Saturday 5 March 2011

Premier Inn Hotel

Here's 2 screenshots of the Premier Inn on Speke Hall Avenue.


This scenery gave me a few problems, in that the hotel has been built on a greenfield site, and the GenX scenery still shows that.  So whilst Owen Way scenery just sits on 1.2m GenX photoscenery, and I used a higher res google maps image for the base of Bleinhem Way, I needed a different solution here.

First of all I tried applying a flatten to the area but the previously encountered problem with the inter-relationship between flatten polygons made that impossible as I could only flatten half the area!  After emailing Gary and getting a pointer or two I tried again to overlay an image over the default terrain using SBuilderX.  When I first tried I kept getting error messages relating to the texture I was trying to use.  After a not inconsiderable time head scratching I figured out it was that SBuilderX doesn't support spaces in texture image filenames and once I'd renamed my file and removed the space, SBuilderX compiled it happily with no errors.

As can be seen in the picture above though, the overlay over default terrain caused the base image to distort and look very different to the nice flat car park that exists in real life.  So I went back to placing the base image on a flat plane sitting underneath the building model with no flatten polygon applied and the altitude reference set to the car park entrance off Speke Hall Avenue.  That still posed a problem in that one end of the car park disappeared under some low-res terrain and the hotel itself looked like it had been buried at one end.

The best workaround I have been able to come up with is to raise the altitude of the whole model by approx 16cm, which brings it above the terrain across its whole surface and displays it properly.  The drawback is that one end of the area near Speke Hall Avenue is 16-25cm above where it should be!  Fully zoomed in and paused it is possible to see this defect, but I'm guessing that overflying this scenery from an altitude of at least 1000ft and a significant horizontal distance away will mean that the 16-25cm error may not be noticeable!

Another bothering aspect is the car park still looks a little artificial.  I had to build it from scratch because all aerial imagery available still shows it as a field, so I took various photos of the car park surface and counted the number of parking spaces from each aspect.  I extracted images of the surface from the photos and used that as the base building block for the tarmac surface.  Other details like the disabled parking bay marking are again extracted directly from photos.   Even though the tarmac texture is built from an actual photo it doesn't look convincing so I may play around with that at some point to try to improve it.

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