The struggle is real. Fortunately, most of the orthos are already properly built and don’t require anything more than unzipping them and using the included conversion process to make them work for these regions:
The only reason I ever mess with Ortho4XP is areas of the country or world that don’t already have them built. I have a feeling, once I establish a workflow, I’ll be fine. I’m just struggling to find out what that is at the moment…
Lucky you revisited this thread. Yesterday or day before I started reading from top.
So hopefuly you will figure out all the bits for us so I can build my orthos with overlays quick and easy 
Well…I would point everyone to this free scenery that puts all the trees exactly where they are supposed to be on your Ortho for the US. It is magic and cleans up all the trees that end up on the beaches or highways and what not. It is in the World2XP section but does not require that and works well with ForkBoys pre-builts.
I would argue that US Ortho needs this, it is that big a difference.
can you pls check, the link doesnt work for me, thx
Edit : probably this is the link to 1.30 for win users
Edit2 : building tiles with 1.20b already… I hope the diference between 1.2 and 1.3 are only the UI
Built 2 areas yesterday w zoomlevel 16. Final size was not bad at all and first tests were very positive. Made also work the overlays.
Encouraged with it I went for 6 areas and zoomlevel 19! building over night. Early in the morning I was half way through the proces and at 100GB ! …
Stop Proces → Exit 
Edit: Now building 5 areas with ZL 17…
following this tutorial for Ortho4XP 1.20b
So it was 5 areas with ZL 17, size of tiles + overlay cca 50GB ( I didnt get further then tiles and overlays yet, need to continue with the tutorial video )
plus I use XEurope2.0 for the OSM data I gues.
LZNI… hmm, not that bad imo 
Number of world objects : HIGH
Number of world objects : MAXIMUM
I found particular areas with no coverage or with clouds from BI source. So if anyone is looking for best Base source for his country :
https://forum.thresholdx.net/topic/5-ortho4xp-master-source-list/
Having “fun” converting the JPEGs to DDS format - I’ve got a fairly fast computer with a good graphics card but it is taking forever with the recommended batch file program. Any secrets?
This is what I meant by being not happy with the single source for streamed Ortho. Below you can see small comparison from XP. Its great to choose from different sources of Ortho for particular region.
Left - Source : BI; Zoom Level : 17
Right - Source : CZ; Zoom Level : 18
Left - Source : CZ; Zoom Level : 17
Right - Source : CZ; Zoom Level : 18
Mmm…ran into many hours of frustration today with Ortho4XP. Was trying to build tiles for an area of Iceland and time and again I was coming up against a problem where the imagery would be there, and the roads and buildings, but the underlying terrain (elevations) were not…leading to flat as a pancake generated tiles. I went over and over and around and around rebuilding, trying different selections.
Finally - I turned to Google (I should have done that 15 minutes into the four hours) and apparently the height maps/elevation data (hgt files) are either not available online or weren’t in my HD Mesh or default scenery (how that is possible…I dunno). But a guy did supply some HGT files for the area that you can inject manually into the Ortho4XP working directory to make it work.
Victory…it only took about six hours to figure it out. (You can use individual tile HGT files to build tiles from separate height files…but you can’t do them in batches unless you are handy with some scripts and other junk…)
Your results are outstanding Beach. Well done.
What chipwich said. 
Wheels
What chipwich and Wheels said.
I have enough trouble just loading already produced ortho scenery. Did it once for the Tidewater area (where I live) and it took out all the airport buildings at KORF…never figured out why.
Think I’ll stick with ORBX until I learn more…speaking of which…update on the New Rig Thread.
It’s in the order of your scenery.ini. Can’t explain it right now but basically tells X Plane what should be drawn on top of what.
Google it, there are some.good explanations out there
I had tried changing the order … initially I had no buildings. I got the autogen stuff back but not airport stuff. I’ll try again.
Yeah, as soon as I think that I have it logically sorted, I’ll get an airport without a bunch of 3D objects. Anyway, at least it is and easy fix → relocate the airport to or near the top in custom_scenery.ini.
Ortho is a mesh which is the very base layer. It should be at the bottom of the ini file.
The only thing you would want it above is another mesh (such as AlPilot HD mesh) that covers the same area.
In general, this is the order:
Airports
Custom landmarks for cities etc
Overlays (OSM or other overlays)
Mesh
And then within mesh and overlay categories you put the highest quality and lowest area ones at the top, so they block out the other ones.
See also Understanding Scenery Order - X-Plane Tips and Tricks - The AVSIM Community
That terrain looks AWESOME! Did you save it? Could be fun to canyon run through there 
