it just as I have my other models.  This worked fine in principle until it came into conflict with the land mesh.  Chunks of my higher resolution image disappeared.

Clearly, if this approach was to work I needed to flatten some areas so that my image could be displayed properly.  After a bit of research I settled on SBuilderX as a tool and worked out how to use it.  I can create flattening bgls now, the only catch being that the lowres mapping used in SBuilderX to define the polygon is out of alignment to GenX, so to get the right area flattened I need to map it across accurately and then apply a displacement so it shows in the right place on GenX in FSX.

This approach works, in that the flattening bgl sits underneath the scenery.  It took me a lot of playing about with sketchup because on a single plane the applied texture was somehow mirrored, and when imported through IS2 into FSX just didn't show at all.  The solution was to take the texture file and mirror that, then apply it onto a flat rectangular plane in Sketchup, then cut away the excess unwanted areas to leave an uneven polygon with the ground texture on, then take that into FSX.

When imported into IS2, this reversed image miraculously was displayed correctly (don't ask me how I have no idea, but it works so I'm not complaining.)   When placed in the correct geographical position though it still didn't work, which foxed me until I hit on the idea of increasing its elevation ever so slightly to bring it above the flattening polygon.  Giving it an elevation of 0.0001m made everything ok and displayed it perfectly.

So, I can now make a higher res basemap for my scenery areas, and flatten them so all the additional scenery displays properly on top of it.  If anyone knows of a better way let me know!