La Réunion Ultimate – complete scenery for X-Plane 12

La Réunion Ultimate – complete scenery for X-Plane 12

Author: orl_cz/Simulators Czech

Version: 1.0, October 2026

Coverage: the whole island of La Réunion – DSF tiles -21+055 and -22+055

Simulator: X-Plane 12

Licence: freeware

Please post any issues, requests, or discussions here: Forum Ultimate series | Simulators Czech

A completely new scenery of Réunion built from scratch as a replacement for the Laminar Research default scenery and the HD scenery by alpilotx, using the most accurate data available: French IGN lidar terrain, 1 m coastal lidar, detailed bathymetry of the lagoons and reefs, European Copernicus satellite vegetation maps and 1 m IGN aerial imagery. The island is modelled from the summit of Piton des Neiges all the way down to the seabed off the coast.

The scenery comes in two versions:

• with aerial imagery (ortho) – photorealistic ground across the whole island,
• classic – X-Plane textures placed according to the real land cover, for less powerful computers.

Autogen is not the focus of this scenery – the emphasis is on the terrain (mesh). All objects come exclusively from the default X-Plane library (Laminar Research); only the orthophoto textures are custom.
For richer autogen you can use X-World or similar add-ons.

What the scenery includes

Lidar terrain – 5 m instead of 90 m

• IGN RGE ALTI® La Réunion lidar – airborne laser scanning covering 99.97 % of the island; the remaining 0.03 % (small spots without lidar) is filled with a 30 m bare-earth model.
• The full 5 m elevation model inside the DSF: each tile carries an elevation grid of 20,855 × 22,265 points (every 5 m) with a height step of 7–10 cm. The X-Plane 12 default scenery has a 1,201 × 1,201 grid on the same tile (every 90 m) with a 1 m height step – 320× fewer elevation points. HD Mesh and Ortho4XP with default settings are built from global 30–90 m data.
• More than 140× more triangles than the default scenery: 14 and 20 million terrain triangles per tile instead of roughly 80 and 140 thousand.
• Points where they matter: 5 m is the density of the source data, not a fixed triangle grid. The mesh places points densely on ridges, cliffs, river beds and the coastline and sparsely on flat ground – with a target accuracy of 20 cm against the lidar, 5 cm along the coast.
• Centimetre precision: terrain vertices are stored in the DSF with 2.5 cm horizontal precision, the water surface and coastline with heights in 5.5 mm steps – the water is perfectly flat and beaches blend smoothly into it.
• Sharp ridges, the cirques of Mafate, Cilaos and Salazie, river canyons and the lava fields of Piton de la Fournaise look as they do in reality.
• Heights converted from the local French datum to the global EGM2008 geoid, so they match X-Plane airports and navigation.

Seabed and lagoons

• Bathymetry at 5 m resolution combined from three sources:
• Litto3D® Réunion – 1 m lidar for the coastal strip and shallow seabed (lagoons, coral reefs, beaches),
• SHOM HOMONIM – detailed seabed model around the island,
• GEBCO 2026 – the deeper ocean.
• Native X-Plane 12 water with colour and transparency following the real depth – turquoise lagoons at Saint-Gilles and L'Ermitage, dark ocean beyond the reef.
• Custom water turbidity mask for both tiles.

Coastline

• Accurate coastline from OpenStreetMap, checked against the terrain (no islet or rock is missing).
• Beaches where real beaches are mapped in OSM, not sand all around the island.
• River mouths and lagoons levelled to the water surface.

Vegetation from satellite data

• Land cover from Copernicus High Resolution Layers 2024 (as an overseas region of the EU, Réunion is covered by the European data): forest type, tree cover density, grassland, herbaceous cover and crops.
• Where Copernicus has no data, ESA WorldCover 10 m fills in.
• Forest types refined with the global Copernicus map.
• Plants chosen by CHELSA climate with altitude correction: humid and dry tropical areas differ, high-mountain vegetation on the summits.
• Tropical seasons without winter – vegetation does not turn yellow or shed its leaves as in Europe; the high mountains keep their seasonal cycle.

Towns and buildings

• Over 600,000 buildings:
• all buildings from OpenStreetMap (over 466,000 footprints),
• plus 141,000 footprints from Google Open Buildings where a building is missing in OSM.
• Buildings placed on their real footprints, facades chosen by climate.
• Built-up density from ESA WorldCover for a realistic spread of towns, suburbs and villages.
• Industrial areas, cemeteries, quarries, sports grounds and parks from OSM.

Roads, networks, obstacles

• Complete OSM road network (over 41,000 segments on the southern tile alone).
• Major roads cut into the terrain so they neither float above the slope nor sink into it.
• Power lines, masts, chimneys, radio towers and other obstacles from OSM.

Airports

• FMEE Roland Garros and FMEP Pierrefonds from the X-Plane Gateway.
• Terrain under the airports smoothed; paved areas and airport buildings matched to the scenery.

Aerial imagery (ortho version)

• Orthophoto 1 m/px (ZL17) – 590 image tiles covering the whole island.
• IGN aerial imagery only (BD ORTHO®, Géoplateforme) under an open licence – no commercial satellite imagery, the package can be freely redistributed.
• Colour-matched (brightness, contrast, saturation) for a natural look.
• Photo on the seabed – in shallows and lagoons down to 30 m the real seabed from the imagery is visible under the water.
• The coastal strip blends into the beaches, so there are no hard edges between photo and water.
• On the open sea outside the imagery coverage, native X-Plane 12 water remains.

Sounds

• Custom soundscape map – forest, countryside, town, industry and sea according to the real land cover.

Installation

Version with aerial imagery

1. Unzip into X-Plane 12/Custom Scenery/:

• ZZ_Reunion_orto – the scenery,
• YZ_Reunion_z14_ZL17 – the aerial imagery (required for this version).

2. Both packages must be enabled in Custom Scenery/scenery_packs.ini. Their order does not matter – the imagery package contains only a texture library, no DSF.

The aerial imagery is in a separate package. The scenery looks the images up by their location, so the package can be swapped for another one at any time – for example a lower resolution for less powerful computers or a higher one for more detail – without changing the scenery at all. This package has ZL17 resolution (about 1.1 m per pixel). Other variants are not available yet; if you are interested in one, write to us at scenery@simulators.cz.

Classic version

Unzip the ZZ_Reunion package into X-Plane 12/Custom Scenery/.

Always use only one of the versions – both cover the same tiles.

Both versions

• Scenery packages belong in scenery_packs.ini below airports (custom airport sceneries and Global Airports) and above the global scenery.
• Water mask: copy -21+055.png and -22+055.png into X-Plane 12/Resources/bitmaps/world/water/-30+050/. Back up the original files first – an X-Plane update may overwrite them, in which case just copy them again.

Data sources and licences

The scenery is freeware. Data used and their authors:

• Terrain: IGN – RGE ALTI® La Réunion, Licence Ouverte Etalab 2.0
• Coastal lidar: Shom / IGN – Litto3D® Réunion 2016, Licence Ouverte Etalab 2.0 – not for navigation
• Bathymetry: Shom, 2016 – MNT bathymétrique de façade de La Réunion (HOMONIM project), doi:10.17183/MNT_REU100m_HOMONIM_WGS84
• Ocean bathymetry: GEBCO Compilation Group (2026) GEBCO 2026 Grid, doi:10.5285/4f68d5c7-45eb-f999-e063-7086abc036fa
• Aerial imagery: IGN – BD ORTHO® / ORTHO HR® (Géoplateforme), Licence Ouverte Etalab 2.0; modified (resampling, colour adjustments, DDS compression)
• Vegetation: Copernicus Land Monitoring Service – High Resolution Layers (Vegetated Land Cover Characteristics 2023/2024), © European Union
• Land cover: ESA WorldCover 10 m 2021 v200, © ESA WorldCover project, CC BY 4.0
• Climate: CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al.), CC BY 4.0
• Map data: © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0
• Additional buildings: Google Open Buildings v3 (Sirko et al.), CC BY 4.0
• Airports: X-Plane Scenery Gateway
• Supplementary 30 m terrain: GEDTM30; FABDEM (University of Bristol / Fathom, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 – non-commercial use only)
• Seasons: X-Plane 12 default scenery (Laminar Research), adapted for the tropics

The scenery was created with the RenderFarm tool (Simulators Czech) based on the X-Plane Scenery Tools (Laminar Research). The original tool has been updated and extensively modified with the permission of LR.

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