Stunning aerial photo resource nearly with us!!

[kipanderson]

Hi,

this one is very close now,

http://www.evidenceincamera.co.uk/index.htm

It was first launched about a year ago but overwhelmed by the demand and taken off line. In a week or two it should be back up for good.

The truly stunning news is that they also have all of the German aerial recon photos from the Eastern Front and will be making them available too... in time.

All the best,

Kip.

[flamingknives]

Way to go Kip.

Planning to incite enough demand to wipe it out this time round too?

[Michael Dorosh]

Gee, with the increased content, I can only imagine their outrageous prices have skyrocketed even further.

[Michael Emrys]

I'll believe it all when I see it.

Michael

[Macphail]

what are you guys talking about?

[Philippe]

Detailed aerial recce photographs of Europe taken during WWII. There are already plenty of maps down to 1:10,000 that give you contour lines for elevation (e.g. the French IGN series and the hikers maps), but the war photographs will tell you if a building existed at the time, and what the plant cover was. So it could mean a quantum leap in battlefield map detail and accuracy.

[Michael Emrys]

Maybe. But my guess is that you have to be a fair hand at aerial photo interpretation before it's going to show a lot of improvement. I've looked at a lot of photos and the maps drawn from them and been puzzled at how they got from A to B. Not sure I'd trust you lot to get it right every time.

Michael

[mrpwase]

Not sure I'd trust you lot to get it right every time.

That wasn't very nice.

[Philippe]

The truth is never nice. I can barely figure out which side is up, let alone whether that little squiggle is a tree or a bush. I had an epiphany the other day when I realized that double tracks look like single tracks in aerial photographs because from higher altitude a track starts to merge into a single rail. But at least clods like me would be able to figure out the shapes of the fields that Normandy is subdivided into. That in itself is worth something. I hate playing on wide open spaces that I suspect don't really exist.

[kipanderson]

Hi,

Wow…there are some serious non-believers in good news here.

I have also seen quite a few aerial photos and walked the ground the photos cover. In my experience, of say, the Ardennes/Bulge battlefield, the mixture of aerial photos and topographical maps gives an extremely accurate picture of the detail of the terrain.

Given the way the site was overwhelmed I am clearly not the only one to regard this as serious good news for those with our interests and hobbies.

All the best,

Kip.

PS. As it happens I have just returned from spending two days and three nights in the Ardennes…. last night I was standing in the high street of Bastogne, snow falling, and a Sherman M4A1 slowly crawling by….for real… not that I want to make anyone jealous;)

[flamingknives]

There's a phrase for people like you Kip. Curiously enough, the first four letters of the second word are the same as Bastogne. The first, of course, is Lucky.

[WindyCity]

I like the fact that TAX dollars paid for the equipment to take the photos in the first place. Not to mention the TAX dollars that have been spent keeping them archived. But if you wish to view them you must pay.

[Lawyer]

The real weak link is the CM map editor. It doesn't matter how much photo detail we have if it can't be modeled accurately in CM.

I made a pretty good map of Baugnes crossroads for a CMBO scenario two years ago using a local hiking map, my personal scouting visit, and a couple of US air recce photo's taken shortly after the massacre. When I returned to visit the next year, I was impressed how close to real it was. But I couldn't truly re-create the buildings, roads, and terrain to match the maps and WWII photo's due to CM editor limits.

I don't mind paying for good books, maps, and pictures based on government sources, but these photo's are pricey. Also, I found that photo's need to be taken much closer to the ground to have enough 3-D detail to be useful for a tactical scenario in CM. These pics are taken too high up from what I see.

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by Philippe:

But at least clods like me would be able to figure out the shapes of the fields that Normandy is subdivided into. That in itself is worth something. I hate playing on wide open spaces that I suspect don't really exist.

But with a 20 metre tile size restriction, what good is this knowledge, honestly?

EDIT - which is what Lawyer is saying. Even the simple act of making a playable hedgerow is spoiled by the fact that the roadway, of necessity, is 20 metres wide. A lot of the roads in hedgerow country (or in a typical European city or village) were scantly 20 feet across much less metres.

The proposed 5 metre tile size we hear about for CMX2 (and the ability to put in terrain outside the grid, IIRC) will revolutionize CM map making. Coupled with the ability to make custom buildings (what a great feature those Factories in CMBB were, what a shame they were left out of CMAK) then perhaps we'll have some reason to look to "historic" terrain.

To do some of the big battles, we just don't have the right colours in the paintbox - Remagen Bridge? Nope, you need brick towers for the bridge, and a railroad tunnel at the far end. Berlin? Paris? None of the buildings are over 20 metres square or more than 1 additional level high.

Maybe once we have an editor worthy of doing stuff like the Ardennes map for OpFP (see the GF for Agua's post and screenies), then maybe it will be worth paying money for ridiculously expensive aerial photos.

[ December 18, 2004, 01:20 PM: Message edited by: Michael Dorosh ]

[Philippe]

It's surprising what you can do with those 20x20 tiles. If you have a big open space that is 800x800 meters, you can articulate it with one tile wide strips of scattered trees, or brush, or woods, or hedges, and break that space up into its historic triangles, lozenges, whatever. Doesn't do much to the game play, but you can make a blank map look much more real. And you can also relieve the map designer of staring at a kilometer square blank space and doing something creative (and perhaps unfortunate) to that space, because he knows that in reality it was broken up into smaller bits.

As I understand it, in Normandy if you were a farmer and had three sons, you left each of them a third of your field, they did the same with their sons, and everybody planted hedges and trees along the rim of their property. Several centuries of that kind of subdivision resulted in some pretty unblank spaces. There's a teltale charm to the irrationality of the way that they divided up their fields that most map designers wouldn't be able to reproduce without a guide, and the photographs might provide that.

As for the Remagen Bridge problem, I think what is needed is several sets of duplicate unused bmp's (or their equivalent) so that you can construct more scenario-specific buildings. In the case of Remagen bridge you would need a little programming to get the frames into the shapes of the anchoring piers. Actually the game needs more bridges period. Arnhem scenarios don't have the right kind of suspension bridges either.

[ December 18, 2004, 01:46 PM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

[Lawyer]

Phillipe,

If you just want an accurate representation of Normandy terrain, I bought a nice map there for 9 Euros by IGN (www.ign.fr). It has a lot of detail and shows all the hedgerow fields individually at 1:25,000 scale. The map number is 1412 OT. It shows the terrain as it is today, but not much has changed. It's plenty well-detailed for WWII CM scenario purposes. Much cheaper and easier than buying those online photo's.

In fact, I have several IGN maps of Normandy and the Ardennes. They are great maps with terrain markings at smaller scales intended for hikers and tourists. Highly recommended!

For a nice selection of WWII aerial recce photo's with very good explanations of what they mean, I recommend "Above the Battle, D-Day, The Lost Evidence" by Going and Jones (History Channel book) and "To Fool a Glass Eye" by Stanley. Not as good, but still worthwhile is "Allied Photo Reconnaissance of WWII" by Staerck. I bought all these on Amazon. As I recall, they were less than $25 each.

Cheers,

Jake

[Michael Emrys]

Originally posted by Lawyer:

It shows the terrain as it is today, but not much has changed.

Hmmm, this last bit is contradicted by what someone posted a year or so ago to the effect that a lot of the hedgerows have been destroyed and many of the fields consolidated. I have no opinion on the matter myself, but I would like to see the matter hashed out more thoroughly by those in the know.

Michael

[Lawyer]

Of course Normandy has changed in 60 years! What growing area hasn't?

My point is that bocage country for CM scenario purposes looks much the same today as it did in WWII. I toured the whole area by car in August, and can tell you that one hedgerow field looks the same as another after a while. Unless you want to design a CM scenario where you design the contours of an actual plot of land belonging to Mssr. Whoever in 1944, it won't make a difference using the maps I mentioned for general layout purposes. And even if you do want to add that extreme layer of detail, the CM map editor won't let you.

The IGN Normandy map shows lots of small irregular hedgerow fields that look the same as those in pictures shown in the books i mentioned above. So I recommend the IGN maps available today as a useful gaming guide for CM.

Originally posted by Michael Emrys:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Lawyer:

It shows the terrain as it is today, but not much has changed.

Hmmm, this last bit is contradicted by what someone posted a year or so ago to the effect that a lot of the hedgerows have been destroyed and many of the fields consolidated. I have no opinion on the matter myself, but I would like to see the matter hashed out more thoroughly by those in the know.

Michael </font>

[Thomm]

Originally posted by Lawyer:

Also, I found that photo's need to be taken much closer to the ground to have enough 3-D detail to be useful for a tactical scenario in CM. These pics are taken too high up from what I see.

A colleague of mine owns a powered paraglider and a digital camera! I have asked him already to take aerial pictures of exactly the right resolution for games that use textures as a terrain backdrop (CC, EYSA, ...). Not much use for CM (other than grass mods?!) but I cannot wait to play on photorealistic terrain. Too bad it is winter here and the guy is grounded by the cold!

Best regards,

Thomm