HD Mesh Scenery v4 for X-Plane 11 was released • HeliSimmer.com

Both the HD Mesh Scenery and Ortho4XP are an amazing set of free resources to boost your X-Plane scenery and vastly improve over the default terrain.

Version 4 now brings even more detail to your scenery and, yes, it can be used along with Ortho4XP. You will need to edit your scenery_packs.ini file so that your Ortho information will stay above the HD Mesh one.

Here's the official feature list:

HD Mesh Scenery v4 can be seen as a vastly improved version of the default scenery shipping with XP11. It is using/referencing the exact same set of artwork files (textures, object, autogens, forests) which ship with XP11, so you do not need other art assets to be installed while HD Mesh Scenery v4 will also benefit from any artwork improvements (autogen, texture) coming with future XP11 versions.

The most important advantages of HD Mesh Scenery v4 are:

The triangle mesh resolution is far higher than in the default mesh and even a bit above the level of the previous HD Mesh Scenery v3::

this give – obviously – better DEM (elevation data) representation (slopes, mountains etc.)

BUT this also vastly(!) improves the landclass data representation (which in X-Plane is very closely coupled with the triangle size in the mesh). This is most obvious with forest detail.

The vector data simplification is less aggressive than in the default mesh (where Laminar needed to do that to limit the overall size of the global scenery). Thus road / railroad bendings are more accurate and the same is true for rivers, shorelines (but where the OSM raw data is bad, this can’t help much either)

HD Mesh Scenery v4 also has the new “high buildings” feature included, which I introduced with Laminar in XP11. This puts all (well, with some filtering of not reasonable stuff from OSM) buildings > 20m “height” or > 5 “building:levels” as some “high building” object (with a more or less correct height – as defined in OSM) in the scenery (“building:levels” are simply multiplied by 4m to get an approximate height). This usually gives most cities a much better look (New York is a great example, where in OSM almost all buildings already have a height defined). This same approach also “imports” antennas / masts from OSM (as antenna obstacles)

OSM data is updated (its “date stamp” is 1st October 2017) . Which makes it newer than current XP11 default mesh data and of course much, much newer than the data in HD Mesh Scenery v3.

Most of the Landclass data has seen an update (which already happened with my work for the XP11 default scenery … but HD Mesh Scenery v4 can represent the high res landclass data much better)