##How to Use HD Mesh Overlay Data With Ortho4XP
As we all made it alive so far, the next and probably first question will be 'how can I use my nice alpilotx.net free HD mesh scenery with all this? First off, if you don’t know about it, it can be grabbed here:
http://www.alpilotx.net/downloads/x-plane-10-hd-mesh-scenery-v3/
There is also an !!!ULTRA!!! UHD version that is even bigger, but I’m not sure it’s worth it (maybe for jaggy mountains though, so maybe). So I grabbed this area, shown by the artistically challenged red X. The map acts as a way to know which files to grab:
The site flightsim.com is worth registering with as they hold .torrent files that for me came down quickly, but try the others as well I guess.
Now, there is usually some confusion over this (so I hope I’m right) but I believe that only the overlay Open Street Map like info (things like roads and autogen scenery locations) are read from the HD-Mesh download, as there is no way to have two elevation meshes combined in XP10/11. The Ortho4xp doesn’t actually need the HD-Mesh download anymore after the overlay directory has been built, so you can also remove it to save space. There is no point having two meshes as X-Plane will just use the one anyway. The ‘Curv_tol’ setting in the ‘build base mesh’ area is used to set the number of triangles in the mesh and is worth playing with.
If you already use w2xp and the w2xp net scenery for overlay stuff then you don’t really need to do this in Ortho4xp, although they do cover slightly different things (you actually get roads, powerlines and autogen from HD-Mesh data and the rest from w2xp)…
Anyway, once HD Mesh v3 is downloaded and unzipped, to build an ‘overlay’ you just do this:
The Michelangelo-like red arrow at the almost bottom shows that you just point to your HD-Mesh v3 directory (you might already have it under Custom Scenery for XP) and then the (Build Overlay) button does the rest.
What you end up with is a new scenery folder called ‘yOrtho4XP_Overlays’ in the base install directory of where you put Ortho4XP (mine is E:\Games\Ortho4XP\yOrtho4XP_Overlays). You then install this like you installed the other scenery, either copy it into Custom Scenery or symbolic/junction link it in. It should then look like this (Note: you can see I don’t have the HD mesh in anymore as it’s been ‘used’):
So, we now have nicer ‘overlay’ data and have told X-Plane based on the more recent streep map data where things are. Let’s take a look:
The keen of eye will now see that the roads, trees and autogen buildings are now in the proper place and things look less flat. It looks even nicer at night with some traffic and street lights (something XP is very good at):
It all lines up with the photo scenery too plus only took 5mb of space as well. Neat!
If you do fly really low a lot, then it’s worth building tiles to a higher zoom level (the defaults in this example are only zl 16, but check out the ‘zones building’ in the first post) but you can see the autogen does pretty good at combining:
For an X-Plane 11 beta install it might also be worth playing with the default scenery data that comes with that install. The OSM overlay data seems pretty good, so it might even be just as good to point the overlay directory to E:\Games\X-Plane 11\Global Scenery\X-Plane 11 Global Scenery anyway and save doing the HD Mesh big download… For a future experiment!
Also, things I want to try but if others have done already do say:
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Try a ‘Sea Source’ tile, as although we lose the water reflections some coastal graphics will look nice.
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Try a different ‘Curl_tol’ as how detailed the elevation mesh triangles are over somewhere like the Rockies or Andes. There’s an interesting comparison here that shows that in some cases the mesh data in Ortho4xp is actually more detailed than what you get with HD Mesh v3 anyway:
http://oscar.pilote.free.fr/meshtoolortho4xpcomparison.html
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Over lake areas (Ontario etc) try out some settings on using ‘masks for inland’.
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Figure out more the ability to draw shapes for zones to have higher level zoomed tiles for areas around airports or places I know I’ll be low on a route. The zoom level preview tool looks pretty straight-forward to use but I’m curious to see how XP picks up these around airports etc.
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Write up a guide on the batch build screen, as it’s a bit weird to use.
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Try a different map source, as I’ve heard USA_2 is good for well, you know…
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Bring it all together with the use of xOrganizer…