Loading a large map as a background

I'm having difficulty placing a large map on my model and have looked but could not find a sililar question on the forum.

I'm building a model of a harbour & river where I need to be able to see the whole model and to be able to zoom in to see individual boats. The water network that I need to model is 26KM long.

The smallest scale i can go to and still see individual piers leaves me with a map of about 16,000 pixels long by 5,000 deep. Originally from Open Maps the map was a standard road map and 30MB but by using blue for water and green for land, the file size is now only 1.8MB so the filesize isn't a problem, it's the pixel count.

I guess there are limitations to what can be loaded onto one Visual Tool - does anybody know what they are?

I can spread the map over 4 different Visual Tools and I guess this will be the way to retain the detail in places where it is required.

Before I go down the route of placing several Visual Tools together, is there a way to hide the joins (currently a line at each join), and are there any issues i should know about?

These are the limitations that I have come accross

• Visual tool size - seems stable around 640x211 once it gets to 800 then some or all of the tool dissapears when i move the screen around or zoom in/out.
• I can load a 5000 pixel map on as texture but not a 7000 one (it's just a black box)

Thanks in advance

Kenny

Kenny,

I am not sure if I understand exactly what you mean, but I still like to try to give you some hints.

I just tried to use a Visual Tool (size 1920 x 1200 x 0.10) and put a texture onto it (Pixel 1920 x 1200).
You are right, if you now zoom out in an ortho view the VT disappears at a specific zoom (magnification). The standard is viewmagnification = 1. You can change this for the Visual Tool in the variables tree. Set the variable viewmagnification e.g. to 0.01 and you can see it much longer. The current viewmagnification for the active window you can check in the view tree - active.
For the persp view please have a look at viewdistance and set it to a high value.
At a specific point there might other attributes come into the game like (viewnear, viewfar, viewfog), but I am not sure about this.

Please try the above and maybe this is already a help. Otherwise ask again and maybe someone else can give you some more hints.

Tom has the solution to the VisualTool disappearing when the view point gets moved a long way away from the object itself. This usually only comes into play when the VisualTool has a large SX,SY because you have to zoom/move a lot to see it. I attached a screenshot of the "viewmagnification" node Tom is refering to in the tree.

I did some testing and found that on my machine the largest image that would successfully show in a Flexsim VisualTool was just over 5000x6000 pixels. I tried a 7000x7000 image but it did not show. Having thought I found a max, I looked into the dark edge issue.

One way to get rid of the dark edge around the VisualTool is to not use this object. Use another object like a Queue and go into the General tab to set the 3D shape to fs3d\textureplaneup.wrl. Then change the 3D Texture to your desired image. The funny thing I noticed is that the 7000x7000 image shows with this approach... and you can tile them together without a dark edge. Once you get the images tiled together as you like, you will want to go into each of the Queue's tree and set the "ignoredraw" node to 1, to mimic the No Select function of a VisualTool. I attached another screenshot to show this node location.

I tried a 10,000x5,000 image with a Queue, but it did not show. Interesting to note that it shows-up in the Media Files gui under Tools, so there is hope yet? An image of 7,000x7,000 is only 1,000 less pixels than a 10,000x5,000 so I'm curious to know what is causing the limitation.

Thanks Guys - this is great. I managed to get started on laying down the rest of my model in the confidence that the size will be fine now.

This may be a precurser to a bigger issue. I'm going to build a demo model for an Emergency Management project, where they client will expect to see an overview of the region and the detail - the region is 500Km long so I'm sure I'll find more limitations. If you've any pointers/strategies to manage such a varying level of detail then I'd appreciate them.

Kenny

It just dawned on me - the viewmagnification parameter. WOW!

I can layer different levels of detail and use this parameter to control what level of detail seen on the screen. So a very low resolution graphic to show the whole region and as you zoom in new more detailed maps are turned on - just like Google Earth! Awesome.

Kenny,

Have you checked out the LOD concept within Flexsim? (search for LOD in the user manual) That might give you some more ideas.

Steven

Thanks Steven.

I haven't used LOD yet but can see good uses in this work; I'll have a play with it.

I know it's not entirely what LOD was designed for but I might also be able to use it to scale 3D objects so they can be seen as the "proper" size in detailed views and still have some (enlarged) representation of the objects when zoomed out to regional level.

I'll report back how well this works.

Kenny