Comments on: MeshTool: The Seeds Are Sown

By: Benjamin Supnik

Benjamin Supnik — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:44:51 +0000

You need to input your own coastline data, probably as Shapefiles.

By: olexia

olexia — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:33:07 +0000

I am creating full tile .dsf's where I want to change the digital elevation model, but leave everything else the same. I managed to use meshtool to input a new digital elevation model, and the results look fabulous except that all the water bodies are missing. Was happy with the original water bodies, just want to know how to make sure they are included when meshtool cuts the dsf.

By: Benjamin Supnik

Benjamin Supnik — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 21:15:00 +0000

You provide everything except the ‘xes’ climate/files. For those, download MeshTool from the XPTools March 08 download – the URL is in the README.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:12:00 +0000

MeshTool require some config files. where can i get those files?

By: Harry Bosch

Harry Bosch — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:58:00 +0000

What format do you use for polygon coastline data. Is it possible to use standard formats like Polish Map Format for this?

It would be great if we could use tools like GPSMapEdit to get accurate coastlines!

By: Benjamin Supnik

Benjamin Supnik — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 15:53:00 +0000

anonymous: for texes: I get asked this a lot, so I'll answer in another blog post.

For water...yes, the water height comes from the DEM height, so you can set the water height however you want per lake or even within a lake (but sloped water is not recommended).

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 15:39:00 +0000

It looks like a great tool.

Two questions.

How big of an area can we make with ortophotos, X-Plane loads 6 geocells at the same time and this eats up a lot of memory. By compressing the imgages we can reduce the memory roughly by a factor of 4. According to my calculations using 4 m/pix ortophotos gives us about 2,2 gig of textures to be loaded, and thats only ortophoto textures. Can X-Plane handle this?

Do I need a videocard with 3 Gig of VRAM or is this handeled in the RAM memmroy?

The other question, can we have water at different altitudes? a lake for example in a higland area?

Thanks for a great work with the scenery!

By: Benjamin Supnik

Benjamin Supnik — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 13:39:00 +0000

Yman: adjusting the coastline is done by editing the text file that "controls" meshtool. Meshtool requires polygons that define land, water, airports and custom orthophotos...they are all just polygons, and the coastline is just the border of water with, well, anything else. So you adjust the coastline this way.

Adjusting the SRTM DEM is legal and does allow you to customize elevations..edit it any way you want! The land use will naturally changes as you edit because the land use rules examine the SRTM height. (In otherwords, if you make an artificial mountain b y eidting the HGT in photoshop, the cliff sides of the mountain will get rock texture automatically if the land type is "natural" in the text file and not an orthophoto or water or airport).

Two things do not happen:
1. Editing the HGT file NEVER changes the land-water boundaries. Those are strictly vector.

2. mesh tool doesn't flatten. If you change coastlines using your text file, YOU have to make sure the elevation is reasonably flat.

Finally note that we are providing climate but we are not providing coastline data. If you want to make a tile, you need to somehow get vector coastline data and convert it to the polygon format MeshTool uses.

This is one of the main reasons that MeshTool is meant to be a tool used by other PROGRAMS, not HUMANS. The polygon coastline data tends to be a huge horrible string of numbers that you would not want to edit by hand.

By: y-man

y-man — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 10:45:00 +0000

You said "purpsoe of MeshTool is to let you put orthophotos and new coastlines".

Adjusting the coastline is done by providing some new points with zero altitude MSL in "SRTM-style HGT file for elevation"?

I would expect that this user-provided elevation data set will also enable us to correct local elevation errors. Am I correct?