Yosemite Valley HD scenery upgrade – FREE
Yosemite National Park is one of America’s most valuable natural treasures, and it’s a stunning scenery to fly across, discovering the towering mountains and lush valleys within.
The default Yosemite MSFS scenery is nothing to be ashamed about, but can always be improved, specially with regards to the mountain details. And that’s exactly what VFXSimmer set out to do. As a fan of the region, he figured something better could be done by using Google Maps data, and here it is. Yosemite Valley 1.0 includes all the major features of the valley, like El Capitan, Half Dome, Glacier Point, Bridalveil Falls, Yosemite Falls, Vernal & Nevada Falls.
This is an initial release, and several improvements are expected to be released in the future, namely:
- Creating normal maps to add finer detail when viewing objects from a closer distance
- Subdividing some areas of the geo and smoothing out some of the weird jagged shapes photogrammetry sometimes creates
- Get the FX system working from Asobo to add working waterfalls
- Get the animal SDK details to add some wandering around the park… (that said, there IS some stationary wildlife if you look very carefully)
- Do more paintwork to reduce the “baked in shadows” on some of the cliff faces from the photomapping
Keep in mind that you’ll probably need a pretty beefy system to run this. It was done with the goal of getting the maximum amount of detail, so things may become slow. YRMV, but it does look stunning!
