Ortho4XP - Tips & Tricks

[@ChrisPinCornwall]

One of the most useful videos I have watched on KZbin. Thank you so much.

[@MrScott_e]

Nice Job! Do more Ortho4XP Tips and Tricks you may find. All good stuff and love the Polygon vs. Z squares. Well done!

[@chrisevans-nodd]

That polygon technique is a nice option for sure.

[@britfrog]

no matter how much one thinks one knows there is always room to learn something new and i have with this video , thanks!

[@chrisevans-nodd]

They say "never stop learning". Good for the brain :-)

[@vicrobinson1366]

I have used Ortho4xp a lot but thanks to your video I picked up a couple of things which I did not know so a big thanks for that.

[@chrisevans-nodd]

You are welcome Vic. Yes it was a big help to go through all the settings & learn what each of them do. Amazing bit of software.

[@artandmusicplace]

Loved it thanks, particularly the ending take off

[@chrisevans-nodd]

Yes we like to get a bit silly at times. Glad you enjoyed it.

[@johnlovell1640]

Love your enthusiasm!... great vid and learned a lot from it.. including gliding off a mountain!

[@chrisevans-nodd]

Thanks John. Glad you found this helpful.

[@alexepvppm]

Nice tutorial; and very cool gliding!

[@chrisevans-nodd]

Thank you. Yes the goofy ending was fun.

[@rglasinovic]

Hi. Great video. Thanks for your tips. A question... what should I activate in Ortho4Xp in orther to see downloaded history squares on the map? Thanks

[@pokiishere-sebastian2126]

Excellent video! Thanks a lot!

[@chrisevans-nodd]

Thank you poki. I appreciate the comment.

[@filxplane288]

Very interesting tutorial, thank you. I have a problem with Iceland, all my tiles are flat and I am looking for a tutorial for that particular country. Could you help me to find something that could help me? Thanks

[@MagnumMike44]

One other thing I noticed, I used Zoom Level 19 on an airport that's close by, and it only generated the tarmac and the 2 physical runways but no buildings. It also generated scenery for the entire tile you select on the map, which is not desirable if you just want to create one high detailed airport.

[@chrisevans-nodd]

Ortho4XP is not an airport design tool. It's purpose is to compile satellite textures, elevation data & overlay geometry to produce scenery for a tile, an entire tile. You probably want to look at WED or Overlay Editor for individual airport work.

[@luftbilderhd]

Thanks a lot for all these explanations! At 16:20 you have chosen "NED 1"" as custom_dem, but once you have startet generating the tile with the "All in one" button (at 16:30), the status windows shows that it's downloading elevation data vom "Viewfinderpanoramas (J. de Ferranti)" which is default setting. Have you noticed that? What was going wrong here? Why did it override your custom_dem?

[@thx1138y]

You made it really fun, your like and suscription,continuous making funy videos,regards from sud am,chile

[@chrisevans-nodd]

Thank you & I love your KZbin name. Not a lot of people know about that movie.

[@terjehelle]

Why didn’t I see this video BEFORE making tiles for the Navajo Mountain task.. 🙈 Oh well, both tiles on 19, so hopefully it doesn’t look that bad.. Next time. 😅🕺

[@chrisevans-nodd]

I made this video quite some time ago. Nice to see its still helpful.

[@carlosh11934]

I'm trying to follow your video because I've been having a devil of a time and have not been able to get other scenery methods to work. On your video at about 10:51 you explain about the directory path that needs to be specified for the custom_overlay_src. I installed my X-Plane 11 from discs, so my installation is on a separate hard drive. Things fall apart after I get to this point: E: X-Plane/X-Plane 11/Custom Scenery. You show a directory X-Plane 11 Demo Areas. I don't have that directory. What should I do? I do have a directory Global Airports that contains "Earth nav data". Is that the folder I should use? The Custom Scenery folder contains the ini file and some airports that come with the program, Las Vegas, Dubai, etc. Carlos

[@chrisevans-nodd]

Sorry to hear you're having issue Carlos. Unless you're planning to generate scenery in X-Plane's demo areas (Seattle or Dubai) you don't need to worry about finding your demo scenery's location. But you do have to tell Ortho4XP where to find your regular overlay files (custom_overlay_src). Reading your comment it sounds like you maybe pointing at the wrong folder. You are looking for "...X-Plane 11/Global Scenery/X-Plane 11 Global Scenery", not "...X-Plane 11/Custom Scenery". I suspect that has been your problem.

[@wouldntyou_like_to_know]

Great video thank you sir!

[@chrisevans-nodd]

Glad that helped.

[@chrisgard4076]

great tutorial krrp em commin

[@chrisgard4076]

can you go into more detail regarding "curvatture_tol and apt-curve_tol in the mesh column please

[@KailimVibesyt]

Did you use V-Trees mod for the trees?

[@chrisevans-nodd]

I believe I was running a few forest mods when I recorded this. I don't recall which exactly but V-Trees was not one of them.

[@alexepvppm]

Do you know the difference between the mesh created by ortho4xp and Al pilot Mesh?

[@chrisevans-nodd]

Sorry I'm not familiar with AI pilot Mesh.

[@spcornelissen]

V1.03 or V1.30. I presume it was slip of the tongue... Lessons learned to make my scenery better using the latest version.

[@chrisevans-nodd]

At my age I find my tongue tends to get quite slippery.

[@seanlibin]

are you using IR Tracker?

[@LWJCarroll]

I am pretty sure Chris does on his cap.. Laurie

[@onealmr]

2:00 Version 1.03?? Not V. 1.30? Dyslexia? J/K.....great video!! TY!!

[@Kreemerz]

What about 'skip converts'? I've heard you should set to 'true'.

[@chrisevans-nodd]

Skip Converts is only used if you plan to tweak the satellite images using a third party program like Photoshop or Gimp. When Skip Converts is set to true Ortho4XP will download the satellite JPEGs but will not convert them to DDS (which is what X-Plane uses). So the process would be... set Skip Converts to true > build the tile > edit the JPEGs as needed > set Skip to Converts to false > run the tile a second time.

[@wouldntyou_like_to_know]

@@chrisevans-nodd I use "skip converts=true" on the original tile download process because this way the CPU is not having to jump back and forth (download then convert, download then convert on every individual image file) throughout the entire process but once the download is complete, I set skip converts back to false and then click "All in one" again. This time ortho will realize it has downloaded all the image files and commence to converting the .jpg files to .dds in one large batch and it just seems to work faster per tile for me that way. To each his own... Happy Ortho-ing!

[@chrisevans-nodd]

That's an interesting approach. Do we know that method is actually faster? I wouldn't expect the download function is all that CPU intensive but you're saying the switching between tasks is slowing things down? Might be interesting to run a test tile using both methods & compare the times. This is somewhat of a moot point for me however as I generally run my tiles over night. And I try not to do more than say six in a batch so I avoid potential data overage issues with the satellite image providers. But that's a whole other topic.

[@wouldntyou_like_to_know]

On my specific setup (XEON E5620 2.4GHz x 4 w/HT on, 24GB RAM and Gtx 1070) it is maybe 5 minutes faster per individual tile. Downloading isn't cpu intensive but I believe that the ortho program passing the function directly back and forth for each .jpg is where that extra fraction of a second accumulates over thousands of image files. I am no expert but I believe someone else steered me on to that approach and it made sense and even better it works for me.