On The Glideslope

I Finally Built My Own X-Plane Photorealistic Scenery, And Man Was It EASY

Readers know that I was lucky to be gifted a pretty big set of photorealistic ortho scenery for X-Plane. It covers a nice part of the West where I like to use the sim, but I also enjoy the Tampa area and didn’t have scenery for that part of the world. So today I downloaded Ortho4XP and generated my first two tiles, covering the greater Tampa area. I downloaded the Ortho4XP files from the creator here, followed the instructions in this brief video (and there is more information here if you need it), and that was all there was to it. It took about five minutes to get installed and running, and about 10 minutes per tile (but I do have a fast connection). Here are some screen grabs showing the results, and note that this is zoom level 17. With this process being so easy, there is absolutely no reason for X-Plane users to not be creating and enjoying photorealistic scenery for any part of the world in which they wish to fly. And best of all, it’s FREE.

CirrusSF50_3
Clearwater Beach North
CirrusSF50_5
Tampa Bay & St. Pete
CirrusSF50_1
Clearwater Area South
CirrusSF50_6
Low & Slow Over Clearwater

Basement Fly Guy

3 responses to “I Finally Built My Own X-Plane Photorealistic Scenery, And Man Was It EASY”

  1. Peter Allen Avatar
    Peter Allen

    It’s fabulous. I find the best way to use it is batch processing which is explained in this is video.

    https://youtu.be/uUAR2nz6sPs

    It means you can set up a number of tiles covering an area and leave it to run overnight. It shows you how to:

    – set up the zoom levels automatically for me build all airfields at zl18 for 3km around the airfield and zl17 elsewhere
    – automatically link the overlay
    – set up your water masks how you want them.

    The only two things you do manually apart from choosing the tiles in the first place is to:
    – reorder you scenery configure file (when doing say 10 tiles at one I find the easiest way to do this is to run xplane which will build the file names at the top of the list, shut down and then cut and paste into the correct position); and
    – link the files to XP using right click (this will keep them out of your xp folder if you are running out of space)

    I hope this is helpful – took all the pain away for me. Currently building the whole of the UK ten tiles at a time.

    Cheers
    Peter (Capt CWG Allen on Avsim)

  2. Antoine Avatar
    Antoine

    Hi there,

    I’m on Mac and it looks like a big deal to run Ortho4XP.
    Would you share with me your clearwater/St pete photorealistic files?

    1. Basement Fly Guy Avatar
      Basement Fly Guy

      Unfortunately that’s a violation of the terms of use for the Bing imagery.

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