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ImpulseSimulations avatar image
ImpulseSimulations asked ImpulseSimulations commented

Colour Filter Applied to Australia

Hi Team,
We're wondering if there is a way we can pull the imaging and Colour filters used in sim into QGIS.

This would help to correctly colour match without the need to do a full sim export to check if the blend is correct.

We took the image from bing and overlayed our capture and matched the bing colour however with the filter that is applied over the imaging in sim, our image doesn't match.

Being able to do this would be extremely helpful!

scenerydefault
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ImpulseSimulations avatar image
ImpulseSimulations answered RoscoHead commented

Hi Team, whilst terraforming today I seemed to have glitched the sim causing the Red mask to be "Removed" temporarily. Our scenery looks so much nicer at the realworld colours.

Is there a way we can exclude the mask from sceneries. I've attached two photo's One with and one without the mask.


With Mask:

flightsimulator-ebyefdwxg8.jpg



Without:

flightsimulator-jaftiuzovh.jpg

As you can see it brings the scenery together and really makes this area look accurate.
The red tinge over a massive part of Australia, in several areas such as this one it is not at all the case.


Look forward to seeing what we can do here.


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FlyingRaccoon avatar image FlyingRaccoon ♦♦ commented ·
Hello @ImpulseSimulations

Where did this happen? It this your own aerials or the game ones?
If you are able to repro the color change when using the terraforming tools, I'm interested to know how.
We are reviewing this post so I'll come with a proper answer later on.

Regards,
Sylvain

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Nick_NZASimulations avatar image Nick_NZASimulations FlyingRaccoon ♦♦ commented ·

Back in the early Alpha version of the game I believe someone complained Australia was "too green" so they put a red filter over it and completely broke Australia and we have been stuck with it since.


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RoscoHead avatar image RoscoHead Nick_NZASimulations commented ·
It's like when someone said "the music is too loud" so instead of setting the default music slider to 50%, they reduced the maximum music volume. Now if I *want* the music louder I have to turn everything else down.
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ImpulseSimulations avatar image ImpulseSimulations FlyingRaccoon ♦♦ commented ·
Hi @FlyingRaccoon I have been able to replicate the removal of the red mask that was applied over Australia several times.


To reproduce simple create a Rectangle with a height map then edit it and click and hold the Flatten or Smooth tools. Eventually you'll be faced with a window to say you've been disconnected from the servers (internet issues) if you push past this and eventually it comes up again once closed after that if you move away from the area either via Slew, Dev cam or drone and return to the area it will be what I can only assume is the RAW Bing data in a much more accurate form.

The area in particular from my photos is Bendigo Airport (YBDG)

having the ability to remove the mask would allow us developers to use our own CGLs much easier as we can match them to the Bing imaging which tends to have much more colour in it over this red mask.

Also note that if the area is covered in a custom Aerial the mask is not there but if we were to do that for this area to cover what we would need for the area to look nice It would be above 5GB without a doubt.

Look forward to seeing what we can plan for this.

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FlyingRaccoon avatar image
FlyingRaccoon answered FlyingRaccoon commented

Hello @ImpulseSimulations @Nick_NZASimulations

" I believe someone complained Australia was "too green" so they put a red filter over it and completely broke Australia"

That's not really the explanation obviously.

We have two types of color correction:

- Aerial color correction: imagery color varies from one tile to its neighbour, and from one LOD to the next. To fix this we have to apply a color filter on aerials so that they are uniform and you don't see any discontinuities while flying. That's what your picture are illustrating above; the aerial ends up being colored in red to match high neighbouring tiles and higher LODs.

- TIN color correction: TIN colorimetry is most of the time very different from the aerial. TIN is Australia are a good example of this. To avoid any discontinuities, we apply a color filter computed from the aerial on the TIN to better match the surrounding aerials.
Here's an illustration of the difference at the border of the TIN at Adelaide:
Raw:

1659004506480.png

Corrected:

1659004533868.png


Now, why are you ending up with raw aerials when editing heightmaps?
Thanks to your great feedback, we identified the issue. The game has a mechanic where it will switch offline if it hasn't received any signal for a period of time. I think you can witness this if you click on the main window border for over 30 seconds. This is not supposed to happen when clicking in the Scenery Editor so we will have a look and fix this.
When switching offline, the game is supposed to clear the terrain data and switch to the procedural rendering. Since we're not in the correct flow here, this does not happen and you end up having the tiles already loaded being rendered without the aerial color correction.

Regarding your first question. No, giving you access to our imagery is not possible but we have plans to improve how the Scenery Editor lets you decide how this color correction process influences your scenery.

Finally, we are aware this color correction process leads to cases where the raw aerial is better than the corrected one but we have no choice if we want to maintain image continuity between locations and LODs.
The way to improve this is to get better source imagery that needs less correction and improve our color correction processes.
That's something we want to improve in the future obviously.

I hope I answered your questions.

Regards,
Sylvain


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ImpulseSimulations avatar image ImpulseSimulations commented ·
Thanks for the explanation here @FlyingRaccoon,

however that doesn't really help me in this case much.

What I am asking is, if there is a way us developers could exclude the filter around the area that our airport/scenery is being developed around.

Most of us have access to tools for a custom CGL, however as my last 2 weeks have been manually editing our aerial to suit the area I am hoping that there is a possibility for some form of exclusion tool.

it brings so much more life to the area and helps us to be able to match the aerials that we have access too which are generally much greener.

Look forward to hearing more.


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FlyingRaccoon avatar image FlyingRaccoon ♦♦ ImpulseSimulations commented ·
No, you can't disable it.

The only way around this would be to cover the area with your own CGL or TIN.

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HybridNZ avatar image
HybridNZ answered ImpulseSimulations commented

I guess the problem is it effects a lot of things including airports ... this is NZA YMHB with true black material runway grime. It gets tinted red as well.

Here is what it use to look like vs it what it looks like now, the red hue happened several sim updates a go. Will be really nice to be able to control and we're glad its being worked on.


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FlyingRaccoon avatar image FlyingRaccoon ♦♦ commented ·
That's one of the issue we plan to address by changing the default behavior and available options in the Scenery Editor.

By default, the "Enable coloration" which allows you to override this color is disabled. You probably want to use it to make sure your airport is no longer impacted by color correction.

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ImpulseSimulations avatar image ImpulseSimulations FlyingRaccoon ♦♦ commented ·

@FlyingRaccoon problem appears to be even when using that in an area covered by TIN, the colour refuses to return to the way we have it set currently as apron override.


For example, if you test our release of Adelaide International (YPAD) you can see if the World Update for Australia is not installed our aprons look as intended per our release.

Then if you install it, it's a completely different look.
The point in these photo's is the colour change in aprons even when using colour override.
Disregard the change in colour of CGL that was fixed with the Tin Exclusion.


With World Update Australia Installed:

unknown-2.png


Without World Update Australia Installed:
unknown-3.png

As you can see even though in both photo's, the aprons are using custom colours via the colour override it appears that the colours from the nearby photogrammetry, although TIN excluded still seems to effect our aprons.

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ImpulseSimulations avatar image ImpulseSimulations ImpulseSimulations commented ·
I'll also add that within Australia it is common to have Yellow sort of long grass, if the area has more heat, and the sim will not draw grass unless it's closer to green. so any area, that is colour matched closer to the Red Hue won't draw the grass either.


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