Hi,
I’ve been trying to exclude TIN from my airport. The result is that the terrain is flattened, but the Photogrammetry satellite remains.
The problem is, that I can’t modify elevation terrain precisely with rectangles as its resolution seems to be low.
The only way to solve the problem is to turn off photogrammetry completely in the sim settings. Then it works as expected.
Usually, Exclude TIN removed photogrammetry completely.
Photogrammetry + Exclude TIN:
Photogrammetry OFF
Regards.
Your exclude may need to be much larger.
Done that, no luck, unfortunately.
Yes, there are at least a couple of threads on this. As I noted in another thread, I’ve been working on an airport in a photogrammetry area. While you can exclude photogrammetry objects (like trees), you can’t “turn off” photogrammetry over an area, at least as far as anyone I’ve seen discuss here.
I also found out that the satellite ground data from photogrammetry is different from what you see if you turn photogrammetry off in the data options.
I’ve been working on an airport in Stow/Hudson, Massachusetts, which lies in a photogrammetry area. If I have photogrammetry turned on, when I try to use any terraforming, you end up with the grass following the terraforming, but the “land” is formed much more coursely and randomly than expected, so that you end up seeing grass floating in the air like a hill and empty under it. The sim also pretty much ignores all terraforming and kind of does its own thing.
Upshot being, if I ever release the airport, I’m going to let users know they have to turn photogrammetry off for the sim, since there’s no way that I can see of locally suppressing all photogrammetry “features”. I’d be happy if perhaps I could say turn it off on this whole tile, but, that’s not currently possible.
As much as I like flying over photogrammetry, it destroys our ability to create airports (not to mention those ugly, ugly trees). I don’t know how Asobo/Gaya etc. get around the terraforming issues. Maybe through editing CGL somehow? Or maybe Microsoft adjusts the photogrammetry and deletes it for their first party airports?
(not to mention that in general, especially with photogrammetry turned on, terraforming in general looks different in dev mode than in normal mode, which is another issue).
Here’s an example of the floating grass showing what the terraforming “should” look like, with the land far below. This is a polygon terraform, but I get similar issues with rectangle terraforms, though mostly with rectangles it just looks awful with photogrammetry turned on vs off.
I’ll post a few more images later.
Anyone, anything? It’d be (at least) good to know if there’s any plan to fix this or not. We have two airports in development that won’t run on Xbox because of this, and the PC version will require the user to turn off photogrammetry.
Thanks.
What is the airport icao?
I’d like not to share at the moment.
Hello @MateoEs7874,
I apologize for the delay.
Is there any chance you could share your project with us? This would help us understand the issue and try to reproduce it.
See section 3), here.
Thank you
Regards,
Boris
Hi @Boris ,
Thank you for reaching out to me. I’ve sent a message.
Hello @MateoEs7874 ,
We’ve found that we already have a ticket addressing this same behavior with no ETA for a fix.
I will update the existing issue and include a link to this post for reference
Regards,
Boris
Hi, thank you for reaching back. Do you have any suggestions/tips for us on how to proceed in such a case?
That’d be great if we could have the option to exclude photogrammetry with a polygon.
@Boris I have run into this as well. KPMD photogrammetry / TIN overlaps runways which makes adding heightmaps and/or runway profiles get really crazy bumpy. turning off photogrammetry, the same heightmaps and runway profiles are smooth as silk. would be great to be able to at least exclude TIN with a custom airport area. Other areas that don’t have photogrammetry work as expected with heightmaps and runway profiles. can we at least get the KPMD area photogrammetry excluded even if the tools don’t enable us to do it? happy to share example privately.
@Boris has there been any update on this bug? I know you last replied here a year and a half ago and have possibly forgotten about the issue.
There are still a number of us fighting against this problem of how photogrammetry overrides terraforming. It’s making it impossible to develop and release airports that have a lot of terrain variation.
I’m trying to develop an airport in Colorado and, I’m sure you can imagine, it is anything but flat. Because of this photogrammetry problem, I have 3 choices:
Develop the airport with “flatten” turned on, in which case there’s no point releasing the scenery because some of the defining characteristics of it are wiped out, including its sloped intersecting runways and the fact it sits on a plateau.
Develop the airport and release it with the caveats: “it won’t work on Xbox” and “PC users must turn off photogrammetry”, which might make the airport better, but would destroy the character of the surrounding area. Turning off photogrammetry is such an immersion-breaking change, I doubt anyone would do it just for the sake of a single airport.
Quit developing the airport altogether because, in the current state, there’s no demonstrable advantage over the AI-generated version. I don’t want to do this because it’s my “home airport” and I’m invested in releasing a better version.
Is there any way, if the bug can’t be fixed, could there be a Polygon attribute added such as “exclude photogrammetry”? Or could terraforming be given priority to override photogrammetry contours?
If no development time can be set aside for this (totally understandable with the impending release of 2024) could you shed some light on how your internal developers handled this problem for the bespoke airports? Do they all just use “flatten” regardless of the surrounding real-world terrain? Or is there some way around this apparent rendering prioritization issue you could share?
Cheers,
Shawn
PS - my own thread on this issue:
Getting a sloped and flat runway with terraforming just isn’t workable - Questions & Community Discussions / Airports & Sceneries - MSFS DevSupport (flightsimulator.com)
Yes, I have the same issue in 2020. Lots of the Northeast is PG’d, and we can’t use terraforming there wherever there’s vegetation (including just grass). Not to mention the terraforming acts differently.
I’d really love to be able to exclude ALL aspects of PG in an area. Not just TIN objects.
