Satellite imagery in flight sim is next-level - but it comes at a price. Orthographic aims to master its challenges.

Discoloration through stitching. Weather situations. Seasons. Pixelation. Satellite imagery is the most realistic imagery you could ever obtain for many use-cases, including flight simulation. It provides a 1:1 copy of how the world looks from above, and has given us a perspective of the world, unseen and unheard of before this was possible. Countless satellites orbit the earth to shoot these photos - but the process is not perfect. The imagery is combined in a process called stitching as some material is not usable. In this situation, material from other passes over the same location is being used, and "stitched" together. And this is where challenges for digital clone cases start to emerge. Challenges are made to be mastered. To some sim pilots, the challenges that come with satellite imagery is reason enough not to use it, and thus prefer to use standard or other ground imagery. The challenge appeared to be insurmountable. What initially began as a technical feasibility test, turned into a complete project to master the challenges of satellite imagery. Orthographic does not rely on, and does not use satellite imagery at all. Instead, imagery is generated from data alone. Introducing Orthographic - a ground imagery synthesizer. The artifact-free, data-driven alternative to ground ortho scenery. Written in Python and using OpenStreetMap data at its core, the engine is capable of producing believable, realistic ground texture imagery - free of immersion breaking artifacts such as discoloration through stitching, distortion of objects, clouds on the ground, and others. Using a carefully curated and hand-crafted pool consisting of photorealistic imagery for nearly 40 OSM data tags, a meticulously tuned color-grading and a carefully fine-tuned render order for each layer, Orthographic is capable of producing believable and realistic ground imagery. The results are ready for professional digital twin use-cases, and are already available for the X-Plane 12 flight simulator.