Next I’ll be working on the Milford Sounds, an area I’ve never been happy with. There seems to be quick a few issues with this area which I couldn’t get my head around a few years ago. Lazy me.
Here’s some embarrassing shots of issues:
Top down view of I don’t even know what this is…
Another top down view of a blurry patch
Inside X-Plane – the ortho doesn’t come close to matching the mesh. Nightmare!
Here’s a look at the current ortho imagery:
That doesn’t look right
I believe what has happend here, is that the aerial photography has been flying at a set altitude above the sounds floor, but far too close to the mountain tops, so the perspective is all wrong.
Here’s a shot of LINZ imagery, same photo:
No warping on this one.
The result of this fix:
Left: old Right: Fixed! (Note, my fps is quite ‘low’ as Vulkan was disabled)
Milford Sound Airport
Above you can see Milford Sound. Interestingly the airport objects are now misaligned to the mesh and ortho, so this might require a tweak to the airport to fix. The new scenery fixes issues with the water that was previously climbing up the walls of the valley, so I’m pretty sure the new ortho is correct, and the scenery should be adjusted to suit.
There is an annoying issue with NZQN and NZMF – the gateway airport has flattening turned on, which crushes a nearby hill on the mesh, and then creates a shear cliff at the edge, so users might want to add a custom airport in WED and tweak it to ‘be better.’
EDIT: Actually, I’ve loaded in the default scenery gateway Milford Sound Airport and it aligns perfectly. It also doesn’t have flattening, so the crushed hills are corrected.
So we are all good:
Categories: Flight Simulation
On a layOver 
Freeware – OSM Overlay for New Zealand and the Chatham Islands 
The (Over)lay of the land 
Lyndiman’s Ortho UHD Mesh Release 
Lyndiman's Blog 
I took a flight from Mannapouri to Milford Sound in the B58 Baron yesterday. It’s a completely awesome VR experience! My plan was to descend through the Lake Ada valley and make an overhead join at Milford. However, the thought of leaving the relative safety of 7000 ft and descending into a deep dark valley sufficiently unnerved me that I bottled out and descended over the sea. Eventually I made an approach up the sound for a straight in landing on Runway 11. It turns out that there is a fairly large hodkey stick halfway up the runway so some fairly extreme braking was required. Now I’m wondering how I’m going to get out of there again. Thanks for a lot of fun.