My Brain Hurts from Virtual Soaring

I've been working on a project for nearly a year to build a photorealistic scenery for Harris Hill's soaring area.  Frankly, my brain hurts.

But the end is near!  I've generated a test scenery that is about 40 miles by 60 miles and am in the final stages of scaling it to a 250 mile X 140 mile scenery that fits our turnpoints.  And no, it didn't take a year of full-time effort, I put it aside during the soaring season this year and picked it back up this January.

In starting this project last year, I realized that 1) the information about how to do this was scattered everywhere; 2) it requires knowledge of the terminal window.  I wanted to change that by applying a GUI based GIS tool called QGIS to the process and creating a scenery using just QGIS.

QGIS is free, open source, and powerful.  It wraps the ugly commands required for GIS experts to manipulate python libraries that do serious crunching of data.

I want most anyone who has is willing to take the time and patience to be able to create a scenery, not just the elite technical experts.  So, I've done the hard work (had to do it anyhow) and I know how to write a comprehensive tutorial for how to do it, so that's what I'm doing.  Frankly, I pretty much HAD to write a tutorial because I went down so many blind alleys trying to find alternative ways to use QGIS from the online information I found that it was hard to track my steps even when I was successful!

A huge shout out to the Condor scenery forum community.  In particular to Dave Regula and use prstzel for providing step by step details for how to do this.  Dave gave me at least two hours of time on the phone to discuss the challenges.  And numerous other contributors who have been at this for the better part of a decade to reverse engineer the Condor scenery process.

The internet is truly an amazing thing.  I never would have found out what I needed to know if it didn't exist.  I've scoured every corner of every scenery, QGIS, and GIS forum.  I've posted questions and gotten answers crucial to my search.  And the tools were all free.

Think of that.  The USGS puts 1 meter aerial photography online and you can download it for FREE.  All you need is bandwidth and time.  The crucial libraries - called 'gdal' are free.  They're written by people smarter than you and I put together and they're put out there for free.  I just use them and they work.  The QGIS tool is also free and developed as an open source tool just for my use.  Amazing.

And Google spreadsheets is free.  I needed a tool to do some calculations for me and found myself wondering if a browser based spreadsheet had the power and accuracy to calculate decimal degrees down to the 15th significant digit.  Turns out it can do that and much, much more.  I wanted to provide users with a tool that 1) didn't cost any money; 2) did all of the hard work of calculating scenery and tile sizes for free; and Google spreadsheets does that.  For free.

Fifteen years ago, this project would have been flat out impossible.  The cost of the photography alone would have been prohibitive and the georeferencing required would have driven you batty.  Today, from my house, I can create a photorealistic scenery of my soaring are in just a matter of, say two weeks.  Unbelievable.

Oh yeah, and I can't wait to actually fly a task on it!