Orsogna - WIP

[Pinetree]

I thought I'd create a thread to document my efforts in creating a map of Orsogna, which was the site of some fierce battles between the 2nd NZ Division and German troops of the 26. Panzer-, 65. Infanterie-, and 1 Fallschirmjager- Divisions in December 1943.

Orsgona is in the province of Chieti in the Abruzzo region, 17km (10 mi) southwest of Ortona. It is situated on the edge of a plateau with a steep drop-off to the south and a large gully to it's north.

For my first attempt, I decided I'd base it on the area of 25 Battalion's attack and subsequent German counter-attack on the 3rd Dec:

I'd trace the contours using a screenshot from Google Maps:

The result wasn't too bad:

I was going to carry on with this, then @Butschi released his tool..

..and it's a game-changer. This is the same area but generated in the CMAutoEditor using data from a geotiff:

Similar shot from Google Earth:

(to be continued)

[Pinetree]

Because it's now relatively painless to do elevations, I decided to increase the size and rotate the map a bit to include the cemetery which featured in the later attacks.

The red area is the size I used to generate the map from the geotiff, the orange area is the new size.

The new area:

So with the elevations done, it's time to move onto roads, buildings and other terrain.

[Pinetree]

After downloading the scant Open Street Map data for the area, I've placed it as a layer in QGIS and I've also loaded the 1:50,000 map that was used by the Allied troops at the time. I've found that once I had it properly placed, it's not very accurate; especially the roads, but it's handy for showing the extent of the buildings compared to modern times. I adjusted the railway to match it but I don't think it's accurate either. It was realigned after the war so while you can see traces of the old path on Google Earth it's unclear where how far the top of the S went and where the bottom straight section was. I've ordered a couple of RAF aerial reconnaissance photos taken in Nov. 1943  from the Italian archives and I hope they'll be clear enough to make out those and other period details.

I thought I'd carry on with tracing the buildings that I'm pretty certain were there in 1943 like the school (big green polygon) and houses near it.

I decided to run a test using the autoeditor and see how it generated the roads and buildings. The result wasn't great:

The school, especially, is just a hodgepodge of houses due to the orientation of the map. The streets aren't great either. When you generate the elevations, one of the things that is also generated is the actual grid that will be used in the CM map editor. You can load it up as a layer in QGIS and it will give you good idea on how things are orientated. Looking at this, I think I'll reorient the map in a more anti-clockwise direction so that the school and street are on the north-south axis as that whole area saw some nasty street fighting and I want it looking good.

So my next task is to rerun the autoeditor and try and get the map lined up. Hopefully by then, the aerial photos will be ready too.

[MOS:96B2P]

+1. Interesting stuff.  What size is your map in the editor?

[Pinetree]

I think it's roughly 2.8 by 2.2km.

[Pinetree]

Using the tools in QGIS, I made a rectangle that was parallel to the street grid & school:

There is another tool that shows the coordinates for the vertices as well, which you need for the dgm2cm tool in the autoeditor. After generating the new map elevation file, I loaded up the new grid layer.

And it looks pretty good. Once I adjust the grid layer for transparency & opacity, I get a nice grid that I can use as an overlay.

This will allow me to tweak any roads and buildings to fit the CM map grid better. I still have to create the new map in the CM editor yet, I'll do that overnight as my machine is not fast and I had to slow down the autoeditor so it would register all the map points.

[PEB14]

That's impressive.

@Butschi you really do have to make CMAutoEditor run on Mac OS… Pliiiiiiiiiiiiiz!

[Butschi]

@Pinetree Nice to see someone at work who knows his way around QGIS and the like. Oh, and good one with the grid file (I don't think I've shown that in a tutorial ).

Map precision can really be a PITA... I did a map around Perbais for the Battle of Gembloux and tried to piece together about 5 different maps.

Hm, I'm still not entirely happy with the building placement (and the road can do weird things, every now and then, too). Currently each building is placed separately. Ideally, there would be a global optimization. But then, the best algorithm can do only so much when the grid 8m x 8m and roads and buildings can be rotated only in 45° steps...

Edited May 19, 2023 by Butschi

[Butschi]

11 hours ago, PEB14 said:

@Butschi you really do have to make CMAutoEditor run on Mac OS… Pliiiiiiiiiiiiiz!

Sorry, no deal. You should be able to use the tools in python natively. I've tried to setup an automatic building process for Mac OS executables on github without success. I don't own a Mac and anyway manually doing this is on top of all the Windows stuff is a big no-no for me. That would be a job for the community.

[PEB14]

44 minutes ago, Butschi said:

Sorry, no deal. You should be able to use the tools in python natively. I've tried to setup an automatic building process for Mac OS executables on github without success. I don't own a Mac and anyway manually doing this is on top of all the Windows stuff is a big no-no for me. That would be a job for the community.

I'm afraid that's way beyond my computer abilities...

But no worry, I completely understand the "no deal" logic!

[Pinetree]

11 hours ago, Butschi said:

@Pinetree Nice to see someone at work who knows his way around QGIS and the like. Oh, and good one with the grid file (I don't think I've shown that in a tutorial ).

@Butschi Thanks, I'm pretty rusty with QGIS, I used it produce the situation maps for Command Ops 2 a few years ago and haven't really touched it since. There's some little gotchas I'd forgotten about but it's starting to come back to me now. I saw that the grid was a .shp file so I loaded it up for fun and it's coming in very useful.

Quote

Map precision can really be a PITA... I did a map around Perbais for the Battle of Gembloux and tried to piece together about 5 different maps.

Oh, yes. When I did the first sit maps for CO2, I was exclusively using Paintshop pro and lining up maps with different projections was a nightmare. It's why I learnt how to use QGIS in the first place. The tutorial lessons that are part of the QGIS documentation are really good.

Quote

Hm, I'm still not entirely happy with the building placement (and the road can do weird things, every now and then, too). Currently each building is placed separately. Ideally, there would be a global optimization. But then, the best algorithm can do only so much when the grid 8m x 8m and roads and buildings can be rotated only in 45° steps...

Yeah, that's why I think having the grid as an overlay will help a lot as I can adjust the features to fit the grid better.

Edited May 20, 2023 by Pinetree

[Pinetree]

The aerial images I ordered from the Italian archives were made available to me last night. And they're perfect for my needs. The first thing I needed to do was place them into QGIS. Unfortunately, the images are not geotiffs so I would have to manually place them myself. Here I used the Georeferencer tool where you pick points that are common tn the image to the map in QGIS. This enables QGIS to rotate, move and warp the image to the precise location.

and voila! I now have period detail to work from. If you look closely, you can see the tree shadows and pick out the olive groves. I've already adjusted the railway.

While I was waiting for the aerial images, I ran a test of the osm data I had to see how the town would look. I ended up manually selecting the buildings so they would more resemble the actual ones. However I did notice that the slope is too steep, so I may have to manually adjust that as well.

Edited May 24, 2023 by Pinetree

[Pinetree]

It's been a quiet couple of weeks due to other stuff going on but I'm still plugging away at the village buildings. I've been using the grid to help placement.

[PEB14]

Impressive...

 

[Vacillator]

10 hours ago, Pinetree said:

I'm still plugging away at the village buildings

Wow, you call that a village?  Great work and great research backing it up.  I like it a lot!

[Pinetree]

5 hours ago, Vacillator said:

Wow, you call that a village?  Great work and great research backing it up.  I like it a lot!

Lol, more like town, I suppose. Thanks, it's an interesting battle in that it was the 2NZ Div's first major battle with an organic armoured brigade and it was a failure due to the very reasons the brigade was created in the first place, bad coordination of tanks and Infantry. They even sent the tanks in alone twice with predictable results.

[kohlenklau]

How goes the project?

[Pinetree]

On a bit of a hiatus at the moment, Real Life(TM) keeps getting in the way.