Ground Textures

[benclark]

Hi George and Team, I'm wondering what source do you use to make your high resolution ground textures? I'm currently wanting to have a go at making some smaller Canadian airports for my sim that no-one in the payware world would for obvious reasons ever consider and I can't find any sources approaching anything close to what you guys have for ground textures. The highest resolution Canadian satellite imagery freely available (from GeoBase) is 10m/pixel but is b&w while the "colour" option is a paltry 20m/pixel, obviously a far cry from what you guys have.

Thanks for your help, Ben

[skydvdan]

You have to search the internet. The key word to use when searching is orthoimagery.

[benclark]

Sadly I already know that and sadly I've yet to find any free to access sources better than GeoBase. The only other "free" images are only available to university students, from what I can find anyway which is why I figured I'd ask George and the team as I doubt they use a payware source due to the high cost of the images (normally many thousands from what I've seen) would probably lead to exceedingly high product costs. If somebody does know of a free high-resolution (or at very least better than 20m, since colour would be preferential for obvious reasons) orthoimagery source for Canada I would be highly appreciative!

[Orion]

There was another thread on orthoimagery: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5009.

George replied saying this:

Sorry about the late reply, I've been away a few days.
I don't know where to get them for Sweden.

I usually buy them but prices can vary. Seattle's cost less than 100 USD. The best ones for Athens where approx 1300euros & still poor quality requiring 100s of hours of clean up.


Try something like this..
http://www.terraserver.com/view.asp

or just google aerial images.

[benclark]

Thanks for the reply, George and the team must do some serious post-processing to the images as terraserver while supposedly giving 0.3m to 0.5m pixel resolution depending on where I look the images aren't very crisp or "colourful", indeed washed out for the area I want would be more appropriate. Maybe I'll have to charter a plane for an hour and go up with my camera, probably cost me about the same

[Orion]

I took the reply as not necessarily recommending TerraServer. There are many other distributors of orthoimagery as well. Just take a look at the little copyright string in the lower right of Google Maps or the Bing Maps data suppliers page: http://explore.live.com/about-bing-data-suppliers.