Re: Experimental DSM-based terrain renderer with streamed orthophotos

Hi Pat

On Tue, Jun 2, 2026 at 2:57 PM Patrick Callahanwrote:

> 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.
>

Well, that's kind of what osm2city does.  Except it does it as a scenery
building step, and uses the OSM data for height.  It should be the case
that the OSM data can be updated with the LIDAR height information, if it
hasn't already been done.

Apparently, there is now an open global database of building outlines in 3d
> format:
>
> https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/17/6647/2025/#bib1.bibx4
>

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

Render, probably yes.  We have a shader-based approach (the BUILDING_LIST
STG verb) which scales very well.  It should be possible to use a
vector-based data source to write BUILDING_LIST files for simple buildings.

-Stuart

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