Scenary development thread: US Air Force Plant 42, Calif.

[DaveS]

Could anyone with the appropriate knowledge please make a scenery pack for US Air Force Plant 42, Calif. area?

It would be kinda nice to have it in Orbiter as it is the birth place for many historic aerospace vehicles, including the the Space Shuttle Orbiters.

Here's the coordinates for the area: 34.631380° W 118.092166° N. The buildings left-most of the three complexes north of the runway is where the Orbiter were assembled before being transported overland from Palmdale to Edwards AFB to be mated to the 747-100 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft.

However, starting with the delivery of Endeavour, the Orbiter Lifting Frame that was built for use at Vandenberg AFB was relocated to Palmdale to serve there for use when one of the orbiter's went there for the Orbiter Maintance Down Periods(OMDPs).

So Endeavour was the only orbiter that did not make the trip from Palmdale to Edwards AFB as the OLF had been relocated and set-up by the time she was completed.


July 13 2008 edit: General Plant 42 area add-on has been released. See last photo for link and release notes.

 

[DaveS]

Here's a Google Earth screenshot of the area in question. I have added a GE Placemarker where the orbiter's were assembled before being transported to Edwards AFB or in Endeavour's case, moved to the adjacent Orbiter Lifting Frame.

 

[wehaveaproblem]

I'm a bit busy with Ascension atm, but the process is easy enough. I'm sure a man of your ability could manage it in an afternoon, even without prior knowledge. That is, do the surface tiles. It's a relatively painless process to be honest.

If you don't fancy doing it though, then I'll see if I can find some time for it.

 

[DaveS]

I'm a bit busy with Ascension atm, but the process is easy enough. I'm sure a man of your ability could manage it in an afternoon, even without prior knowledge. That is, do the surface tiles. It's a relatively painless process to be honest.

If you don't fancy doing it though, then I'll see if I can find some time for it.

Which tools are you using to create the surface tiles? I have tried using EasyTiler, but I can't seem to get any good hi-res tiles(512x512 or larger) out of it, just small low-res tiles(256x256) and I can't seem to find any good utilities that can batch convert a bunch of jpg files to dds.

 

[Notebook]

In this thread:-
http://www.orbiter-forum.com/showthread.php?t=813&highlight=Surface+tile+scaling

I explain the crude method I used (#10). Slow, and tedious, but it sort of works...

With the m6 gallery showing level 17 surface tiles, I'm waiting to see how the surface tile system develops in the next release of Orbiter. Thats my excuse anyway.


N.

 

[wehaveaproblem]

I've not actually done any tiling since Ascension v1, but I used Surface base wizard and photoshop. I remember following a tutorial from the old site.

The trick is to find out what size tiles you need/want to reflect the size of the area covered with your original aerial photo. The larger the tile, the more area it covers, but the lower the resolution will be.

So for eg (arbitrary numbers). if a level 1 tile covers 32 km square and your base also covers 32km square, then you could use one level 1 tile for the whole base. But that would mean the texture covers a much larger area and therefore loses detail. So maybe instead you would use 4 x level 2 textures to cover the same area. That way each tile is smaller and the resolution is sharper.

Basically the smaller the tile, the higher the res will be. So if you used 1024x1024 textures in the previous example: the total resolution of the base would be 1024x1024 if you used 1 x level 1 tile, but 2024x2024 if you used 4 x level 2 tiles. So the second option doubles the overal resolution of the base whilst still using the same resolution textures. The tricky bit when looking to get more resolution is cutting up the tiles accurately so that they join seemlessly. The more tiles, the harder and more labourious this is.
As an indication for you, Ascension uses level 4 512x512 textures. i think this is a good balance of close up detail without becoming too cluttered to the eye when higher up. Plus it keeps the graphical workload down for low end specs.

However, I would have used level 3 or 2 textures if I could have. However, in order to get Ascension Island to fit over the blob that is there on the default earth texture, I had to use smaller tiles. Because the layout of the larger tiles did not line up with the island. The good thing about your inland base is that you can probably get away with using relatively few tiles of a larger size and resolution, as you won't have to actually line the base up with any existng features.

I'm not sure if I'm being very clear. It's actually quite an easy process if you have example pics and you are methodical, but hard to explain in brief.

Tom

 

[DaveS]

Thanks to Artlav's WorldStudio application I new got a set of Palmdale tiles, albeit low-res(256x256).

I now want to know if there's any general desire for this add-on despite the low-res surface tiles?

 

[Urwumpe]

Thanks to Artlav's WorldStudio application I new got a set of Palmdale tiles, albeit low-res(256x256).

I now want to know if there's any general desire for this add-on despite the low-res surface tiles?

For me, yes, of course. Where can I find WorldStudio, can I use it for getting some tiles for the ECAL/TAL sites?

 

[DaveS]

For me, yes, of course. Where can I find WorldStudio, can I use it for getting some tiles for the ECAL/TAL sites?

It's part of the Orulex v1.0.0 package.

 

[C3PO]

I now want to know if there's any general desire for this add-on despite the low-res surface tiles?

You could always release the tiles. Maybe someone will develop it further.
The Groom Lake scenery turned out quite nice in the end.

 

[sputnik]

Cool! My backyard!

Will it join up to existing Edwards tiles?

Man, if you could just include Fox Field (my home 'drome, just off to the upper left of your existing tiles....). Nah, that's a market of exactly one interested party.

 

[DaveS]

Palmdale general area v1 has now been released: [ame="http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=3445"]Palmdale general area v1[/ame]

It's pretty bare-bones right now, it could use some help in the building department as I haven't managed to find any good photos of the facilities at Plant 42.