Tiled Import - Georeferenced GPS Tiles

[fpibbs]

Focusing on an organized import, I'm investigating about opportunities of doing a TILED GPS GeoReferenced import, to be able to simplify the process for the community. From what I've searched at the moment there are some tools that can interact externally with RenderDOC but need the user to be in there (no python at all):

MapsAreaCaptureTool - A simple tool to help you capture large areas in Google Maps:

https://www.reddit.com/r/FS2020Creation/comments/inahmx/mapsareacapturetool_a_simple_tool_to_help_you/

and Google Earth Decoder:

https://www.reddit.com/r/FS2020Creation/comments/iwmz5o/google_earth_decoder/

Any othe ideas?

[eliemichel]

There's also this one: https://github.com/retroplasma/earth-reverse-engineering

[HuBandiT]

There's also this one: https://github.com/retroplasma/earth-reverse-engineering

@eliemichel, @retroplasma Please integrate (with) this?

It completely obviates any RenderDoc steps, as it talks directly to servers. Therefore the whole import could work from within Blender, no external software needed (other than for graphically choosing the area to import).

Caveats I encountered during manual use:

• geometry should import correctly
  • geometry should auto-center around zero to avoid falling apart due to limited precision of 32 bit floats used in Blender vs. Earth-sized coordinates
  • option of autorotation so that real life "local up" becomes up (instead of the North pole being up)
    • suboption: geometry rotated around local up axis so that e.g. North is always in the same direction, regardless of which area of Earth is imported; ideal would be seamless interoperation with other georeferenced Blender add-ons
• textures should import efficiently: instead of unpacking JPEGs into uncompressed bitmaps required by OBJ, then importing and embedding them as such into Blender, reuse the original JPEG data
• NTH: allow for appends: if I realize I need more octants (my camera points toward a missing octant), allow me to append import a new octant into Blender, and correctly merge it with the existing one
• NTH**2: allow to change (up or down) the detail level of already important octants retrospectively, so that already imported terrain can be adapted to changing needs.
• NTH**3: "Import Earth for camera perspective": imports all octants visible from the selected camera angle, with detail scaled according to actual detail visibility from that camera.