Loking to model a coral reef ground/water texture.

Gathering materials to model some of the Spratley Islands with their new infrastructures. Thanx to you good people, I have Scenery Builder to build the island, then ADE / SDK to do the runway, buildings and objects. So far so good. But I am at a loss how to model the coral reef, which extends a long way beyond what is on the surface. Is there any way to process a photo similar to the attached to achieve this? Simply plonking it down like a ground polygon doesn't work - it looks terribly unrealistic. Making the black background transparent sort of works, but the boundary is too sharp - again unrealistic.

Hi Steve, photoscenery on water will always have a sharp edge so I would recommend creating a new land/waterclass polygon for that area, using for example the default Coral Beach textures. This will probably be more 'generic' in appearance than photoscenery of course, but it will blend in more realistically.

Thanks, tiger, I will stagger off in that direction.

 

Thinking about this a little further, for my purposes, a coral reef of a "generic" size and shape will be "good enough", providing as you say that it "blends realistically". It's the overall impression of a sand island built on a larger fringing reef that is all that I am looking for.