Hello everyone Does anyone here have an idea for an alternative to the Google Maps overlay? I can't use it because my debit card isn't accepted by Google. I actually don't want to exchange mine because of this, but without the overlay it will be more difficult to build a map. Can anyone help me or does anyone know whether Dovetail could possibly plan an alternative? Thanks Godzilla
You can use planes with satellite images as texture. This is how it would look: It's a bit tedious because you need to place a plane manually for example every km² and find a texture for it. Now I would not recommend using screenshots of Google Earth for it. If you are in Germany, they provide high resolution distortion-free satellite images in some states which are exactly 1 km², so perfect for this editor. (It's called digital ortho photo) It's actually much better than Google Maps in my opinion. Here is a comparison: Left: DOP, Right: Google Maps To make the workflow faster you can make custom blueprints and materials but it requires more Unreal Engine knowledge. Don't forget to mark the planes as editor only. You also need to make all tracks in a section completely even and afterwards adjust the hight of all tracks. (Unless you want to program it so that it bends around the landscape)
I think so. That must be how DTG has done it. And it's Unreal Engine so almost everything is possible. But I don't know how to do it as I haven't done much in Unreal Engine. And I don't think it's worth the effort.
I tried changing the material to decal but it only works when the plane is very close to the ground which is very hard if the terrain is uneven. Where the terrain sticks out the plane is not visible. Where the terrain is too low below the plane it looks weird and the plane texture is projected onto other objects like the tracks. So I thought it's like a dynamically generated subdivided plane that is wrapped around the landscape and maybe a decal at the same time.
Ah alright, fair enough. You could also try to apply a scaling to the decal vertically to cover the lowest and highest point
Yes, I don't think it would be worth the effort either. Can you tell me how to insert such a plane into the editor? I once got the “digital orthophotos” for an area and inserted it into QGIS.
Sure! It's going to be a lot of manual things. First off I strongly advise you to make yourself familiar with Unreal Engine. It will help you a lot when using the editor. You would have a much better understanding of how things work. It's best to make yourself also familiar with the UTM coordinate system if you want to make your own satellite overlay planes. Find out the size of your DOP. If they are 1km x 1km then good. If not then you have to split them to be 1km x 1km but that might not be as easy. Or you might need to make something different than what I tell you. One last thing, my route origin is exactly at the center of a UTM tile. I don't know if this is important but if something in this tutorial doesn't work that might be why. Go into select mode. From the left panel drag the "Plane" and drop it into the 3D viewport. Import your DOP texture into the editor by dragging and dropping it from the Windows Explorer into the Unreal Engine Content Browser. The DOP must be in a format that Unreal Engine can read, for example jpg, png or tga. Not jp2. If it is in jp2 you must figure out how to convert it to jpg or something which can be done in QGIS. (Import may fail if the file name is something like 123_456 because UE is stupid) If it is successfully imported, drag and drop the texture onto the plane that you placed. That should apply the texture on the plane and create a material for you. It's a good idea to think of a folder structure for all the materials and texures you're gonna need if you need many planes. Then set the scale of your plane to x=1000, y=1000, z=don't care. Move the plane to the center of a landscape tile. Look at the coordinates of the plane. If it is close to the nearest 100 000, everything is fine and round it to the next 100 000. For example if it is x=99987.123 make it x=100000 (obviously not for z) That should align it perfectly at the center. If it isn't, still try it. It will probably not be aligned correctly. If this is the case, save all (Shift+Ctrl+S), open the world composition window, double click on a far away tile to unload all tiles (teleports you), after the loading is complete, double click on the tile you were before. This will cause the editor to rebase the map coordinates so they will be nice again. Then try again aligning the plane. Right click on the plane and Click on Level > Move to Correct Tile(s) so they are only loaded if you are nearby. (It might already be on the correct tile anyway) Now you can move the plane up and down but you shouldn't move it sideways. This is now your satellite overlay. Lastly you should click on the plane and in the right menu under "Cooking" check "Is Editor only" so that it doesn't appear when you play the route. After Play in editor the planes tend do dissappear until you restart the editor. If you place tracks now, you must place them in the air, best would be to adjust the hight so that only the top of the rail sticks out. Later if you are done with the tracks you can snap all the tracks to the landscape. If you need a lot of planes you should create a blueprint so you don't need to do every step every time.
Wow! Thanks for the tutorial I'll spend the entire evening tomorrow going through it. Also, I'll take a closer look at the Unreal Engine. One thing I can already mention: my DOP is 2x2 km in size.
Side note unrelated to the problem in question: Godzilla, without sounding too rude there is something I wanted to mention to you already before and I noticed when I helped you out with QGIS. If somebody helps you out like Lulon here so greatly and you think it helps, you can like or vote the posts for being helpful in the bottom right corner of any post. This helps A. not only make it clearer for others (but also the one that helps you itself) to see which posts are actually helpful to the solution to your problem, but also B. give at least something back for people who dedicate their time to help you out with your issues. Don't want to force you to do so and it's of course open to your own will, but I think it's just the least thing a user can do as exchange here in forum if somebody helps you that much obviously. So just in case you didn't know. Feel free to ignore this post.
With paint.net. Works well for a small amount. If you need hundreds, I would write a script or something like that.
Oh, I didn't even know you could like posts. Thanks Robert I really appreciate your help and will like every single helpful post from you from now on. Thanks for all the help, without you I would never have gotten as far as I have and also thanks to Lulon for your help so far. You have already helped me extremely. Thank you, I'll try paint.net too. I already have an idea how I can do it
So, now I have shortened the photos of a town from 2x2 km to 1x1 km. Around 25 pictures were taken. I think it's better to initially only add the overlay to a small part of the map to see if it works.
