fly4ever_gr

Well,the result was more than I expected as real as it gets!Even though I get the feeling there's room for further improvements (as always),the blendmask "trick" worked marvelous! See for yourself: Any thoughts welcomed! Cheers, Nick.

Hi again everyone, I think I finally got it!Even though not 100% sure if this is exactly the technic Jim was talking about - probably because Paintshop is a little different compared to Gimp2 - I followed the following procedure: I used the free selection tool aka "lasso" with a Feathered edges of 30,0 to draw a loose shape all along my coastline extending quite far out into the sea.Then I used the Blend Tool with an offset of 30,0 to fill the outlined area with a black to white color gradient. However,and even though the resulted .bmp was nearly perfectly blended, there was a slightly visible line where the black to white blending stops and the pure white outside my free selected boundary blended area start to appear.In my efforts to somehow soften the already almost invisible edges close to shore, I gave it a try by using the "Smudge" tool just to scramble the edge a bit in order to appear more "physically" shaped as in real nature there aren't straight lines. Thing is I'm in a different computer right now and my FSX is based at my other rig so I'm unable to test my work in FSX environment at the moment.However I'm almost certain it will look like a charm. In the photos below you see the actual image taken with Google Earth,the primarily waterblended image and also the "smudged" final image.What do you think?Will actually do the work correctly? Any input/proposal is greatly appreciated! Cheers, Nick.

Hello everyone, recently I started getting involved building my own photoscenery for FSX using the latest version SbulderX 3.14 and saw some posts (https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/showthread.php?250762-How-to-create-photoreal-scenery-for-FSX/page24) where the issue for which I'm concerned is discussed and obviously solved in the best possible way!!! My concern is the most accurate possible and close to reality water blending.Although the certain posts are already 3 years old, I hope someone still remembers the way it worked out achieving the magnificent water blending I see in the pictures at post #236 (!!!!!!!). I use GIMP 2 instead pf Photoshop for the job,it's almost the same.I'm facing the same issue trying to blend the sea background color to my photoscenery as the part of the world where I live and trying to make (Greece) is full of reefs,sea vegetation and the sea floor is full of white sand all along and adjacent to almost every sea shore.In brief it looks like tropical in most cases. So, in which way the issue was overcome?Do someone remembers?As far as I can tell from the posts between a fellow simmer/scenery developer named annber and Jim Robinson a drawing technic called "lasso" was proposed. It's the same in Gimp2 which I use,I've seen the "lasso" inside my tools but I don't know the proper way to use it in the way Jim Robinson describes.Could someone please explain me how it's done?I already experimenting by starting making my blend watermask boundaries using a normal brush but with reduced harness (50%) and a quite big imprint and it's way better than using a smaller brush at 75% hardness,however my results in any way are so real looking as annber's.I suppose the "lasso" method will be the way to go if I know how to use it correctly. I also tried to overcome the issue by using water polys,water texture polys from the ones already in FSX texture library and some other options to no avail. Which method do you think - according to your experience - is giving the best results like the ones I see in the pictures at post #236?I'm new to this but eager to learn fast because I'm sure there's a way to do it right and from what I see is more than as real as it gets!!! Thank you for your time and I'm eagerly waiting for your answers! Nick.