Saturday 12 March 2011

New approach to higher res base images

I've decided to change tack and try working in a different direction.  I knew all along that the base images I had available for the area I want to cover are pretty old and don't show half of the new developments on the Boulevard Business Park.  So I've stitched them all together in Photoshop and managed to find a friend to help me get some newer aerial pics.   The new aerial pics were impossible to capture from an overhead perspective so when I got back with them I had to perspective crop various sections out of different images and then map it onto my existing old imagery to get it in the right place.  Easier said than done!

Not only was mapping the perspectives across awkward, but even when in the right place the colour matching made me want to vomit!  I haven't quite got the colour matching right with the GenX scenery but that can easily be tweaked with Photoshop later.   I used SBuilderX to make the bgl and the results are below.  All the higher res imagery is now in one file, albeit an 8Mb one.

Also, in doing this I've lowered the resolution somewhat from my first attempts, to see whether it made a difference or not with the night texture problem.  I've flown over this texture now for a while and it's happened once before correcting itself.  I'm looking into whether there's anything I'm doing that's causing it but in the end I'm goig to use it and if people don't like it they can turn it off - after all it's not like they're paying for it.  At some point I'll return to the high res texture and darken it to have a night version, but that's not top of my priority list right now.

You can see from the image below the difference between my photo-textures and GenX is pretty substantial, even at the new lowered resolution, especially from a lower altitude.


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