[Flightgear-devel] new utility

[Curtis O. <cur...@gm...>]

This weekend I hacked together a little utility that might be interesting to
some people.  I called it photomodel and it's in
FlightGear/src/utils/Modeller/

This is a command line utiltity that takes the name of an aerial photo
texture, along with the lon/lat coordinates of the corners of the image (or
the max/min lon/lat if the image is aligned along strait lon/lat edges).  It
then spits out a .ac file of the correct size in meters to cover your area.
It tells you where to copy the file, and gives you a line to add to your
.stg file (and tells you which one to add it to.)  Special thanks to Syd
Adams who whipped up a .ac template for me to work from.

If you have access to some aerial imagery, you can use this utility to
quickly spiff up a local flying area.  Please note, I'm not saying you
couldn't do a screen grab out of google maps or some other online mapping
service to get some quick aerial imagery, but if you do anything like that,
please don't distribute the results without getting explicit permission from
the owner of the imagery, and please don't tell me about it. :-)

Note that this utility does have many limitation at the moment ... it only
spits out one square for one texture per model.  The output model is flat,
so you have to manually figure out an altitude that floats it a meter or two
above the default terrain.  It's not a perfect solution, but might be useful
for some situations.

I have found it handy to spiff up my local R/C flying site scenery for
replaying flights in my instrumented R/C airplane:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=MTkJYaiVxtA

All those nice mowed fields around our airstrip have been planted with corn
this year and it's now about 8' high ... sob ... :-(

Regards,

Curt.
-- 
Curtis Olson - University of Minnesota - FlightGear Project
http://baron.flightgear.org/~curt/  http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/
http://www.flightgear.org
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