X-Plane Spain Complete UHD Photoreal Scenery

SpainUHD is a new high-resolution photorealistic scenery with mesh for all of Spain, with zoom level 17 on the peninsula and 18 on the islands, and elevation data of 25 meters resolution, for X-Plane 12, X-Plane 11, and even version 10 (if you are still using it).

This package has been re-packaged from the original SpainUHD release which included 90 tiles individually. This ZIP file contains all 90 tiles in one easy-to-use package. This file is very large and may take days to download on most Internet connections. This file is free to access and you may download this add-on free of charge, however, you may benefit from signing up for our PRO subscription in order to download this file faster.

The main characteristics of this scenery are:

• 100% free source data, both orthophotos and elevation data, and water masses. There are no legal impediments to its distribution.
• Mesh generated from 0 (from scratch). No existing mesh has been used, all meshes are being generated from the MDT25 + LIDAR data (PNOA) with one-meter error and an initial base of 1,000,000 vertices in the peninsula and 2,000,000 for the islands (default is 78,000 vertices and error of 6.5 meters).
• High-resolution orthophotos of the PNOA. Like those of SimHeaven, in the peninsula, they are zoomed at 17 (1,20m / pix approximately), but the textures have gone through only one compression level since they have been downloaded directly in uncompressed GeoTiff format, unlike the from Google that comes in JPEG format already compressed. The final compression is made to DXT, so the size per texture is the same but retaining a higher level of detail. In the case of the islands, the zoom level is 18 (60cm / pix approx.).
• Chromatic correction and homogenization between autonomous communities avoiding the infamous rectilinear "patches" (except Portugal, where there is only a single set of free orthophotos).
• Improved definition of distant textures through custom MipMaps filtering.
• Inner bodies of water from the Land Occupation Information System in Spain and CORINE Land Cover, masked with translucent orthophotos that "stain" the water in addition to showing details in shallow masses.
• Data of raster elevation with 16-bit depth without sign and variable scaling, with vertical resolution between a few millimeters and 6 centimeters according to the maximum and minimum altitudes, and horizontal resolution of 25 meters, which allows the treatment of airports and fields of flight with terrain profiles with an error margin of less than 3 meters.
• Autogen improved with roads, power lines and AlpilotX buildings and vegetation masses and other 3D elements from the National Topographic Base 1: 25,000 and the Soil Occupancy Information System in Spain with a scale of 1: 5,000.
• Complete orthophotographic coverage in continental Portugal, Andorra and Gibraltar, and the area of ??France in the border cells.
• Bathymetry with 180 meters resolution of EMODNet.

The performance is very similar to the SimHeaven scenery, but the CPU and RAM requirements are somewhat superior to having a much more complex mesh, similar to the UHD meshes of AlpilotX. At least 8GB of RAM and a graph with 4GB of VRAM are recommended.

Installation

The installation instructions will ALWAYS be found within each file folder. However, for convenience, we will explain it here in detail, step by step. Repeat the procedure for each folder:

1. Download the SpainUHD
2. Unzip the file on our computer, where you want. It will take a while as the file is large.
3. Folders for every scenery tile will be extracted and text files "README" will appear (in Spanish and English) inside each folder which, as their names clearly indicate, we must read BEFORE doing anything.
4. Move each folder to the "Custom Scenery" of our X-Plane. The name of this folder will ALWAYS begin with "z_SpainUHDv2_" and correspond to the scenario of a 1x1º cell on the Iberian Peninsula or a group of islands, the Canary Islands or the Balearic Islands.

At this point, we will have the scenario installed and we can start X-Plane to see it. However, there is still more to be done ...

By default, X-Plane when booting gives top priority to the new scenarios it finds, placing them first in the scenery_packs.ini file (text file) found in "Custom Scenery". But this is not the right thing for SpainUHD scenarios. That's why we should do something else:

1. Close the X-Plane and open the scenery_packs.ini file with the flat text editor you want (NotePad, NotePad ++, Geany, etc ...).
2. Select and cut the newly added line that refers to our scenario and that will have a look similar to:
   "SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery / z_SpainUHDv2 _ ***** /"
3. Paste said line at the end of the file, together with other possible scenarios based on meshes.

EYE! If we have more scenarios based on meshes (*) (such as the HD / UHD of AlpilotX, scenarios generated by G2XPL, Ortho4xpscenarios, etc.) we should give SpainUHD more priority (place it above them in the scenery_packs.ini ) as this type of scenarios are mutually exclusive, cell by cell and, in this case, we are interested in seeing SpainUHD ...

... otherwise, you would not be reading this text.

Example of the final part of a scenery_packs.ini with the SpainUHD Tenerife tile:

(...)
SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery / Aerosoft - LPFR Faro /
SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery / Aerosoft - LSGG Genf /
SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery / Global Airports /
SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery / OpenSceneryX /
SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery / z_SpainUHDv2_CAN_Tenerife /
SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery / ZZZ UHD Mesh v1 /
?SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery / ZZZ HD Mesh v3 /

NOTE:

Mesh scenery such as SpainUHD or AlpilotX is excluded from each other, with the highest priority prevailing. Therefore it is absolutely useless to have more than one mesh type scenario (whether photoreal or not) in the same cell, except to occupy disk space.

This comes from many comments that have been seen in the network saying that if SpainUHDv2 is combined (!!!) with HDMesh the mesh of the terrain acquires better definition.

That is totally false because the architecture of X-Plane scenarios does not allow to combine meshes and ignores any that have lower priority as long as it belongs to the same cells, so if the orthophotos are visible, the only mesh that is working is that of SpainUHD, because internally everything is linked.

In the case of the previous example, the cells belonging to Tenerife (+ 27-017 and + 28-017) of the HDmeshV3 and / or UHDMeshV1 scenarios will be totally excluded because they have a lower priority than the Tenerife scenario of SpainUHD.

License and Distribution

This package, created by SpainUHD has been released under Creative Commons licenses - CC BY-SA 4.0 (Share: copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, Adapt: remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.) Also, other portions have been released under CC BY 4.0 (Share: copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.) If you choose to redistribute, repackage or re-use for redistribution the files present in this archive, you must use the same license. Some of the tiles in this scenery package contain works from Andras Fabian (AlpilotX). This can only be reused by permission of Andras himself. You can find his HD Mesh scenery in our file library here which we are allowed to provide under license.

Developer & Author: SpainUHD - Albert Ràfols (Grrr05), José Ángel Estévez (Cestomano), Evaristo González, Jordi Durán, Juanjo Manzano, Pau Gómez.

Coverage of the photoreal scenery for Spain in XP11.