Water Creation in FSX Scenery

If any of you have any thoughts and theories I'm trying to create a creative Watermask. I know water masks are black where water is and land is white. I however am kind of perplexed with this dillema as I try to think what the program Tile Proxy used to do to get the water to show ON TOP of the water in the map images? Any ideas? Anyone know? Thanks!

Never used tileproxy but what you see in the GPS and map view are additional polys tagged "GPS_Hydro_Polygons". The map won't see a watermask, if you see anything at all in the GPS or map it will be default GPS_Hydro_Polygons unless you've excluded and rebuilt them with your own.

Oh no Jim, not the GPS view, I'm talking about what we see when we look out on the ground. I remember looking down and seeing like the shallow waters of the shore and then deepen. That's what I'm trying to accomplish. (Of course, it didn't deepen, just looked it)

I guess that would depend on the actual imagery then, if it doesn't look like it has a shallow end and a deep end in the imagery it probably won't in the sim either. You can maybe clone stamp some appropriate water over your imagery's wet areas to get the effect you want. I know a water mask is either wet or dry, there's no in between, in fact you're not supposed to use any feather or even anti-aliasing where black meets white on a watermask. With the right imagery it can look like this though if that's what you mean:

 

http://www.cat-tamer.com/flightsim/atchmnts/maine_06.jpg

Yes sir, that is exactly it. I appreciate your time. I imagine Filter Forge is handy for this, huh? I think I'll need it for the water....

That was just in the imagery so didn't require anything but water masking, blend masking to make it feather into the default water, and a little color/contrast adjusting. If needed though I usually find a decent piece of donor imagery (like that shown), then in PhotoShop I'll load the water mask's selection and use the clone stamp tool to stamp water from the donor imagery to the water body in need. The water mask's selection keeps the stamping action from spilling out onto the adjacent land so it's blissfully simple to do. You sort of need to stamp shallow areas from the donor imagery near the shoreline and it's nice if your donor imagery has a shoreline that runs in approximately the same direction as the one in the destination image otherwise it can look a little odd when wave patterns appear perpendicular to the shore for example. Not hugely noticeable though. If you're using SBuilderX to source imagery check out the Bar Harbor Maine area using VirtualEarth satellite imagery, that's what I posted above and there's tons of it for miles around with interesting patterns that you could use to fix up your actual working photoreal. Love the boat wakes near Deer Isle for example:

 

http://www.cat-tamer.com/flightsim/atchmnts/virtual_earth_deer_isle02.jpg

That is beautiful Jim. I'm trying to accomplish all that. I have the imagery, I just have to do the steps you said to get it to work, but wow, it will be worth it.

 

I'm still waiting for my cable to use my card after getting it on SUNDAY. I'm on my old machine now which just doesn't cut it anymore for developmental purposes, unlike my workstation.

 

Could you maybe send me a detailed PM on what I need to accomplish this? I'd really appreciate it if you could. I follow alot better with detailed tutorial or step by step. I started the water masking all ready, but think I have to restart since I might have followed some wrong areas after really zooming in.

 

Thanks in advance if you can do this for me, and have a great Thanksgiving man. :)

WOW!! That is some beautiful stuff!!

Thanks for the compliments guys. Johhny, I'm always happy to answer specific questions but there are already tons of photoreal tutorials out there so I doubt I could add anything that hasn't been written already anyway. I've tried writing mini/personal tutorials but after the 100th "thanks, I saved your post to a text file and I'll read through it when I have some time"... I kinda lost interest.

 

Couple thoughts though:

(are you using PhotoShop BTW?)

 

-Getting the right color adjustments, saturation, and contrast is the most important part I think. A "selective color" adjustment layer overtop your base imagery is a great, infinitely adjustable way to dial in the colors. Use a hue & saturation adjustment layer above the selective color, and a brightness & contrast layer above that. You'll have plenty of adjusting options to play with, if you don't like what you see in the sim just open the .psd and make some adjustments. It'll take a while to get it right, save the selective color and hue & saturation adjustments as presets, you can load them as a good starting point for your next piece of imagery.

 

-Copy some of your ***b2su*.bmp landclass textures out of scenery\world\texture, convert them to 24 bit so you can get them in PhotoShop to match against. 047b2su1.bmp is a forest & field texture for example, 027b2su1.bmp is a deciduous tree texture, etc. Use Imagetool from the command line to make them PhotoShop-compatible. Do not run this command in your scenery\world\texture folder, copy them to a temporary folder and run the command on the copies:

 

imagetool -brief -24 -e bmp -nomip *.bmp

 

-I do my water & blend masks as color fill layers overtop of everything else. These are obviously switched off when I export a .tif from my .psd so they don't show, but the advantage is that you can load a selection from the color fill layer at any time, for example above I said "The water mask's selection keeps the stamping action from spilling out onto the adjacent land" and by having that color fill layer saved in the .psd I can load that selection effortlessly whenever I want.

 

Here is an example .psd I made once that shows how I set up my PhotoShop file. Look at the color fill blend mask and watermask layers at the top of the layers palette, note how they correspond to the alpha channels, also check out the adjustment layers (which aren't finished but should give you an idea). Here the blend and water masks are in alpha channels. A .tif supports multiple alpha channels so if you export as .tif your blend and water masks can be embedded in the .tif as alpha channels. That saves a lot of screwing around in the .inf when you have to add those separately.

 

http://www.cat-tamer.com/flightsim/atchmnts/KEYW_key_west_sources.zip

 

Jim