Re: Experimental DSM-based terrain renderer with streamed orthophotos

Amazing.

Would that .5m resolution be the cause of the "jello mold" look of some of
the buildings?  Is it possible to detect that effect and properly blend the
surrounding scenery with a straightened building wall with an appropriate
texture?

Osm has building locations and footprints apparently taken from our city
tax authority's data.  I'm assuming that if we had .5m-resolution lidar
data for our area, it could be matched and used to correct the lidar data,
yielding a reasonable approximation of the roof shape,  height and and building
footprint.  Is it possible to use common textures for the front and sides
of residential buildings based on roof height and widths taken from the
building outline?  That's a lot of processing, but the result could be
quite realistic viewed from 1000' agl.  Buildings near airports might need
better modeling, as the minimums there would be lower.

Apparently, there is now an open global database of building outlines in 3d
format:

https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/17/6647/2025/#bib1.bibx4

And this:

 A project from Finland that provides a very detailed city model.  An
outline of the techniques they used:
https://www.hel.fi/hel2/tietokeskus/data/helsinki/kaupunginkanslia/3D-malli/
Helsinki3D_Kalasatama_Digital_Twins_020519.pdf

Take a look at https://kartta.hel.fi/?setlanguage=en and click the 2d/3d
button on the right.  Zoom in and out on Helsinki.

One estimate puts the number of buildings in the world at 2.75 billion.
Can we model them all in Flightgear?


-Pat

On Tue, Jun 2, 2026 at 6:25 AM James Hogan via Flightgear-devel <
[email protected]> wrote:

>
>
> On 2 June 2026 03:52:54 BST, Curtis Olson <[email protected]> wrote:
> > It looks
> >like the elevation data accurately represents the tops of trees and
> >buildings, not the base ground level.  That leads to some interesting
> >results as you mention, but in many places it looks spectacular.
> >
> >I think there are times when you just want the base ground, but other
> times
> >the first lidar reflection is pretty cool.  From time to time I wonder
> >about training a yolo model to pick out trees or other objects from the
> sat
> >photos (wouldn't really have to be that perfect.)
>
> The high res (1m or better) lidar data from the UK environment agency,
> that I've long wanted in FG but it doesn't look convenient to stream
> directly, have both DSM (surface) and DTM (terrain), theoretically allowing
> vegetation and buildings to be fairly directly determined including their
> height above the terrain...
>
> Cheers
> JamesH
>
>
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