Viewing walks in 3D with Memory-Map

Terry Pinnell said:

there's a lot of '3D work' that can be achieved
with more modest software like Memory-Map (MM) and Google Earth (GE).

Quoted message said:

But the *3D* facilities in these two programs are also worth serious
consideration in this context IMO. I've shown some examples from MM
below, following experiments over the last couple of days.

The quality is not bad at all, considering. There are three issues compared
to FSX. The main one is obviously the lower resolution, which is not really
a problem for an overview, but you can't see the fine detail when you get up
close. For example, last night I was studying a bracken covered slope in the
Beacons and I was able to pick out some very faint paths through it, in
addition to the larger more obvious paths. I think I can even make out sheep
tracks now.

Another issue is that there's no anti-aliasing, which creates a nasty effect
in the distance, seen as "shimmering" in the background in your videos. And
of course pixelisation in the foreground, which the flight sim smoothes out
so it doesn't look so bad.

Quoted message said:

MM

BTW, you inserted two hyphens below MM, which is used as a sig separator, so
it's possible some people didn't see what you wrote afterwards in their
newsreader, if they have it set to ignore sigs.

Quoted message said:

As a walking test area I chose Snowdonia, to compare views with Paul's
more detailed scenery. It's also a realistic reason for using MM
instead of GE, as the latter's resolution for central and northern
Wales is far poorer than much of the UK.

One thing I've just noticed about MM is that it uses the same source of
aerial photos as Horizon's photo scenery, albeit at a lower resolution.
Certain quirks in the landscape give this away. There are certain summits in
the Beacons where the photos don't align properly with the terrain
grid/mesh, and these errors are identical. Also there are odd colouration
quirks which match, noticeable in your Foel Gron screenshot.

Quoted message said:

One issue was how much or how little to label the map before switching
to 3D World, either for a Fly-Through or manual exploration. I'm still
experimenting but I think it's probably best to include some labels at
first for navigational purposes, then remove them to get more natural
views.

Yes. I tend to just place a few waypoints.

Quoted message said:

#3 MM3D-03.jpg (312 KB)
http://www.speedyshare.com/990661887.html
Approaching Halfway Station. I'd made the track invisible, but was
still using place names at this stage of my experiments. Note how they
are embedded in the bitmap. Not vectors like GE. So they are virtually
unreadable in this direction, especially on a fly-through.

That's one advantage of FSDiscover! (yes, the name includes an exclamation
mark), it shows the names correctly from any angle, even when you bank the
plane.

Quoted message said:

#4 MM3D-04.jpg (255 KB)
http://www.speedyshare.com/194902393.html
Approaching Snowdon summit. Track had been set to a faint orange line.

Notice the really dark shadows, which are also present in Horizon's scenery.

Quoted message said:

#5 MM3D-02.jpg (235 KB)
http://www.speedyshare.com/659314704.html
From Snowdon summit, looking back down Railway walk. Note pixelation
on close up sections.

As I say, pixels are blurred in the flight sim so they look a lot better,
but there's much more detail than this anyway.

Quoted message said:

Couple of lakes on left look as if they're on
the slopes.

That's due to you using an extremely wide view, it's created an
(uncorrected) ultra-wide-angle lens distortion effect. Notice the curvature
of the horizon in the background. FSX also has the option of a very wide
view like this, but it is corrected (to keep the horizon horizontal).

Quoted message said:

#7 MM3D-07.jpg (237 KB).
http://www.speedyshare.com/395244840.html
Walking over Foel Gron. Roughly similar view to Paul's foelgron-jf.jpg
and foelgron-ho.jpg.

This is the screenshot that shows the odd colouration. Notice the yellowish
terrain in the foreground, which suddenly changes to a more accurate colour.
This is exactly the same as in the Horizon scenery.

Quoted message said:

The Just Flight distant scenery top left for both
Eilio and Gron looks surprisingly different to MM's.

Oh, I forgot to point out the reason for that. My screenshots were taken
using the demo scenery which only covered a small area, so the distant
scenery was the default (non-photographic) FSX scenery. Actually, I haven't
got the northern area yet, I ordered it but it was out of stock. The central
area doesn't quite reach the North Wales coast.

Quoted message said:

#8 MM3D-06.jpg (247 KB)
http://www.speedyshare.com/380680403.html
Near Moel y Dyniewyd. Roughly same view as Paul's dyniewyd-ho.jpg and
dyniewyd-jf.jpg, although the latter's lake colour has had significant
editing?

No, they haven't edited the lake colour, what they've done is turned it into
"real" water. They've basically just cut a hole in the photo scenery, to
match the edges of the lake, and the sim creates the water effect. This
includes waves and ripples, reflections of the sun and of the scenery, all
of which varies with the weather and time of day, including the colour.
There are different graphics settings which affect the look of the water too
(if you set it really high it looks fantastic, with mirror like reflections
of the scenery in the ripples, but that's a frame rate killer). It actually
looks more realistic if you turn the water effects down a bit, because the
reflections rarely look that good in real life.

Quoted message said:

#9 MM3D-08-penyrolewen.jpg (229 KB)
http://www.speedyshare.com/423512168.html
Looking across Llyn Ogwen at Pen yr Ole Wen. Broadly similar view to
Paul's penyrolewen-ho.jpg and penyrolewen-jf.jpg.

This is a good comparison for picking out detail in the terrain. Notice that
on my screenshot you can see a network of walls in the bottom right of the
picture, but you can't make them out at all in yours.

Actually, one thing I really like about MM and Anquet is being able to see a
3D view of the maps, with shadow effects. It's sort of halfway between
reality and a flat 2D map. It's good for seeing the shape of the terrain and
all the map detail at the same time. Very useful for seeing how the contour
lines relate to the actual shape, especially for those who aren't used to
visualising contours (and very useful in complex areas like the Moelwyns).

Quoted message said:

VIDEOS

Quoted message said:

Most of these are in wide format for possible inclusion in DVDs for my
wide-screen TV. They're quite large, so some players on lower powered
PCs might display them a bit jerkily at full size.

They display jerkily on mine! I'm guessing it's because they were created on
your low powered PC. I've made some videos that are 10 times larger and they
play perfectly.

Some general comments. As you say there's a lot of pixelisation close up,
and also background shimmering. Far better than nothing, but really not a
patch on the flight sim. As I've mentioned before, you really have to see
the flight sim in action (i.e. moving, not screenshots) to really appreciate
it.

There's also the weather in the flight sim, which takes it to a whole new
level. My previous screenshots were taken with weather "turned off" (i.e. no
clouds, no wind, unlimited visibility and at midday), but when you add
weather (particularly real-time weather downloaded off the net, rather than
the simple presets), it adds another dimension and changes it from simply
"viewing a 3D model of the terrain" to almost being there!

I've taken some screenshots in real weather, so I'll have to upload those
too.

Anyway, back to the video. Thanks for pointing out FRAPS, I've wanted
something for making videos of the flight sim for some time. This seems to
do the job really well (I've done a few 30 second grabs with the trial
version). Since my screen res is 1680x1050, it can only record half-size
videos at 840x524, but that's fine, I wouldn't want them any larger than
that.

But I'm wondering what you've done to your videos. Clearly you've converted
them to mpg, What software did you do that with? FRAPS recommend some
software for compressing them (then saving as AVI) but I haven't tried those
yet.

Once I've figured out how to compress them I'll post a few.

Quoted message said:

If there's enough interest, I'll post some equivalent GE examples
later (not Wales!).

That would be interesting. Apparently there is a flight sim mode in Google
Earth, but I still haven't tried it yet.

Paul
--
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/weblog/

Paul Saunders said:

Terry Pinnell said:

there's a lot of '3D work' that can be achieved
with more modest software like Memory-Map (MM) and Google Earth (GE).

Quoted message said:

But the *3D* facilities in these two programs are also worth serious
consideration in this context IMO. I've shown some examples from MM
below, following experiments over the last couple of days.

The quality is not bad at all, considering. There are three issues compared
to FSX. The main one is obviously the lower resolution, which is not really
a problem for an overview, but you can't see the fine detail when you get up
close.

Agreed.

Quoted message said:

For example, last night I was studying a bracken covered slope in the
Beacons and I was able to pick out some very faint paths through it, in
addition to the larger more obvious paths. I think I can even make out sheep
tracks now.

Quoted message said:

Another issue is that there's no anti-aliasing, which creates a nasty effect
in the distance, seen as "shimmering" in the background in your videos. And
of course pixelisation in the foreground, which the flight sim smoothes out
so it doesn't look so bad.

Agreed.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

MM

BTW, you inserted two hyphens below MM, which is used as a sig separator, so
it's possible some people didn't see what you wrote afterwards in their
newsreader, if they have it set to ignore sigs.

Thanks - never would have thought of that possibility! (I'd be
interested to know if anyone here *did* actually get that result?)

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

As a walking test area I chose Snowdonia, to compare views with Paul's
more detailed scenery. It's also a realistic reason for using MM
instead of GE, as the latter's resolution for central and northern
Wales is far poorer than much of the UK.

One thing I've just noticed about MM is that it uses the same source of
aerial photos as Horizon's photo scenery, albeit at a lower resolution.

Ah - I thought so!

Quoted message said:

Certain quirks in the landscape give this away. There are certain summits in
the Beacons where the photos don't align properly with the terrain
grid/mesh, and these errors are identical. Also there are odd colouration
quirks which match, noticeable in your Foel Gron screenshot.

Quoted message said:

One issue was how much or how little to label the map before switching
to 3D World, either for a Fly-Through or manual exploration. I'm still
experimenting but I think it's probably best to include some labels at
first for navigational purposes, then remove them to get more natural
views.

Yes. I tend to just place a few waypoints.

Quoted message said:

#3 MM3D-03.jpg (312 KB)
http://www.speedyshare.com/990661887.html
Approaching Halfway Station. I'd made the track invisible, but was
still using place names at this stage of my experiments. Note how they
are embedded in the bitmap. Not vectors like GE. So they are virtually
unreadable in this direction, especially on a fly-through.

That's one advantage of FSDiscover! (yes, the name includes an exclamation
mark), it shows the names correctly from any angle, even when you bank the
plane.

Is that another FSX add-on?

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

#4 MM3D-04.jpg (255 KB)
http://www.speedyshare.com/194902393.html
Approaching Snowdon summit. Track had been set to a faint orange line.

Notice the really dark shadows, which are also present in Horizon's scenery.

Yes.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

#5 MM3D-02.jpg (235 KB)
http://www.speedyshare.com/659314704.html
From Snowdon summit, looking back down Railway walk. Note pixelation
on close up sections.

As I say, pixels are blurred in the flight sim so they look a lot better,
but there's much more detail than this anyway.

Quoted message said:

Couple of lakes on left look as if they're on
the slopes.

That's due to you using an extremely wide view, it's created an
(uncorrected) ultra-wide-angle lens distortion effect. Notice the curvature
of the horizon in the background. FSX also has the option of a very wide
view like this, but it is corrected (to keep the horizon horizontal).

Thanks, understood.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

#7 MM3D-07.jpg (237 KB).
http://www.speedyshare.com/395244840.html
Walking over Foel Gron. Roughly similar view to Paul's foelgron-jf.jpg
and foelgron-ho.jpg.

This is the screenshot that shows the odd colouration. Notice the yellowish
terrain in the foreground, which suddenly changes to a more accurate colour.
This is exactly the same as in the Horizon scenery.

Quoted message said:

The Just Flight distant scenery top left for both
Eilio and Gron looks surprisingly different to MM's.

Oh, I forgot to point out the reason for that. My screenshots were taken
using the demo scenery which only covered a small area, so the distant
scenery was the default (non-photographic) FSX scenery. Actually, I haven't
got the northern area yet, I ordered it but it was out of stock. The central
area doesn't quite reach the North Wales coast.

Thanks, that had been really puzzling me.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

#8 MM3D-06.jpg (247 KB)
http://www.speedyshare.com/380680403.html
Near Moel y Dyniewyd. Roughly same view as Paul's dyniewyd-ho.jpg and
dyniewyd-jf.jpg, although the latter's lake colour has had significant
editing?

No, they haven't edited the lake colour, what they've done is turned it into
"real" water. They've basically just cut a hole in the photo scenery, to
match the edges of the lake, and the sim creates the water effect. This
includes waves and ripples, reflections of the sun and of the scenery, all
of which varies with the weather and time of day, including the colour.
There are different graphics settings which affect the look of the water too
(if you set it really high it looks fantastic, with mirror like reflections
of the scenery in the ripples, but that's a frame rate killer). It actually
looks more realistic if you turn the water effects down a bit, because the
reflections rarely look that good in real life.

Quoted message said:

#9 MM3D-08-penyrolewen.jpg (229 KB)
http://www.speedyshare.com/423512168.html
Looking across Llyn Ogwen at Pen yr Ole Wen. Broadly similar view to
Paul's penyrolewen-ho.jpg and penyrolewen-jf.jpg.

This is a good comparison for picking out detail in the terrain. Notice that
on my screenshot you can see a network of walls in the bottom right of the
picture, but you can't make them out at all in yours.

I'll take another look - I'd convinced myself I could just see them
;-)

Quoted message said:

Actually, one thing I really like about MM and Anquet is being able to see a
3D view of the maps, with shadow effects. It's sort of halfway between
reality and a flat 2D map. It's good for seeing the shape of the terrain and
all the map detail at the same time. Very useful for seeing how the contour
lines relate to the actual shape, especially for those who aren't used to
visualising contours (and very useful in complex areas like the Moelwyns).

Agreed

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

VIDEOS

Quoted message said:

Most of these are in wide format for possible inclusion in DVDs for my
wide-screen TV. They're quite large, so some players on lower powered
PCs might display them a bit jerkily at full size.

They display jerkily on mine! I'm guessing it's because they were created on
your low powered PC. I've made some videos that are 10 times larger and they
play perfectly.

I'm puzzled by that jerkiness.

Quoted message said:

Some general comments. As you say there's a lot of pixelisation close up,
and also background shimmering. Far better than nothing, but really not a
patch on the flight sim. As I've mentioned before, you really have to see
the flight sim in action (i.e. moving, not screenshots) to really appreciate
it.

Agreed.

Quoted message said:

There's also the weather in the flight sim, which takes it to a whole new
level. My previous screenshots were taken with weather "turned off" (i.e. no
clouds, no wind, unlimited visibility and at midday), but when you add
weather (particularly real-time weather downloaded off the net, rather than
the simple presets), it adds another dimension and changes it from simply
"viewing a 3D model of the terrain" to almost being there!

I've taken some screenshots in real weather, so I'll have to upload those
too.

See my comments in your thread. I love the weather effects.

Quoted message said:

Anyway, back to the video. Thanks for pointing out FRAPS, I've wanted
something for making videos of the flight sim for some time. This seems to
do the job really well (I've done a few 30 second grabs with the trial
version). Since my screen res is 1680x1050, it can only record half-size
videos at 840x524, but that's fine, I wouldn't want them any larger than
that.

See my other post in your thread.

Quoted message said:

But I'm wondering what you've done to your videos. Clearly you've converted
them to mpg, What software did you do that with? FRAPS recommend some
software for compressing them (then saving as AVI) but I haven't tried those
yet.

Big subject, and definitely OT! I'll come back to it more fully if you
want, or by email. But in short, I use Womble MPEG Video Wizard or
MemoriesOnTV.

Quoted message said:

Once I've figured out how to compress them I'll post a few.

Quoted message said:

If there's enough interest, I'll post some equivalent GE examples
later (not Wales!).

That would be interesting. Apparently there is a flight sim mode in Google
Earth, but I still haven't tried it yet.

Later...

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Terry Pinnell said:

Paul Saunders said:

Quoted message said:

MM

BTW, you inserted two hyphens below MM, which is used as a sig separator, so
it's possible some people didn't see what you wrote afterwards in their
newsreader, if they have it set to ignore sigs.

Thanks - never would have thought of that possibility! (I'd be
interested to know if anyone here *did* actually get that result?)

It has to be hyphen-hyphen-space, and you had hyphen-hyphen-return. So a
newsreader shouldn't have cut that off, providing it was working correctly.
I don't know, however, how accurately newsreaders implement it.
Mine (tin) showed the whole article but it's old enough to have been
around when that feature was more widely used.

-adrian

Adrian Godwin said:

Terry Pinnell said:

Paul Saunders said:

> MM

BTW, you inserted two hyphens below MM, which is used as a sig separator, so
it's possible some people didn't see what you wrote afterwards in their
newsreader, if they have it set to ignore sigs.

Thanks - never would have thought of that possibility! (I'd be
interested to know if anyone here *did* actually get that result?)

It has to be hyphen-hyphen-space, and you had hyphen-hyphen-return. So a
newsreader shouldn't have cut that off, providing it was working correctly.
I don't know, however, how accurately newsreaders implement it.
Mine (tin) showed the whole article but it's old enough to have been
around when that feature was more widely used.

-adrian

Thanks Adrian.

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Terry Pinnell said:

Quoted message said:

BTW, you inserted two hyphens below MM, which is used as a sig
separator, so it's possible some people didn't see what you wrote
afterwards in their newsreader, if they have it set to ignore sigs.

Thanks - never would have thought of that possibility! (I'd be
interested to know if anyone here *did* actually get that result?)

I didn't, but I'm running OE Quote-Fix which colours quoted text
differently, and I noticed that everything after your two hyphens was shown
in grey. At first I thought your post was really short, until I scrolled
down.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

One thing I've just noticed about MM is that it uses the same source
of aerial photos as Horizon's photo scenery, albeit at a lower
resolution.

Ah - I thought so!

Whereas Just Flight have obviously used a different set of photos.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

That's one advantage of FSDiscover! (yes, the name includes an
exclamation mark), it shows the names correctly from any angle, even
when you bank the plane.

Is that another FSX add-on?

Yep, it costs $29.95, currently £14.80.
http://www.flight1.com/products.asp?product=fsdisc
http://www.flight1software.com/showcase/fsdiscover/

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

They display jerkily on mine! I'm guessing it's because they were
created on your low powered PC. I've made some videos that are 10
times larger and they play perfectly.

I'm puzzled by that jerkiness.

Maybe it's the time they take to decompress that's causing the jerkiness?
Ironally an uncompressed video may play better.

Paul
--
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/weblog/

Paul Saunders said:

Terry Pinnell said:

Quoted message said:

BTW, you inserted two hyphens below MM, which is used as a sig
separator, so it's possible some people didn't see what you wrote
afterwards in their newsreader, if they have it set to ignore sigs.

Thanks - never would have thought of that possibility! (I'd be
interested to know if anyone here *did* actually get that result?)

I didn't, but I'm running OE Quote-Fix which colours quoted text
differently, and I noticed that everything after your two hyphens was shown
in grey. At first I thought your post was really short, until I scrolled
down.

Seems odd given Adrian's point?

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

One thing I've just noticed about MM is that it uses the same source
of aerial photos as Horizon's photo scenery, albeit at a lower
resolution.

Ah - I thought so!

Whereas Just Flight have obviously used a different set of photos.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

That's one advantage of FSDiscover! (yes, the name includes an
exclamation mark), it shows the names correctly from any angle, even
when you bank the plane.

Is that another FSX add-on?

Yep, it costs $29.95, currently £14.80.
http://www.flight1.com/products.asp?product=fsdisc
http://www.flight1software.com/showcase/fsdiscover/

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

They display jerkily on mine! I'm guessing it's because they were
created on your low powered PC. I've made some videos that are 10
times larger and they play perfectly.

I'm puzzled by that jerkiness.

Maybe it's the time they take to decompress that's causing the jerkiness?
Ironally an uncompressed video may play better.

Paul

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Terry Pinnell said:

Quoted message said:

I didn't, but I'm running OE Quote-Fix which colours quoted text
differently, and I noticed that everything after your two hyphens
was shown in grey. At first I thought your post was really short,
until I scrolled down.

Seems odd given Adrian's point?

Yeah, it does. Maybe it's something to do with the fact that OE routinely
chops off the space at the end, so it probably doesn't expect it.

Paul
--
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/weblog/