Dave; I reviewed my process, here it is:

Okay, here we go. First I want you to know that this exercise hurt my brain.

Correction: I took 194 photos to create the pano, the tripod was set so the camera was 6 foot high and I used a normal swivel and tilt head.

I used Autostitch to connect all the images together, I had to play with the settings some.

After Autostitch, I opened up the resulting panorama image in Photoshop and filled in any blank areas with white (in my case it was the white painted areas anyway)

Still in Photoshop, I selected the slice tool and highlighted the entire image. Right clicked on the image and specified; divide horizontal into 4 rows, divide vertical into 4 rows.

Then I selected File>Save for Web (now I’m pretty sure I didn’t have this option when I first started and I needed to download this as an add-on). Once the Save for Web opens, I selected save as a png-24. Clicked ok and specified the location.

I then Opened DDSConverter 2 (free download – just Google it). Here I navigated to the png files (which by the way are all numbered just right for FSOne - thank you photoshop slicing tool) and highlighted all the images. I checked the options and set them like the FAQ suggested. Selected save and done. I just created the low quality images talked about in the FAQ.

Technically you should go back to the pano image in Photoshop and reslice it the image this time into 4 rows and 8 columns, and then again in 8 x 16. however you might note that in the garage pano I created, I only did the medium images and I just repeated these images in each of the image folders for FSOne as described in the FAQ. I did this in case I put the quality level to low or high and I didn't want a white screen or black screen because there was an empty image folder.

The rest of the process, doing the ele, dom and fld file are all extremely important and must be prepared to the letter, or the whole thing won’t work.

I hope you have photoshop, if not maybe someone else knows of an alternative for a slicing program.

Best of luck, ask any question you want, now that I've reminded myself how to do it, I should be able to help further if need be.

Scott H

Hi Scott and Dave

If you do not have Photoshop or access to it, try Gimp. I've done some panos using the Gimp without too much of a pain. The process using Gimp is as follows:

1) Make sure your pano's size is exactly 8192 x 4096.
2) Add guides to the pano: Image->Guides->New Guide and specify horizontal or vertical, and at which pixel the guide should be. I normally slice my pano into 4 slices wide by 2 slices high, resulting in tiles of 2048x2048 each.
3) Once you've placed all your guides (in this case 3 vertical guides at 2048, 4096 and 6144 pixels and one horizontal guide at 2048 pixels), slice the image using Image->Transform->Guillotine. This will leave you with 8 perfectly square slices of your pano.
4) This step is where I battled a bit.... Saving the slices as JPG files from Gimp resulted in a pano with ugly horizontal lines in FS One. Saving them as DDS did not work either as I could not get the right settings to use with the DDS plugin which is freely available for Gimp. So my only option remaining was to save the tiles as uncompressed 24-bit TGA, but there are also problems doing this from Gimp. So, one way of working around this is to save all your tiles from Gimp with the correct names, but as BMP files.
5) For the next step I use a little freeware program called IrfanView (downloaded with all of it's plugins) as it is able to save in the correct 24-bit TGA format. Doing a batch conversion in IrfanView is quite straight forward.
6) Once you've got your tiles in TGA format, you should simply follow the rest of the FAQ as provided by the developers.
7) Our field, which was my first FS One pano experiment, is quite bumpy, and I liked the elevation file supplied with the Grasslands scenery in FS One, so I used that one. Taxiing using this ELE file looks quite realistic with the plane bobbing around as it moves over the scenery.

Hope this was informative.


Regards
Ryno

Good info Ryno, most folks don't have a copy of Photoshop on their PC, so I'm glad you posted. Scott H

Hey Scott and Ryno,

You guys are awesome! Thanks a lot for the above posts because they fill in all of the blanks that I have had regarding making my own pano. I don't have photoshop so I downloaded and tried Gimp a while ago (it's amazingly good for freeware, I think it comes with the Mac's too). So, your comments are the perfect combo for me.

Quite a while ago, since I didn't have the index head, I tried downloading some spherical projection panos and then doing the tiling etc just to see if I was able to. I managed to do it but the result was low res and not too great in the program. I had used Gimp as a result of probably Ryno's general suggestions way earlier in this thread but I forced it by turning on the grid and cutting and pasting each tile to new files ... brutal. It hurt my head too.

The comments above make total sense for me so I'll be off to the races as soon as I get time and a good day for the pics. I'm near a great beach which is huge and pretty flat at low tide, so I think it'll go well with the existing ele files. If it works I'll try to post it back here if you're into it.

A couple more questions though:
1. Can you tell me what camera resolution you used for the actual photos?
2. When you took the photos, did you also take one or more straight down and a few straight up? Maybe that's why you had to fill in the blank spots?
3. Scott do you think that you would have got similar final resolution if you took fewer photos or did the more photos help improve the resolution?
4. what was the lens focal length when you took the photos, so that it worked nicely with Autostitch?

Sorry to be a pain, but I'm really grateful.
Thanks again.
Dave

Dave, I think a beach setting will be really hard to stitch together, especially the horizon and above. As fars as the number of photos, I did that many photos because I thought I needed that much overlap in order to get Autostitch to work right. I also tried to shoot around 50 mm focal length.
The camera I used for my images was a Canon EOS 30D, 8 meg. I don't think that is really necessary though as I mentioned before, a 3 meg camera will be fine too.
The pointing down and pointing up, absolutely have to be done, if not they have to be filled in. Which is what I had to do. My downward shots were of concrete with little discernible features, so Autostitch just skipped what it couldn't figure out (and actually left an empty black segment). Same with the ceiling.
Regarding fewer photos delivering similar results, definitely will not (I tried and I also tried at wide angle). Autostitch just needs lots of material to resolve the floor to ceiling 360 degree views. I'm sort of curious how a solid blue sky would work, since there is nothing to match, but that wasn't your questions.
It was funny, on one version, I didn't fill in the blank sections, and processed it, I ended up with the most odd looking image. I think it is posted earlier in this forum.
You didn't ask the question, but I used a tripod and angled the camera down and just took photos every 20 degrees or so in a circle, then I lifted the camera angle and circled again, and continued until I was pointing straight up. It's amazing how many photos I ended up taking.
scott H

Lear, have you tried to set your radio like the FAQ:
http://www.inertiasoft.com/fsonefaq/...html#Q1028-FS1
I imagine that one of these of switches is your throttle hold, spend a few minutes here to get some experience and you should be able to set any axis you need.
Scott H

Great Scott! Joke intended. Thanks Scott, that's great info. I'll try what you did and I'll borrow a 7 MP camera with a big memory card too. I don't think the beach'll be that bad because there's enough stuff around it to break up the horizon (at least near the shore). It can't be much different from doing a big grass field in Illinois. I'm in the pacific nw too, so the chances of a cloudless sky are slim! We'll see what happens.

Thanks again,
Dave

Yes I have setup several planes and helis using this FAQ. I haven't had time to go thru and eliminate all axis assignments for the TRex. I don't think that FSOne supports anything except the DX Transmiters with Throttle Hold and the TRex. Is the DX a seperate entry in the transmitter selection? Are you using the wireless interface for the DX? That might explain why I don't see it on my transmitter selections list. I will pursue this further when I get time. Right now tomorrow is indoor fly time and the WX is getting into the 60's for more outdoor time. Thanks for the interest!

The DX isn't a separate entry, just another radio as far as FSOne is concerned. Every set up I do is with the JR 6 channel emulation selection. I'm not using the wireless. Have fun flying

Hi Dave

I used an old Canon 350D 8 Mpixel camera and can give you the following pointers:

1) Make sure your camera is level i.e. take a spirit level and check for a level camera right around 360 degrees. If the camera is not level, I found that the horizon waves when all the photos are stitched together (I might be wrong here, but it is what happened to me).
2) Place your camera in portrait mode on the tripod, set your camera to manual focus, and try to set the focus such that most things look clear.
3) If possible, switch your camera to manual mode, meter right around and choose the best exposure time to fit with an f-stop value of 12 or so (this f-stop value will give you a better depth of field with more things in focus).
4) Take photos right around with the horizon roughly in the middle of the frame, and allow for at least 30% overlap. I initially used a focal length close to 50mm, but found that I could get away with wider shots (I think the focal length was closer to 30mm and this worked well).
5) Tilt the camera up a bit and take another round of photos. If your sky does not have clouds on the day that you take the photos, don't even bother trying to stich it together. See the note on skies below.
6) Tilt the camera down and continue taking photos until you feel that you covered most of the scene with adequate overlaps horizontally and vertically.
7) Stitch your photos together. I've had mixed results with Autostich, but it's worth a try. I've used a freeware tool called Hugin with a lot of success. There are many tutorials available on the web on how to create pano's using Hugin. One of it's good features in my mind is that it enables the user to define straight horizontal or vertical lines (such as the horizon over the ocean or straight edges of buildings), and this eliminates those horrible wavy horizons.

Notes on the sky:
Flying in a simulator using a pano with no clouds makes it quite hard to orientate yourself if you lose view of the ground. Clouds give you a sense of movement and speed when you can't see any land. We often have no clouds here (especially on days when I want to take pano photos!), so I cheated a bit when I created a pano of our local flying field. I stitched together one of the beautiful sky scapes that come with FS One (they are broken down into tiles just as the scenery). When I stitched together the land portion of my pano, I erased the remaining blue sky from my pano, and then placed the FS One sky of my choice on a layer below my scenery. It looks very realistic! I'm trying to upload a small video clip to YouTube and will notify you once it succeeded.

Hope this helps
Ryno

Hey Ryno,
Thanks for the great information.
Scott

I have been using the JR-8 EMU transmitter, I will go and try the JR6 to see if there is any difference.
Thanks!

Hey Ryno,

Thanks for those suggestions, I'll put them to good use. I like the sky one because there are a lot of great skies in FS One. Interesting to note too, then, that we could also alter the FS One pano skies if we really wanted to as well.

As fate would have it, rare as they are here, we had a beautiful day perfectly clear sky today but I'm not ready yet.

Cheers,
Dave

Whats the easiest plane to learn to do hovers and other 3d stunts on? does anyone have any vids up yet?

Brian from Inertiasoft suggested I try the 12 foot tribute to learn hovering and harriers. I've been trying.
Video's I haven't figured out yet.
Scott H

Hello all...

So this is basically what happened...

- people at work have been buying the Air Hogs helis to harass other coworkers

- i decided to try to find a micro plane to "take them out"

- internet research lead me to many fun articles of passion about rc planes - including an article about "UnModding" the ITC StarScream micro flyer.

- during a particular boring lunch one day, i drop into the local RS and found a StarScream microflyer as a managers special for $25.

- take it to my local park (probably one of the most populated parks in the US - Prosepect Park, Brooklyn NY), proceed to have 1.5 hours of unexpected joy playing with this thing.

- realize that although there is much randomness to this toy, I am quite week in response to many situations and proceed to research RC flight sims


So obviously as far as RC planes go, I am kinda a beginner, though I would argue that my learning curve would be relatively fast, as I have quite a bit of experience in a glider (real flying experience - don't have my license but have solo'd over 10 times - basically, I understand basic flight principles - including the ever so scary spin recovery) and I seem to pick up video games fairly quickly - and when you think about it the two disciplines share many of the same hand-eye coordination skills.

Now, here is where I am at. After much research and reading articles online, I am leaning towards FS One. For two reasons. 1) Apparently, they get the physics right and 2) The passion shown by the developers on many RC forums is inspiring (being an engineer/sw developer myself, I respect this). I am also considering Realflight G4. The only real reason why I am considering G4 is because of the detailed revelation given on their product page about the "training" options. I think it would be really beneficial to watch the stick movements of certain arial maneuvers when trying to learn them.

So to make a long question short (sorry for those you have followed this far)... how are the training features of FS One compared to G4?

Of course the sw engineer in me wants to know things like the Poly count difference (in planes) between FS One and G4, and whether either of these programs are using Shader 2.0 features, can I increase texture detail based on GPU performance, etc..... but for now, I will be happy in knowing which one is best suited for teaching me how do all those f'n cool aerobatic tricks...

thanks,

-j

p.s... forgot to mention that I have always been fascinated with RC airplanes, and am totally enthralled with the 3D flying stuff - especially the cheesy indoor aerial gymnastics to music stuff. who knew? i vote that we save the music industry with RC airplane gymnastics!

-j

Johnny
FSOne does have a series of training videos built in and those do have the stick movements on screen to follow. How it compares to G4 I have no idea. Shader 2 ? Poly? I have no idea.
Scott H

1. Thats becuase G4 has extensive training features, FSone only has some videos to watch.

2. As far as pixel shading is concerned G4 requires a card with atleast PS 1.3 FSone doesn't matter as I don;t think it uses any. If it is graphics that you are concerned about get G4 hands down. Infact, get G4 anyways. For the same price you are getting- real moving water that ripples for landings and take offs where aircraft bobs up and down realistically whereas FSone has no water at all, night time flying with neon light instead of only daytime flyings, 20 3D maps instead of 5, 65 aircrat instead of 41, freely downloadable user created aircraft instead of none, and extensive training options instead of few. G4 is brand new and it shows with its graphics and features, FSone is over a year old and starting to show it's age, especially considering that in the over a year since its been out it has seen very little extra content or changes except for 1 expansion pack and likely won;t see any more changes until a new version is released. Get G4 and you already have access to a bunch of Epxansion packs and free downloadable content not to mention very slick graphics to play with.

Don;t get me wrong, FSone is a great program and I have used and enjoyed it, when it was being compared againt G3.5 it was a lot easier to go with it, Now that G4 is out its a pretty hard sell.

BGM:

Obviously my favorite is FS One, and yours is G4. That said here's
what I think.

My thinking is why spend time flying any sim unless the physics are
top notch. Doing anything less is a waste of time. Also on top of
that it's "negative training".

The FS One videos are out there to let people make their own
decisions. I know I have posted this before on RCU, but here's some
comparisons between real spins and FS One (various planes in the sim
and then real video of the same planes):

FSOne: http://www.inertiasoft.com/videos/fs...latedSpins.wmv
Real: http://www.inertiasoft.com/videos/fs1_RealSpins.wmv

Spins are the biggest challenge for any sim. Find videos of the other
sims that look as real. I've not found any and this includes going
outside R/C simulators and into commerical sims and research.

The numbers game is one thing, but it's worth making a side-by-side
comparison of planes. In FS One we don't count permutations as
separate airplanes. Also, we don't have some gimmicks like blimps and
hawks, etc. We include airplanes that are very popular - a lot from
Hangar 9 and E-flite that are on the market today. We do have a
scaling wizard that will scale an airplane up or down in size and the
physics is scaled automatically. So with that there are an literally
an infinite number of airplanes in FS One. We included many scaled
variants already setup. Here's the list that we did not include in
any numbers count on the box labelling.

http://www.inertiasoft.com/fsonefaq/#Q1021-FS1

Aside from my opinion on all this (and I do think our physics are top
notch and nothing is better), here's another opinion:

http://www.rcuniverse.com/magazine/a...article_id=832

Michael
(FS One aero developer / airplanes ... and day job includes teaching this stuff)

I flew reflex and g4 before getting FS One, and have to agree with Mike. I found with FSOne, if I could do the maneuvers there, I could do them in real life... after flying fsone for several months, when I fly other sims(and I fly others alot, I work at a LHS), I find them very easy, Which isn't necessarily what you want in a learning tool, unless you want your friends to think your cool because you can fly so good on the computer .

Actually that's nbot true. The box and the website claim that there are 11 helicopters when in reality there are about 7 and 5 version that are identical and repeated with added training gear. Some people will be drawn towards the physics of FSone, however the poster above seemed alot more intersted in graphics and active training modes, which G4 is IMO superior. Having free downloadable aircraft, water and night scenes to play with and more overall scenes gives the program a lot more longevity.If you bought FSone over a year ago you have pretty much the same product today. I don't the physics mimc real life on any of the sims I have tried, they are all just different interpretations. Physics are obviously important but it seems like every company claims theirs are the best, it is also pretty much an imessureable factor and one that is easy to fall back on when the other stats all seem to fall behind. One thing I can say, the water physics in G4 are infinatley better than FSone!

Obviously everyone has their own opinion and I imgaine most people contributing to this thread obviously have an affinity towards FSone, especially those that work for Hangar 9.

BGM:

What I said above was true (what you highlighted in the quote).

I said "airplanes", which means wings and sometimes propellers
attached to them. I was talking about airplanes. I did not say
"helis". I also did not say "aircraft", which includes airplanes and
helis.

By the way, the numbers you're using for FS One are your own! On the
box we just say "over 30 airplanes and helis". Count them however you
like. The same counting thing applies to the Hangar Pack. We have
"10 aircraft", but there are different setups on some (PTS).

Everyone who reads this thread knows that I'm the airplane guy. I'm
not so tuned into helis, so I don't post on that topic.

And "yes" I have my opinion. That "opinion" has been pretty fine
tuned. I've been flying airplanes for a very very long time. That's
what got me into aerodynamics, and I'm still learning new stuff.

I'll let you know that the testers behind FS One are good to about
3%. What am I talking about? I can make tweaks on the order of 3%
and the pilots will notice the difference. That's how close we get to
a lot of the parameters/physics in FS One.

Michael

I own fsone and luv it if you watched the two vids it was actually hard to tell the real edge from the fsone version cudos to the fsone plane guy!!!

G4 spins http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi3pqbCAC_I

Heres a decent one from our own RCU review of G4 http://videoserver.rcuniverse.com/rc...3/g4_large.wmv


For my $200 they look pretty real.